The Dutch Farmers’ Protest and the War on Food
It is (allegedly) being done to “protect the environment” makes it a big warning sign for the future. Denmark, Belgium and Germany are already considering similar policies. The Western world seems to be enthusiastically embracing quasi-suicidal policies. I mean, paying farmers to reduce the amount of food they produce…while (notionally) threatened with war…in the midst of a recession…facing record inflation as the cost of living spirals. Does that really make any sense?
This week, tens of thousands of farmers have gathered from all across the Netherlands to protest government policies which will reduce the number of livestock in the country by up to a third.
In a typical example of media weasel-wording, the press reports on this all headline something like “Dutch farmers protest emissions targets”, but this is a massive lie by omission.
The government policy being protested is a 25 BILLION Euro investment in “reducing levels of nitrogen pollution” true, but it plans to achieve this by (among other things) “paying some Dutch livestock farmers to relocate or exit the industry”.
In real terms, this ultimately means reducing the number of pigs, chickens and cows by about thirty per cent.
That’s what is being protested here – a deliberately shrinking of the farming sector, impacting the livelihood of thousands of farmers, and the food supply of literally hundreds of millions of people.
The Big Picture
While the scheme is allegedly about limiting nitrogen and ammonia emissions from urine and manure it’s hard not to see this in the broader context of the ongoing created food crisis.
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Rosaria Butterfield: “I Reject the False Teaching of Revoice/Side B Theology”
After we are justified by God, we can never return to Adam. What does this mean for someone like me who lived as a lesbian for a decade and believed I was gay? It means that homosexuality is part of my biography, not my nature. My nature is securely chained in Christ (Colossians 3:10-20). What does it mean if a Christian falls back into an old sin pattern? It means that he is acting against his true nature. How do we stop acting against our true nature in Christ when our flesh craves our old sin patterns? By going to war with our sin through the power of Christ’s blood.
What Is Truth?
The Bible is Truth, both in word and in substance. When one passage of scripture may seem unclear to us, we interpret it in light of the clarity of God’s unified Biblical witness.[1] There are no problem passages in scripture.
In His image, God created human beings ontologically as men or women. Our sexual difference is part of our origin and eternity. We bear the image of God in purposeful pattern.
“Then God said, ‘Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness…So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them’. Then God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it.’” Genesis 1:26-28
This magisterial passage, known as the Creation Ordinance, reveals that God established men and women for the normative and godly calling of biblical marriage. God planted the seed of the gospel in the Garden of Eden. Scripturally speaking, heterosexuality is natural, and homosexuality is unnatural.[2] When the Apostle Paul revisits the Creation Ordinance in 1 Timothy and Romans 1, he states that homosexuality is “contrary to sound doctrine” (1 Tim. 1:10) and denies the being of God (Romans 1:25-27).
When Eve obeyed the serpent over God, all of humanity was plunged into sin, a sin recorded as Adam’s (Genesis 3). Adam’s sin, imputed to all of mankind, created a cosmological crisis. Puritan Thomas Goodwin depicts this crisis in the form of two giants: one is Adam, and the other is Christ.
Goodwin’s word picture looks like this: chained to Adam’s belt are all men and women born after him. God in mercy removes the chains of his chosen ones from Adam and locks them onto Christ. God’s mercy has a name: justification (Romans 3: 24-25). Justification is “an act of God’s free grace, wherein he pardons all our sins, and accepts us as righteous in his sight, only for the righteousness of Christ imputed to us, and received by faith alone.”[3] In justification, God secures every saved person’s chain to Christ, guaranteeing a new nature and future. From our posture of justified men and women, chained firmly to Christ, we begin the lifelong journey of sanctification (Ephesians 4:23-24): “a work of God’s free grace, whereby we are renewed in the whole man after the image of God and are enabled more and more to die unto sin and live unto righteousness.”[4]
Read More[1] “The infallible rule of interpretation of Scripture is Scripture itself: and therefore, when there is a question about the full and true sense of any Scripture (which is not manifold but one) it must be searched and known by other places that speak more clearly,” Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 1.9. The Reformation Heritage KJV Study Bible, ed. Joel Beeke. Grand Rapids, MI: Reformation Heritage Books, 2014: 2029.
[2] See Rosaria Butterfield, Openness Unhindered, chapter 4, “Sexual Orientation: Freud’s 19th Century Category Mistake,” (Pittsburgh: Crown and Covenant Publications, 2015); 93-112. While sexual orientation as a category of personhood is a Freudian addition, heterosexuality and homosexuality are not equally problematic examples. Heterosexuality is always the biblical pattern, although its application may be sinful, as in the case of adultery. Homosexuality is always the unbiblical pattern and cannot be “sanctified” without being obliterated. Calling people to celibacy and rejecting the idea of sanctified change that allows either for heterosexual marriage or content singleness is unchristian. In addition to being sinful, homosexuality is pagan. For more on this, see Peter Jones, The Other Worldview. Bellingham, WA: Kirkdale Press, 2015. When current self-described “gay Christians” feel “othered” by biblical Christians, there is wisdom in this recognition. Gay Christianity is another—a separate and a different—religion.
[3] Question 33 of the Westminster Shorter Catechism, “What is Justification?” The Reformation Heritage KJV Study Bible, ed. By Dr. Joel Beeke. Grand Rapids, MI: Reformation Heritage Press, 2014: 2055.
[4] Question 35 of the Westminster Shorter Catechism, “What is Sanctification?” The Reformation Heritage KJV Study Bible, 2056.
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The Nature of Responsibility
There are many examples of people rightly taking responsibility in the Bible—and many examples of people trying to avoid it. The latter was a major component of the Fall. Adam and Eve both tried to avoid their responsibility by blaming others, but God still held them—and Satan—accountable for their own sins. A great example of the former is David, who he became a leader by taking on the responsibility for the entire nation by volunteering to fight Goliath (1 Samuel 17). More importantly, while he sinned in some egregious ways, he was quick to repent when confronted.
And David said to God, “Was it not I who gave command to number the people? It is I who have sinned and done great evil. But these sheep, what have they done? Please let your hand, O LORD my God, be against me and against my father’s house. But do not let the plague be on your people.”
-1 Chronicles 21:17, ESV
In October 2008, two senior leaders were fired for something that happened on the other side of the world. Defense Secretary Robert Gates fired both the Secretary and Chief of Staff of the Air Force when it was discovered that four nuclear missile fuses had been mistakenly shipped to Taiwan from Hill AFB, Utah in 2006. To make matters worse, the Air Force was still reeling from a 2007 incident in which six nuclear warheads were mistakenly loaded onto a B-52 bomber and flown from Minot AFB, North Dakota to Barksdale AFB, Louisiana. Even though the official report from that incident placed the blame on base-level leadership and below, the two incidents taken together proved that the issues were much more systemic. This highlights important truths about the nature of responsibility, which is a crucial but often overlooked component of leadership.
Leadership Require Responsibility
Responsibility is integral to leadership first because it is integral to any job. To have any duty is to have responsibility, which means that in formal leadership, to assume a position of leadership is to take on the responsibility of performing all of the required duties of leadership. In an informal sense, leadership can be defined as taking responsibility for those around you. Therefore, as Simon Sinek pointed out, leadership in a very real sense is responsibility. In my leadership paper I showed that good leaders care for those they lead in addition to coordinating their efforts for the good of the organization, so a leader is responsible for the people and for the job. In other words, leadership is taking responsibility, so without taking responsibility for others you cannot be a leader. Authority therefore exists to enabling leaders to fulfill their responsibilities to their people and the organization, so legitimate authority cannot exist without responsibility.
Since responsibility can be described as duty, everyone at every level has some measure of responsibility. And just like in leadership, every duty requires a certain amount of authority. This means that to delegate a task is to delegate both the responsibility for the task and the authority required to complete the task. To give people responsibility without authority is a recipe for failure and discouragement. Unless people the authority required to do the job, can we really claim they have the responsibility to do the job? The responsibility rests with the one who has the authority, so a leader who fails to delegate authority is responsible for the team’s failures. It is therefore unjust for leaders to hold subordinates responsible for tasks they did not have the authority to properly complete. But by the same logic authority is inherent with delegated responsibility, so as a former boss of mine once said, “always assume the authority to do your job”.
Individual and Shared Responsibility
This brings up an interesting question about responsibility: when you delegate it do you relinquish it? To answer this, we must look at the concept of shared responsibility. In our individualistic culture, it is easy to focus on individual responsibility. In this view, an individual who gives responsibility does not retain it. But responsibility is not a zero-sum game, so when it is given it is still retained. The subordinate has responsibility to do the job, but the leader still has the responsibility to ensure the job gets done. Furthermore, the leader is responsible for the subordinate. Therefore, they both share responsibility. So when things go wrong it is proper to hold both individuals and leaders accountable for the particular ways in which they all failed to fulfill their responsibilities. We are all responsible for our individual actions, words, responses, and negligence. We are all responsible for the decisions we make and must therefore own the consequences of those decisions. In essence, we are responsible for ourselves as well as anything and anyone we have authority over. Both W. Edwards Deming and Joseph Juran famously place responsibility of “the system”—and therefore the vast majority of issues—on leaders. This means that while all workers are responsible for the work they do, the leaders are responsible for the tools, training, processes, policies, facilities, environment, organizational culture, and everything else they need to do the job. When something goes wrong it is often appropriate to point to both workers and leaders, sometimes appropriate to point only to leaders, and almost never appropriate to point only to workers.
With this in mind, let’s look again at our nuclear incidents. In the Taiwan incident, various workers were responsible for mistakes in identifying, pulling, and shipping the fuses, so they were justly held accountable for their negligence. At the same time, the incident was in large part caused by various factors that were outside of the control of those workers and therefore the responsibility of leaders at various levels, so they were also justly held accountable. Similarly, the Minot incident involved many personnel failing to properly prepare, load, and inspect the warheads, leading to rightly-deserved adverse actions. But the organizational culture that allowed this perfect storm to happen was the responsibility of leaders at various levels who were also rightly held accountable. Both incidents together pointed to enterprise-wide issues, which were the responsibility of the Secretary and Chief of Staff, meaning that they were rightly held accountable as well. To borrow the analogy we discussed here, there were bad apples (individuals), bad barrels (units), and a bad barrel maker (the Air Force as a whole). Properly solving the problem therefore required people at all levels to be held accountable for what they were responsible for.
Properly solving the problem also required an immense amount of pain and effort for everyone in those units and across the Air Force for years. Many people who were completely uninvolved suffered the consequences of these incidents and therefore bore responsibility as well. This may seem unfair to our individualistic culture, but this is the reality of shared responsibility.
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The Reformation Ideal of Marriage
This “joyous success” of Martin and Katharina’s marriage and the six children who came from their union became, in Pettegree’s words, “a powerful archetype of the new Protestant family.” Luther’s love for his children led him to rightly see that central to the joys of marriage was the gift of sons and daughters.
Our memory of what took place during the sixteenth-century Reformation has been somewhat selective. As heirs of Reformed Protestantism, we have remembered it chiefly as a recovery of the gospel and the biblical way of worship. But we also need to recall it as a great recovery of the biblical understanding of marriage.
Building on the monastic piety of late antiquity—found in authors such as Augustine and Jerome—the medieval church had come to regard the celibate life of the monastery or nunnery as the seedbed of a spirituality far superior to that found in the homes of those who were married. The celibate, it was argued, lived the life of the angels, and thus already experienced in some ways the life of the world to come. With the growing corruption of the church in the late Middle Ages, however, the reality was that far too many of the clergy were celibate but not chaste.
Luther, Pioneer Husband And Father
Although Martin Luther was not the first of the Reformers to marry and have a family, his marriage to Katharina von Bora on June 13, 1525, became in many ways the paradigmatic ideal for the Protestant family. Initially, their marriage was no love match. Katharina had escaped from a nunnery in Nimbsch, near Grimma, with a number of other nuns and wound up in Wittenberg seeking refuge. For a time, Luther acted as a sort of marriage broker, seeking to find husbands for the nuns. Eventually, Katharina alone was left, and Luther married her, he said, to please his father, who had always wanted grandchildren, and also, as Luther inimitably put it, to spite the pope.
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