The Gospels unlock the reality that the Messiah is actually a part of God Himself, entering into the three-dimensional world as a human being. Why would God allow a piece of Himself to suffer the agonizing ordeal on the Cross?

The answer is painted throughout the Scripture -- starting with Adam and Eve and their original sin. After allowing evil against God to enter man's heart, humankind found itself in a state of utter hopelessness. No "good deeds" on our part could make up for the transgressions we'd committed in body and soul against the all-perfect Creator.

It was a radical situation, and it required a radical solution -- one that only God Himself could provide. And when Christ walked onto the scene, John the Baptist saw Him coming and exclaimed, "Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world!"

Just as the Passover Lamb had served as a sacrifice on behalf of one's evil deeds, so Christ Jesus was to take upon Himself all of the evil of humanity; and with one swift stroke, to crush the serpent's head and rescue the lost souls of His children. "For Christ also hath once suffered for sins," Peter writes, "the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit."

And Paul says, "For [God] hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him."

Mission accomplished.

The question of the moment is not whether we've done enough good, but whether we've been tough enough. We Americans hate being occupiers. We are liberators. But Iraq cannot be truly liberated until it has been transformed. And it cannot be transformed if the bad elements are not afraid of American soldiers. Those gleeful faces in Fallujah make the point: They think we are patsies....Baghdad is not Boston. You can't teach democracy until you first have order. And you cannot have order if people like Al-Sadr think they can bully you.

Make no mistake about it -- we are fighting pure evil in Iraq, in Afghanistan and elsewhere around the world in this global fight against Islamic jihadist terror.

But there's only one way to free ourselves from this plague -- to continue to take the fight to the enemy, to call their bluff and to make them feel more pain than we feel.

Not only should the U.S. continue to fight this way, we must turn our allies loose. We must learn the historical lessons of appeasement.

No war was ever won by a country fighting with one hand tied behind its back. No war was ever won fighting under the rules of politically correct engagement. No war was ever won when "allies" are trying to cut their own deals with the enemy. No war was ever won by prolonging the conflict unnecessarily.

This was an issue that I had to face when I was campaigning 25 years ago. I have always been against abortion; it’s not possible for me in my own concept of Christ to believe that Jesus would favor abortion. But at the same time, I have supported the Supreme Court ruling of our country as the law of the land. And the present arrangement, whereby a woman is authorized to have an abortion in the first trimester of the pregnancy, or when the pregnancy is caused by rape or incest -- these are the things that moderates who have beliefs like mine can accept as the present circumstances in our country. The liberality of abortion is anointed by the laws of our country, including the ultimate ruling of the Supreme Court.

Watching the ongoing experiment in retroactive prognostication known as the 9/11 Commission, I keep trying to place events in their proper context. It is hard to think back that far, honestly to place oneself in that September-10th mindset. The events of 9/11 were profoundly life altering. The things that went on before seem trivial by comparison, in part because they were. Triviality was the essence of pre-9/11 political and social discourse. It was the legacy of the Clinton era, as frivolous a time in our history as can be remembered. Unfortunately, the growing terrorist threat was serious and our lack of focus played into their hands.

The al Qaeda attack plan exploited our preconceptions, particularly our knowledge of what a hijacking was. Before 9/11, hijacking was largely a form of theater. Hostage takings had become well-developed rituals. Killing was usually not the hijacker's aim. Perhaps a hostage might be murdered by way of example, such as Leon Klinghoffer or Petty Officer Robert Dean Stethem. But most of the passengers were props, human shields to keep the terrorists alive during the negotiation phase. The way for innocents to get out of the situation alive was to relax, let the scene play out, and hope that if there is a rescue attempt, that none of the bad guys has a bomb. In short, cooperate, don't escalate. Don't be a hero.

This is why box cutters could be used successfully to hijack airliners....Would the box-cutter scenario work today? Of course not. We are no longer told to be quiescent and leave everything to the experts. Nor would we in any case. The risk is too great. The ritual has been shattered.

What was supposed to be a bipartisan investigation aimed at plugging future holes in the system is no more. We now have and irresistible vortex into which actual information is sucked in, spun and regurgitated as partisan propaganda.

Nobody's minds will be changed. Those who blamed Bush before will blame Bush still. Those who blamed Clinton before will blame Clinton still. And nobody will come away blaming al-Qaida or Osama bin Laden.

As in the case of Saddam Hussein, the war was deployed as a political weapon against the Bush administration before the first shots were fired. John Kerry had already begun flip-flopping to his current position that he voted for the war, but was against the conflict.

But the war in Iraq isn't being waged to provide interesting political theater. These are real Americans, engaged in real combat and shedding real blood, while the politicians at home tell them they are dying for Iraqi oil, instead of for Iraqi freedom.

"The full social benefits of gay marriage will come when religions as well as governments customarily bless it: when women marry women in big church ceremonies as parents weep and ministers, solemnly smiling, intone the vows," observes [Jonathan] Rauch, a writer in residence at the Brookings Institution. In other words, forget courthouses and city halls; the fight for legitimacy for gay couples will be won under a roof topped by a cross and a steeple. About three-quarters of Americans choose to be married by a member of the clergy. When it comes to weddings, if not regular worship, we remain a country of steadfast churchgoers. It's a point grasped by both proponents and opponents of same-sex unions: Marriage is a threshold, a life-changing event because of its distinct combination of legal, social, and religious significance. For many of us, the importance of the institution is rooted more deeply in joint blessings than in joint tax returns.

The biblical Jesus sometimes made little sense to those in his day and didn't always leave people uplifted. In the Gospel of Mark alone, for example, we find a Jesus who speaks openly of a Last Judgment that entails the rejection of many people. He also speaks of a sin that God will never forgive (3:29), of horrific consequences for misleading children (9:42), and of God being ashamed of, or even severely displeased with, some at the judgment (8:38, 13:36)....

This is not a Jesus fashioned in our image, let alone the Balm of Gilead. This is Jesus the consuming fire, the raging storm, who seems bent on destroying everything in his path, who either shocks people into stupefaction or frightens them so that they run for their lives....

If, in this national conversation, we do nothing more than blithely discuss Jesus and his adaptable cultural presence -- well, we will have missed the real Jesus. We need to talk with biblical honesty about the One who would not only love and forgive us but also demolish all our cultural images of him. And we need a good supply of crash helmets.

And herein lies one of the most disheartening but salient observations one is forced to make, post-"Passion," about many in the Jewish community: They still don't get it. Even after more than two charmed centuries in America, they confuse contemporary America with medieval and postmedieval Europe, still not realizing how America and American Christians are a category wholly different from those of other nations, other religions and other strains of Christianity....

American Christians viewing the film did so as a religious experience, akin to how Jews who sit down at a Passover seder focus on the message of redemption and liberation, not Egyptian culpability. In contrast Jews view the crucifixion as an historical event, making it thereby more analogous to post-Biblical sagas such as World War II where the Germans, the Nazis, are the focal point of blame. To Christians, therefore, the circumstances and actors are secondary to the divine message. It is not viewed as a duel between specific participants....

Anti-Semitism is a real problem in the world today, but it mostly arises from the Muslim world and the political left. It's easy to attack American Christians, schooled on love and forbearance, who will never requite these attacks with any sort of comparable intensity. It takes real bravery to confront the anti-Semitism of militant Islamists and left-wingers who have been inclined to physical violence.

What amazed her was that the Aramaic word for God sounded just like the Arabic "Allah," with a "u" on the end. After all the controversy over whether Muslims and Christians worship the same God, "Here is Jesus calling God, essentially, Allah," she said....

Nahzeeh Alothmany, a Saudi graduate student and religion teacher, saw it as a chance for Muslim teens to speak about their faith to Christian peers by explaining that Muslims revere Jesus, even though they do not believe he was the divine or that he's the son of God.

Many were struck that Jesus had spoken phrases central to Islam. When he said he was born "to bear witness to the truth," he was using a phrase that all Muslims use to describe their purpose in life.

"He might as well have been quoting from the Quran," Mogahed said.

Newdow's challenge to God lays bare how badly the left wants to banish religion and morality. His mistake was to take too seriously prior court decisions that irrationally prohibited acknowledgment of God.

In serving up the reductio ad absurdum of the atheists' agenda, Newdow has enabled the public to focus on liberal intolerance, and the impending Supreme Court decision will be big news. The liberal media are uncomfortable with the hand Newdow has dealt them....

The Supreme Court is faced with the choice between abandoning its misguided precedents or affirming them, which would plunge the justices into the angry sea of public scorn and congressional retaliation. Justice Antonin Scalia has recused himself, so the court's liberals can't depend on their fellow conservatives to save them from folly by outvoting them.

Maybe the anti-God justices will lose nerve and hide behind Newdow's lack of legal standing: neither he nor a child under his custody was ever exposed to the pledge. Or maybe the court will duck the dilemma by declaring that "under God" has no religious meaning, a ruling that would outrage Americans who are quite sure that God is alive and well.

The lawsuit to censor God out of the pledge and American public life is looking no better than the failed attempt to restrict the showing of Mel Gibson's popular "Passion of the Christ." God is not so easily defeated in America.

First off, yes, it's extremely refreshing to see an article about the way The Passion of The Christ depicts Jesus' death that doesn't focus on who's to blame. The question here isn't who killed Jesus, but why Jesus died. The theological term for how Jesus' death reconciled man and God is atonement.

Weblog can't do much more than encourage people to read this story, which reveals a thorough knowledge of the subject. There are some great lines from John R.W. Stott, as well as comments from Mark Noll, Jack Graham, Frederica Mathewes-Green, Al Mohler, Randy Balmer, and others. The main voices, of course, are those of Anselm and Abelard, with a healthy dose of Augustine, Calvin, and Luther thrown in, too.

The hook is that most Christians in the pews haven't been thinking much about the atonement lately, but "without at least an intuitive comprehension of atonement, a believer stands little chance of making sense of the faith's promises of redemption and eternal life."

In Fallujah, reports indicate that four American private security men, all former military men who had accepted dangerous work in Iraq, were ambushed when they tried to drive down a street in that city. Unlike most of Iraq, Fallujah remains defiant of the U.S. occupation and efforts to build a free and democratic society there, and it has been the focus of many violent U.S. incursions searching for resistance cells and Saddam loyalists. The four Americans were reportedly shot, doused with gasoline and set afire before the mob engaged in its repellent horseplay with their bodies....

The other message at a lynching isn't as obvious. It is also an appeal. It is a demonstration of potency designed to sway and embolden those who are sympathetic but fearful. It says, Look what we can get away with! Look what we can do! The sheer horror asserts the determination of the rebel faction, and underlines the seriousness of the choice it demands from its own community. It draws a line in the sand; it is a particularly graphic way of saying, You are either for us or against us. With the potential for further such atrocities afoot, critics of the rebels are frightened into silence and acquiescence.

It is a mistake to conclude that those committing such acts represent a majority of the community. Just the opposite is true. Lynching is most often an effort to frighten and sway a more sensible, decent mainstream. In Marion it was the Ku Klux Klan, in Mogadishu it was Aidid loyalists, in Fallujah it is either diehard Saddamites or Islamo-fascists.

The worst answer the U.S. can make to such a message--which is precisely what we did in Mogadishu--is back down. By most indications, Aidid's supporters were decimated and demoralized the day after the Battle of Mogadishu. Some, appalled by the indecency of their countrymen, were certain the U.S. would violently respond to such an insult and challenge. They contacted U.N. authorities offering to negotiate, or simply packed their things and fled. These are the ones who miscalculated. Instead the U.S. did nothing, effectively abandoning the field to Aidid and his henchmen. Somalia today remains a nation struggling in anarchy, and the America-haters around the world learned what they thought was a essential truth about the United States: Kill a few Americans and the most powerful nation on Earth will run away. This, in a nutshell, is the strategy of Osama bin Laden.

NRO: Your latest report on assisted reproduction, issued this past week: What is the most useful recommendation to come out of it?

Dr. Kass: Two stand out. First, we call for a federally funded prospective study on the health and well-being of children born with the aid of assisted reproductive technologies. Over a million such children have been born worldwide, but to date we know next to nothing about how well they are faring. Second, we call on Congress to defend the dignity of human procreation by enacting moratoria on certain morally dubious reproductive practices: putting human embryos into animal uteruses; mixing human and animal egg and sperm; starting human pregnancies for purposes of research or growing body parts; conceiving children other than by union of egg and sperm (derived from adults); buying, selling, and patenting of human embryos; and limitless research on human embryos in the private sector.

These are the times that try Americans' souls.

By now we're all saturated with the images of the four dead, members of a security team who escorted American convoys carrying food supplies to an ungrateful town. The four were killed by gunmen who ambushed and torched their vehicles before an angry mob, including children as young as 10, hauled out and mutilated the burning bodies.

It is hard at such times to keep one's head, to remain calm, to rise above the impulse to exact immediate revenge. Or to cut and run, as we did under similar circumstances in Somalia not so long ago. But keep our heads we must. Calmly we must transcend the primitive lust that compels ignorant others to mug idiotically for cameras.

Our revenge will be in facing down enemies who, though unworthy adversaries, impede the worthy goal of stabilizing a country whose future may predict our own. To retreat now would merely feed the terrorists' appetite for America's immediate failure en route to her ultimate demise.

The uprising yesterday was treated in many initial news accounts as a spontaneous uprising directed by Najaf cleric Moktada al-Sadr.

What the other news accounts left out was one significant, but well-established fact: Al-Sadr works for Iran. He is an Iranian agent. His authority comes from Iran....

The edict, or fatwa, issued April 8, 2003, showed that Shiite clerics in Iraq are receiving significant direction from Iran. The edict said that Shiite leaders have to "seize as many positions as possible to impose a fait accompli for any coming government."