The Golden Ass

"He also stood by embattled Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld. 'I don’t believe he should resign. He’s done a fine job. Every war plan looks good on paper until you meet the enemy,' he said." - George Bush's reaction to rumblings among the forest that Rumsfeld should resign. From: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11941620/

See my last blog on the Incarnation as it relates to the world of business to see how this dangerous mis-relation between theory and reality relates to the idea of the Incarnation, in which God left heaven, the mind of the world (so to speak), to enter into our reality. God then proceeded to relate to us from this here Reality, from the ground up, so to speak. Jesus didn't come up with a "plan that looks good on paper" and then set out to implement it. He "did as he saw his Father in heaven doing." And he didn't necessarily always know what was next. The whole plan wasn't concieved in his head and then applied on the world. "Father, if it be your will, may this cup pass from me. But not my will, but yours be done." In the life of Jesus, the next moment was often filled with uncertainty, danger and insecurity. And, as J.R. once said in a sermon, "I don't know that Jesus knew that the resurrection would happen when he obeyed God by going to the cross."

"'Nobody likes war. It creates a sense of uncertainty in the country,' he said. 'War creates trauma.'...Bush said he’s confident of victory in Iraq. 'I’m optimistic we’ll succeed. If not, I’d pull our troops out,' he said, warning that abandoning the nation would be a dangerous mistake.
'So failure in Iraq, which isn’t going to happen, would send all kinds of terrible signals to an enemy that wants to hurt us and people who are desperate to change the condition in the broader Middle East,' Bush said."

If Jesus didn't know the resurrection was going to happen, then how can Bush be optimistic that his theoried concoction of a plan will succeed. Only thing I can figure is that Bush must be the Second Coming, here to fulfill the mission. That's the only way, as I see it, that Bush would already know what was going to happen :) Either that, or Bush is just not in close Incarnational touch with Reality. Because in that Reality, that reality actually affects what you do, changes our course of action. We are not God. We don't determine what does and does not happen. We are at the mercy of forces greater than ourselves, even the ones in this reality here on the ground (not just the "principalities and powers" of the heavens). This is part of "accepting our humanity", or "accepting our human limits" - the prime model of such acceptance, again, being the Incarnation.

Jason