Why a Kuyperian Calvinist treasures a Reformed Baptist
Of late, I’ve been learning — and re-learning — a lot about what the Bible teaches. My main “teacher” these days is John Piper. Piper, as most of you know, is a Reformed Baptist who is the pastor for preaching at Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis. He’s also a prolific (and need I say insightful) author. His ministry, Desiring God, gives away reams of material free, including most of Piper’s sermons and many of his books. All the better for us! (And for many around the world.)
Some Kuyperian Reformed folks (of Dutch descent or allied with us who are Dutch) disparage Piper as not being truly Reformed. He’s too fixated on “personal salvation” and getting to heaven, they say. Maybe he doesn’t care about social justice, they charge. He’s anti-woman because he interprets all those Paul passages (you know the ones I mean) as meaning women should not hold office in the church.
I’m sure I can find things about which to disagree with Piper, infant baptism being one big one. (Though a woman myself, I’m actually somewhat ambivalent about the ordaining women issue). But that’s not the point, because I’m not intending to join his congregation. (Possibly if I lived in Minneapolis I’d consider it!) The point is, he’s a careful reader, meticulous studier and gifted preacher of God’s Word. Which means he takes God’s Word seriously as God’s Word. And that’s surely what the church needs in our increasingly blase, shallow and apostate age.
I listen on my car’s CD player whenever I drive somewhere to Piper’s immense and profound series on Romans (I’m on sermon # 30 and Piper is barely in Romans 3). He is reminding me of all the things my own Reformed upbringing and education taught me (K +12 + 4 years of Christian schooling before being thrown to the secular wolves in graduate school!; plus catechism, Sunday school and devout, staunchly Reformed parents). There is a sweet consonance between Piper’s take on Romans (and everything else) and my own biblically Reformed education which always emphasized the glory of God in all things. And I’m also learning some new things, nuances that I’d overlooked, or passages that had never been explained in the depth (and sometimes in the manner) that Piper explains them.
This series on CD cost my husband all of $8 or $10; he bought it for me for Christmas. To say it’s a present I value highly would be an understatement. (I ordered Piper’s Hebrews series for myself for $3 at his recent website sale; they’re phasing out their online “bookstore (but will still give reams of stuff away) and expanding their global ministry, which includes key works being translated into the world’s most spoken languages after English.
I’m not glorifying Piper, and he himself would be the first to be appalled at anybody who does, or might. But he can certainly be said to be a gift of God to the church in our age.
There’s an irony, too, I suppose, in the fact that there are several resources at Desiring God about John Calvin himself, and that’s how I came to be reading about Calvin the man, and why I dug out my copy of the Institutes (1536 edition) and ordered another (later, expanded edition) the other day. If Calvin could be cantankerous he was a man who suffered; who suffered much and still managed to fulfill the amazing calling God had for him as a prolific preacher, writer and one of the most astute (if not THE most astute) theological-biblical minds in the history of the Christian church. And all that before the age of 54 when God ended his life on this old earth.
Isaiah: Help with reading a difficult book
I very recently started rereading the book of Isaiah. In the last few years it’s something I have striven to do once a year. I usually begin either during Advent (so that sometime during those weeks I get to the wonderful passages foretelling the Messiah’s birth) or during Lent (so that at some point during that time I’ll be reading about the Suffering Servant). Isaiah is, of course, the Word of God. (If you doubt that, the rest of what I’m going to say won’t be relevant to you so you may want to stop reading now.)
Isaiah expresses God’s message in stark but beautiful and often poetic language. If you’re a reader at heart and you love poetry, and — most importantly — you have a heart open to the message God had and has through the prophet Isaiah, what an exhilarating and Spirit-infused experience reading this biblical book is! But that said, when you come to it “cold” it can be tough sledding (pardon the punning illusion). What does it all mean? Much of the meaning of its 66 chapters seems awfully complicated, and many of the ancient references of this 5000-or-so-year-old book are likely to strike the average Bible reader as not only complicatedly remote but somewhat irrelevant to us self-regarding sophisticated human beings in the 21st century (if he or she is entirely honest).
My own reaction was frustration when in the past I would try to read through Isaiah . I would start out fine and then get bogged down, knowing there was much I was missing and not understanding. I would usually quit before I finished the book, or I’d start skipping around to familiar or easier-to-understand passages. Short of being in a church where an insightful pastor was preaching through the entire book (don’t I wish!) I had to do something about that.
So a few years ago I went on a quest to look for a guide to help me: a commentary or other resource whose author I could trust to interpret the book a holistic manner which sees context, uses Scripture to interpret Scripture and sees that all of the Bible is “living and active” Word of God, and therefore never irrelevant and always speaking to those who have ears to hear (what I would call a Reformed approach to reading Scripture). What ended my search and what I decided to buy was The NIV Application Commentary on Isaiah by John N. Oswalt, published by Zondervan, as is the NIV Bible (New International Version).
The commentary is set up like this: First you’ll read the biblical text of the section of Isaiah covered in that particular commentary chapter (a great feature so that you can read Isaiah itself and the commentary from this one hefty book); then a section on “Original Meaning”; a section called “Bridging Contexts”; and a final “Contemporary Significance.” Each commentary chapter covers a specific “chunk” of Isaiah. The breaks are based on its content, not necessarily on the ends of the biblical chapters. Oswalt begins the whole effort with a lengthy and very helpful introduction which presents the historical setting of Isaiah, what was going on in Israel and Judah at the time, and in the surrounding pagan nations. He addresses Isaiah’s authorship and date. Then he lays out what he convincingly argues are the book’s central themes: Judgment and Hope, Servanthood and Kingdom, Trust and Rebellion, Arrogance and Humiliation, The Uniqueness of Yahweh, The Nations, Righteousness. He ties those in again when he addresses “The Relevance of the Book of Isaiah Today.” There’s also an outline of Isaiah so you can see at a glance how and when those themes are interwoven into the biblical book.
If all that sounds just as complicated as reading Isaiah on your own can be, it’s not. Not at all. Oswalt writes in an easy style. And remember: this is an application commentary: its purpose is to better help you and me understand the Bible, not just to present biblical scholarship for other scholars, and which may or may not get read outside of academia and may or may not have relevance to Christians in general. (Not incidentally, many, perhaps even most biblical scholars today are not Christians, and some number are actually atheists.) To put it mildly, this hardcover commentary is well worth the $20-$25 it will cost you at amazon.com. In periodic future posts I’ll speak to some of the specifics that have particularly hit me — and how utterly relevant they are to our own time.
Rejoice! Embrace another year of grace
We finite human creatures are inextricably tied to time, times, seasons and cycles. We can’t escape – our romantic, adventurous notions of time travel, “worm holes” and molecule-scrambling transporters a la Star Trek notwithstanding.
It seems to me that an integral part of our “hours-and-days-and-years-and-ages” nature (as New Year’s hymn #443 in the Christian Reformed Church’s Psalter Hymnal puts it) involves a year’s end/year’s beginning reflection on where we’ve been and where we’re going.
That’s what I feel the urge to do; and the common notion of New Year’s resolutions tells me that my reaction is part of a universal human impulse. The fact that the hymn I quoted was written in the 18th century by a Dutchman, to a Moravian tune, is another clue to the universality of an annual urge to reflect, accompanied by a yearning for renewal.
For us Christians such thoughts must surely include re-evaluating the state of our faith: Where am I on the road to sanctification? Have I, asking God’s help, moved further down that road in the last year? Am I trusting him more and more, in and for all things? And are all of us Christ-believers communally doing the same?
I find that I tend to carry on such reflection throughout all of January — which is why I’m posting this here on Jan. 17. It may, and often does, take the whole month to get my thinking re-ordered and to relinquish bad habits and attitudes, and even to readjust my worldview so that it remains (or becomes) as biblical as possible. The Lord knows I can be a stubborn case!
It strikes me that the first act resulting from our reflection should be repentance. Another New Year’s hymn acknowledges that: “Greet the swiftly changing year with joy and penitence sincere” (Ps. H. # 444, 16th c. Slovak text). Though redeemed, we are a fallen people living in a fallen world and disobedience to God comes all too naturally to us (cf. St. Paul’s “the good that I want to do I do not do…” Romans 7:14). It is instructive that this hymn phrase links joy and repentance. Repenting of sin is a Spirit-prompted reaching out to be put right with God, and God always welcomes and re-welcomes us with open arms when we plead for his mercy. What could bring us greater joy?
Exceeding the volume of our needs
Both of the hymns cited relay other biblical truths. Part of our penitential joy comes from reflecting on how Christ shed his blood for us, says the Slovak hymn. His broken body reveals his profound, description-defying love for us. In short: Jesus came to “end sin’s war” – granting us peace. If we had somehow forgotten, the hymn prompts us to recall that such love “far exceeds the volume of a whole year’s needs.” Did we have a prosperous year or did we lose a job or even our home? In any circumstance, if the Lord is leading us “what need we fear in earth or space in this new year of grace”?
There are more deeply biblical elements in this hymn. It urges both exultation and thankfulness.
Whether in joy or sorrow, prosperity or want, with every stanza we agree to “Rejoice! With thanks embrace another year of grace.” And then, acknowledging again that the new year is ours because of his grace, we give God the glory that is rightly his (echoing the angels’ song), and we ask his blessing as Triune God on our new year.
Despite God’s grace surrounding us and upholding us moment by moment, it is not hard, given our “old nature” of sin, to fear what is to come in a new year. If that is true in our personal lives it is certainly more true when we look at the increasing dangers for, and persecution of, Christians in the greater world. But the author of “Hours and Days and Years and Ages” reminds us that despite danger threatening to overwhelm us, despite raging sorrow, despite the ages moving swiftly as shadows and our own lives dissolving into “fleeting pages,” despite evil circumstances that seem to clamp us in their grasp, and even “though all friends on earth forsake us and our troubles still increase,” time’s marching on will not – cannot – “decide our end.” We know who does decide our end (and beginning, and middle, and every second of each year he gives us till we draw our last breath): “God our Father will remain, always changeless, come what may.”
St. Paul puts it this way:
In all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither life nor death, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate use from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord (Romans 8:37-38).
So: “Rejoice! With thanks embrace another year of grace”!
A slightly altered version on this meditation will appear as a column in Christian Courier, Jan. 23, 2012.
‘My Song is Love Unknown’
(Lenten thoughts)
Are you the same person you were five or 10 years ago? 20 years ago? I’m not. I do have the same basic traits – the ones I inherited from my parents and from family lines stretching back several centuries into the Netherlands and Germany. My musical and writing abilities are gifts from my father’s family. My stubbornness comes from both sides. (I like to call it being principled!) Intractability, it seems, may be a characteristic of more than one ethnic group. My husband, of Irish descent, likes to quip that the Dutch are stubborn but the Irish are resolute. Whatever it’s called, adding to it, we joke, is the fact that we each had German mothers.
Some people don’t change much over their lives, in personality or in thinking. Others change immensely. My husband, who had polio as a child and who now has post-polio syndrome, has been thoroughly shaped by that presence in his life (it is like a presence). Of course I don’t know exactly what he would have been like had God had not given him such a handicap, but I do know that he accepted his circumstances with grace (divine) and graciousness (human) and developed into a gentle soul who is never self-pitying, and a model for others with such wounds.
Over the decades my own chronic illness has, I hope, also changed me for the better. I pray it has made me more patient, more compassionate of those who suffer, more understanding of those who struggle.
Sin is the deadly inherited human-family trait that we cannot change or eradicate through experience or self-will. At base we all need radical change from some other source. Only Christ’s blood – divine genetics – will do.
‘In the cross of Christ I glory’
In the church year we’re currently halfway through Lent. Many Reformed Christians don’t think about Lent. When I grew up in the 1950s and ’60s, Lent was still entirely Roman Catholic to us. My minister dismissed it out of hand; my dad shuddered.
But like people, churches change. The church is its people, after all. And as long as following a new path doesn’t involve a relinquishing of the Gospel, the new road can improve our view. Observing Lent is a beneficial tradition, I think. Many Reformed churches now agree. But Lent skeptics may ask: isn’t it a bit much to wallow for at least five weeks in thoughts about Christ’s death (think crucifix, not empty cross)? I think not, especially in our current era. In fact, contemplating Christ’s suffering for an extended time is a much needed antidote to the self-satisfaction and superficiality of our modern world. And of course we “glory in” the cross of Christ, as the hymn says, because we see the Light at the end of the tunnel – at the door of the empty tomb.
It’s all too easy in our time to be infected by the secular attitude that we’re actually pretty good people. We’re kind to our neighbors, we give to charity when we can, we live and let live. Who needs “salvation,” anyway? (And why does Jesus have sole claim on saving us? That’s awfully exclusive, isn’t it? It’s so distastefully un-Canadian.) We’ve come a long way from the barbaric practices of centuries ago, or even of 50 years ago. Humankind is smart, enlightened, the measure of all things.
I’ve encountered more than a few people who think along those lines. Apart from the working of the Spirit of Christ in their lives there’s no way that I or anyone will convince them that they – like all of us – deserve God’s wrath, and that apart from God in Christ we all perish. Lenten observation from Ash Wednesday (March 9 this year) through Good Friday (April 22) is both communal and highly personal. It forces us as congregations, as individuals, to think deeply and carefully about why and how Christ died for us; for me. The natural outgrowth is renewed repentance and a marveling at such undeserved Love. Repentance then allows for conversion, the ultimate change in any person’s life.
My song is love unknown,
My Savior’s love to me;
Love to the loveless shown,
That they might lovely be.
O who am I, that for my sake
My Lord should take, frail flesh and die?
He came from His blest throne
Salvation to bestow;
But men made strange, and none
The longed for Christ would know:
But O! my Friend, my Friend indeed,
Who at my need His life did spend.
Sometimes they strew His way,
And His sweet praises sing;
Resounding all the day
Hosannas to their King:
Then “Crucify!” is all their breath,
And for His death they thirst and cry.
Why, what hath my Lord done?
What makes this rage and spite?
He made the lame to run,
He gave the blind their sight,
Sweet injuries! Yet they at these
Themselves displease, and ’gainst Him rise.
They rise and needs will have
My dear Lord made away;
A murderer they saved,
The Prince of life they slay,
Yet cheerful He to suffering goes,
That He His foes from thence might free.
In life, no house, no home
My Lord on earth might have;
In death no friendly tomb
But what a stranger gave.
What may I say? Heav’n was His home;
But mine the tomb wherein He lay.
Here might I stay and sing,
No story so divine;
Never was love, dear King!
Never was grief like Thine.
This is my Friend, in Whose sweet praise
I all my days could gladly spend.
Samuel Crossman, c. 1624-1683, “My Song is Love Unknown”
Whatever happened to hell?
Albert Mohler is the president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky — ” the flagship school of the Southern Baptist Convention and one of the largest seminaries in the world,” as his blog describes that institution. Mohler is what I like to call a Reformed Baptist (I doubt he’d object to the term). I find his writings — his books and the blog he updates regularly — biblically compelling and insightful. Below (in italics) is the beginning of a piece Mohler wrote bearing the title Doing Away With Hell? ( in two parts). While unpalatable to many — including many Christians — belief in the existence of hell is crucial to Christianity. If hell doesn’t exist that means God does not hate sin, does not need to judge us and did not need to send his Son to die for us. In that picture, Jesus died for nothing. Do you know who in Scripture speaks of — warns of — hell more than any other person? Jesus himself.
After reviewing the rise of the modern age, the Italian literary critic Piero Camporesi commented, “We can now confirm that hell is finished, that the great theatre of torments is closed for an indeterminate period, and that after 2000 years of horrifying performances the play will not be repeated. The long triumphal season has come to an end.” Like a play with a good run, the curtain has finally come down, and for millions around the world, the biblical doctrine of hell is but a distant memory. For so many persons in this postmodern world, the biblical doctrine of hell has become simply unthinkable. Have postmodern westerners just decided that hell is no more? Can we really just think the doctrine away? Os Guinness notes that western societies “have reached the state of pluralization where choice is not just a state of affairs, it is a state of mind. Choice has become a value in itself, even a priority. To be modern is to be addicted to choice and change. Change becomes the very essence of life.” Personal choice becomes the urgency; what sociologist Peter Berger called the “heretical imperative.” In such a context, theology undergoes rapid and repeated transformation driven by cultural currents. For millions of persons in the postmodern age, truth is a matter of personal choice –- not divine revelation. Clearly, we moderns do not choose for hell to exist. This process of change is often invisible to those experiencing it and denied by those promoting it. As David F. Wells comments, “The stream of historic orthodoxy that once watered the evangelical soul is now dammed by a worldliness that many fail to recognize as worldliness because of the cultural innocence with which it presents itself.” He continued: “To be sure, this orthodoxy never was infallible, nor was it without its blemishes and foibles, but I am far from persuaded that the emancipation from its theological core that much of evangelicalism is effecting has resulted in greater biblical fidelity. In fact, the result is just the opposite. We now have less biblical fidelity, less interest in truth, less seriousness, less depth, and less capacity to speak the Word of God to our own generation in a way that offers an alternative to what it already thinks….”
Mohler’s piece in entirety, and information about his book Hell Under Fire, can be found at www.albertmohler.com
Government, the poor and healthcare
I had nearly completed a post here a few days ago in response to Hans Katerberg (see the previous couple of entries here) and foolishly did not save my draft. When I returned to it it had disappeared. I imagine most of you have done something similar (at least I like to think I’m not the only one who does dumb things like that). Whether alone in that or not, it’s quite disheartening. Alas, it requires trying to reconstruct what I wrote. Mr. Katerberg asked if [I thought] President Obama had suddenly become dangerous. I am concerned about the direction that many of his policies (or in the case of foreign relations, seeming lack of coherent policy) are taking the country. The phrase “nanny state” comes to mind — a cliche, though a fairly useful one. However, I don’t see the thinking and mindset that instituted those policies and that also inhabits all his advisors as having been suddenly adopted. Mr. Obama’s own biography shows him to have grown up in and early accepting the stance of a social-political (and religious) “progressive” in whose view Government should properly control the masses and solve their problems on virtually every level — whether the people see them as problems or not and/or want them solved in the way Government mandates the solutions. As a corollary — as part of the solution — it is Government’s role to take from the wealthy and give that wealth to the poor so as to create an equitable society.
I am extremely uneasy with that approach. It’s not real justice — the kind of justice God requires of us . It too easily leads to both apathy and tyranny, as the situations in numerous countries have shown and are still showing. It doesn’t work. And it far too easily allows each of us as citizens to abrogate our personal responsibility to give our “cups of cold water in Jesus’s name,” including, and especially, financially. In the Bible God reveals his deep concern that the poor not be oppressed, that they be treated fairly. That is stated often in and in various ways, as any biblically literate person knows. The corollary to that, however, is not an obligatory despising of the rich or their wealth (or, in our time, the corporations that may have created that wealth), as many “progressive” Christians seem to think. (Remember Abraham? Jacob? Job?) Yes, Jesus does say that it is harder for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than fora rich man to enter the Kingdom of heaven. And he told the parable of the rich man who built bigger and bigger barns but was oblivious to the state of his soul and to the fact that he would be called to account for his life and priorities that very night. It’s clear that Jesus’s point in both cases relates to our attitudes toward their wealth: ”You cannot serve God and money.” Christians must be very careful that their wealth (whether moderate or extravagant) is used — like all things — for God’s glory and to promote his Kingdom, not our own empires. Biblical justice for the poor does not involve favoritism of the poor, however (as many Christians seem to believe), nor absolving them from the same kind of personal responsibility that all of us have to properly and wisely use every gift, small or great, that God gives us. (Nor should we fawn over the rich, of course.) That kind of onesidedness, says the Bible, even if for the threadbare underdog, is actually a perversion of justice: “‘Do not pervert justice; do not show partiality to the poor or favoritism to the great, but judge your neighbor fairly” (Lev. 19:15). ”The rich are not to give more than a half shekel and the poor are not to give less when you make the offering to the LORD to atone for your lives,” says Exodus 30:15. In ancient Israel the poor were not exempt from bringing offerings to the Lord because they were poor. The acceptable offerings were, rather, adjusted to their meagre income level. Even at the time of Jesus’s birth that continued. Joseph and Mary, being poor, brought the appropriate offering — but not no offering — when they presented Jesus in the temple at eight days old.
That brings me to Government-sponsored healthcare. Do I care that there are poor Americans who, if they get sick, become overwhelmed with medical costs? Of course I do. But here’s my sticking point: Should that dilemma be solved by the tax monies of fellow citizens (via the government) with no strings attached? Is it the Government’s responsibility to pay for healthcare — not only for the poor but for everyone — because healthcare is a “basic human right”? I’m still thinking carefully about that one because a Yes answer is not nearly so clear to me as it apparently is to many Christians (especially Canadians). I would ask this: if that’s so, what other “quality-of-life” needs are, or should be, “basic human rights” in our modern world? Housing? Food? Clothing? Transportation? Internet access and/or a television (lest one be isolated from the world)? Should a poor person expect the government to take care of all of those things because in North America they are necessary in order to have a reasonably decent life, the kind of life that with more money have? I’m not being facetious. Statistics show that a very large percentage of the poor in North America believe that they can’t live a decent life without owning at least one television. I myself, while traveling through my own state and other states have frequently seen virtual shacks adorned with satellite dishes for TV reception. That’s the choice the presumably poor residents of those shacks make. Yet the chances are high that a good percentage of such people live on welfare, food stamps or both, and that when they’re sick they go to the local hospital emergency room (which by law cannot turn them away) because they don’t have health insurance. Some of them may not qualify for it due to “pre-existing conditions” (a problem in our healthcare system that does need fixing — but not, I believe, in the way that the new healthcare law attempts to do so). Others of those people have simply chosen not to buy health insurance. They’d rather spend that amount of money on a TV and getting good reception for it. And they know they can do that without penalty because nothing is expected of them in terms of paying at least a little of their own way. That’s not justice — not for them and not for those better off whose tax money is supporting them. The number of uninsured people is often cited as 46 million (45.7), about 15% of the population. While I’m very concerned for those who are poor and cannot get insurance (and that surely needs to be “fixed”), that number is grossly misleading. Some 6-1/2 million of those are on Medicaid but nevertheless tell pollsters and Census workers they’re uninsured; another 4.3 million are elligible for Medicaid but haven’t bothered to apply for it. Some 9 million are illegal immigrants. (Whether they deserve to be elligible for Medicaid or Medicare is an issue of its own, and a contentious one .) Another 10 million don’t fit those categories but have an income of more than three times the poverty level. Of the remaining 15.6 million uninured, 5 million are between 18 and 34, have no children and don’t buy health insurance. That leaves 10.6 million Americans — roughly 3% of the population — who are U.S. citizens, have an income below 300% of poverty, are not on or eligible for a taxpayer-subsidized health insurance program, and are not a childless adult between age 18 and 34. Still a problem, of course, but nothing like the kind of problem many assume it is. (Data comes from a 2007 Census data survey.)
We need a healthcare system — as other social systems — that requires at least something of everyone, no matter their income level. Nobody should be getting something for nothing. Not even those whose entire income comes from the Government (i.e., their fellow citizens). Nobody should not be paying taxes (even though on the low-income end the actual amount will be minimal. A flat tax as percentage of income would be, I think, probably the fairest possible taxation system, not to mention the simplest and easiest todeal with). Anything less than everyone contributing something to their own lives and wellbeing breeds complacency and a sense of entitlement, and wreaks havoc on one’s values, emotional and spiritual health. We’re still currently in bad economic times and jobs are hard to come by in many areas of the country (which I also I know from personal experience). But all able-bodied people must also be encouraged to work to help pay their own way. St. Paul laid down a rule for the church in Thessolonica :” For even when we were with you, we gave you this rule: ‘The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat’” (II Thess. 3:10). What he’s telling the church sounds shocking to a lot of us: Don’t feed people, not even your fellow Christians, who don’t want to work. To the church at Ephesus he says this: “Anyone who has been stealing must steal no longer, but must work, doing something useful with their own hands, that they may have something to share with those in need” (Eph.4:28). Paul sees a cycle of working and making money so that you can give some of it away to those who need it, and that applies even at the bottom of the food chain, so to speak. Everyone, no matter their own circumstances, is able, and must be willing, to help someone else in need.
In the months before the new healthcare bill was signed, President Obama and the then Democratic Congressional leadership made clear (then denied) that their ultimate goal in passing the kind of bill they did was to move the country eventually to a single payer system run by the Government. That was balked at by a majority of Americans (thus the denials). Besides giving far too much power to government (including the hiring of several thousand new IRS workers to make sure everybody’s complying with every jot and tittle of this very complicated law), the problem I have with it is that while being monstrously expensive it doesn’t truly solve the few real issues needing solving in the current system (including tort reform, which it doesn’t even address at all). There could have been a serious bipartisan effort to address the handful of real issues that need solving in our healthcare system (which, not incidentally, the majority of Americans are satisfied with in terms of quality of care). But that was avoided (and it wasn’t the Republicans doing the avoiding in this case) because the solutions being suggested were incompatible with Obama’s vision of an ultimately government-run system. Therefore, I’m with those who believe the law has to struck down, revamped and a new law passed. That would be kindest and fairest to all of us, poor and rich.
