Posted on 08/22/2004 6:15:20 PM PDT by EternalVigilance
First impressions can be misleading.
Two weeks ago, a wild-eyed Alan Keyes stood in front of news cameras in a hot, crowded Arlington Heights banquet hall sweating profusely, yelling and shaking his fist as he enthusiastically accepted the Republican nomination to run for U.S. Senate in Illinois.
"I will promise you a battle like this nation has never seen," Keyes shouted with the passion of a preacher talking about spiritual combat with the forces of evil, thrusting his fist heavenward for emphasis. "The battle is for us, but I have confidence because the victory IS FOR GOD!"
A few days after he delivered the fiery speech that was replayed time and again on television newscasts across the nation, a decidedly different Alan Keyes is seated behind the desk of a spartan office in what was until recently the Jack Ryan for Senate headquarters on North Clinton in Chicago.
On this particular afternoon, the 54-year-old Maryland conservative, political pundit and two-time presidential hopeful is about to spend more than an hour, one-on-one with a reporter, in an interview about his personal faith.
He's in tie and shirtsleeves, leaning back casually in his chair. Two small, gold charms -- a crucifix and twin Ten Commandment tablets -- that usually dangle from a long gold chain are tucked into his breast pocket, the chain pulled across his chest at an angle giving him just the faintest air of a bishop.
"The boss and the rules," he'll quip later as he pulls the charms out of his pocket and allows them to fall on top of his silk tie.
Whether his mood is irascible or reflective, Keyes, a lifelong Roman Catholic, wears his faith on his sleeve as well as around his neck.
When asked to describe himself spiritually, Keyes is reasoned, sincerely thoughtful and significantly more reserved than that man behind the lectern on TV.
"Well, in the fullest sense, I describe myself as a Christian," he says. "I believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God, came amongst men in order to redeem us from original sin and to offer us a way to his father, which he offered us in his words and examples and exposed to us the truth: that God loves us as individuals and knows our weaknesses because Christ has experienced them.
"And therefore, with really infinite understanding and mercy, is ready to welcome us into his home if we are willing to turn around and accept his grace," he says.
How does he define what a Christian is?
"One of the essential characteristics of Christianity is that it is about faith. Christ often says, 'Your faith has saved you,' to people. And that means that your willingness to acknowledge in truth the authority of God and the mercy of God in the person of Jesus Christ, is the route to salvation," he says, without hesitation.
"We are transformed by our knowledge of Christ, and that's why there is going to be a manifestation in us of that change, which shows itself in the different way we start to relate to people."
Cradle Catholic
Born in a New York military hospital in 1950 while his father was serving in Korea, Keyes describes himself as an "Army brat." Along with his sister and three brothers, he was raised on military bases across the United States, and, for a time, in Italy.
His parents, Alison and Gerthina, both now deceased, were converts to Roman Catholicism.
Keyes says his first concept of what God is like is inextricably bound to Catholicism.
"My earliest idea that I remember was Jesus Christ, he was my idea of what God was like," he says. "When you grow up Catholic, I remember being encouraged to think of Jesus as your friend. Just a friend, like the friends you had on the playground, or in school. And I can remember that that was a part of my developing thought life when I was a child, having conversations with Jesus in my head, as if he were one of my playmates. . . . He was a child, just like me."
And now what does he think God is like?
"He's grown up," Keyes, who is married with three children, says, busting out in a belly laugh. "He's grown up. And I hope, I've grown up a bit. But I think that depth of it hasn't changed. We go through 'times.' We advance, we retreat, we struggle, we wrestle."
Keyes insists his faith has remained fairly constant throughout his life, though there were times when he says he felt more distant from his faith than he does today.
"I think the Bible is right [when] it says that you raise up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it," Keyes says, paraphrasing a passage from the 22nd chapter of the Biblical book of Proverbs. "That obviously implies -- doesn't it? -- a kind of gap. There's something in youth that somehow implies that people do depart from it a little bit. But if you raise them in the way they should go, then the roots take over again. And one returns."
When he was a doctoral student in the late 1970s at Harvard working on his dissertation about constitutional theory, Keyes says, he struggled a bit spiritually.
"When you're a graduate student, you go through your ups and downs and sometimes you hit really great lows. Some people, as a result of that, give up and they never reach their degree," he recalls. "At a moment of crisis for me -- I'll never forget -- I was feeling just that low, sort of thinking, 'I've been working at it and I'm never going to finish and it's just hopeless.'
"I called my mom, and that conversation, in which she really did nothing but listen to me and remind me that I'd gotten through different things in my life through faith -- sparked an experience I still remember," he says, his voice breaking with emotion. "And it transformed my sense of what my faith meant to me."
He received his Ph.D. in government from Harvard in 1979. He also earned his undergraduate degree from Harvard in 1972.
Keyes describes a mild crisis of faith that had grown alongside his intellectual pursuits.
"In American academics, it's difficult to be a person of faith. There's a certain kind of patronizing, a sense of, 'Oh, you'll grow out of it,' " he says.
"So you begin to push your faith into the background, and maybe not really want to show it and so forth and so on. You start to doubt whether or not you are being intellectually honest if you are relying on premises of faith."
It's a conundrum Keyes seems to have resolved with a vengeance.
The word became flesh
Keyes would never make himself out to be some sort of Biblical scholar, but when it comes to Scripture, he knows what he's talking about.
He reads Greek -- he travels with a laptop loaded with Bible software, including a copy of the Septuagint, the Greek version of Hebrew Scriptures -- and can wax eloquent at length about the etymology of certain words and how they correspond to theological principles.
"I try to read or think about some element of the Bible every day," he says, leaning back in his office chair, and propping his feet up on the desk.
When asked what portion of the Bible he most enjoys reading, he says, without hesitation, "Genesis."
"I often tell people that my greatest problem in the Bible is that in any serious way I've never been able to get past Genesis," he says, chuckling. "Now, I have read the whole Bible and I read other books, but what I mean is the book that I keep going back to over and over again is Genesis.
"For the longest time, I was really going back over and over again, thinking and writing about, the creation myths, because it seemed to me that there's an enormous depth of kind of philosophical implication," he says.
In addition to his Biblical studies, Keyes is a philosophy buff.
"People will think this is strange I suppose, but . . . there are books like Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and Hegel's Logic and things like that, and every once in a while I get hit by this mood and I have to wrestle with these books that are very abstract and that are kind of philosophy in the viewless realms where you are really dealing with concepts that have no corresponding material images or anything to go along with it," he says, excitedly. "You just have to go with pure concepts to think about things. And I think, in the sense of that kind of philosophical thinking, meditation and reasoning, Genesis is an enormously powerful experience."
This launches Keyes into a 20-minute discussion of what he describes as his latest "breakthrough" in examining a portion of Biblical text.
Specifically, the candidate says for four or five months he had been reading, re-reading and picking apart several dozen verses from the 4th, 5th and 6th chapters of Genesis, beginning with one of those "begat" passages.
So and so, son of so and so, begat so and so, father of so and so, who begat.. ..
These particular begat passages start with a descendant of Cain, the son of Adam and Eve who murders his brother Abel, and end with Noah -- the fellow with the ark.
With an almost childlike enthusiasm, Keyes recounts how he traced the lineage of Noah and the descendants of Cain, examined the ancient roots of certain words, and learned, according to his interpretation, that God's covenant with Noah after the flood included the institution of capital punishment for the first time.
"It's fascinating, don't you think?" Keyes asks, smiling broadly, when he's concluded an exegesis of the text that, at least in its methodology, would give any seminary professor or preacher a serious run for his money.
A boundless sorrow
Keyes could be a preacher, a Biblical scholar, or professional apologist for Christ. But instead, he's chosen to enter the secular political realm.
Why choose a field that can so often obfuscate faith?
It's a question, apparently, that moves Keyes to tears.
His eyes turn red, he stops talking for several minutes, stares at the ceiling, drums his fingers on the desk, and apologizes for his loss of composure.
After several attempts to begin speaking, only to have his voice crack with emotion, Keyes tries again to explain what he's feeling.
"I'm sorry, I'm getting a grip," he says, eyes red with tears. "When I was young, I encountered a problem, I guess. A challenge. And I guess it was an encounter that disillusioned me, yes, in the literal sense. And that was my first encounter with the reality -- intellectually and emotionally . . ." he pauses again, his voice trailing off for a few moments. " . . . Of what the slave experience meant to my ancestors. And I think I've been working that out ever since.''
When pressed to explain just what this "encounter" was, Keyes reveals that it was, in fact, an intellectual incident.
When he was about 15, he read Lerone Bennett's book Before the Mayflower: A History of the Negro in America, 1619-1964. And it broke his heart, he says.
"It's sorrow," he says, explaining why 40 years later he's still so emotional about something he read as a teenager. "It's not a sorrow for yourself, it's not a sorrow for individuals, it's a sorrow for the reality of our kind of sad experience . . . of life without God."
And it's that sorrow and outrage that in part has led him into politics, Keyes says.
"It's a problem of justice and to understand it and resolve it somehow is not an intellectual exercise. You have to meet the challenge of it in your own time and life. And at some level, that's what politics remains at its heart, in America," he explains.
"It's impossible to be a Christian and really live out your relationship with God apart from life and action," he says. "And that action requires that you kind of be aware of and sensitive to how in fact the injustice that was involved in slavery is like one of those difficult plants where you cut off what appears on the surface but the root is still there. And it springs up again in another place, in what seems like another form, but it is the same evil. It's the same root."
Christus victor?
So, what did he mean, exactly, back at that podium in Arlington Heights, when he exclaimed that "the victory is for God"?
Was he saying God is on his side -- the side of the righteous -- and not on that of his Democratic opponent, Barack Obama, a man who professes the same Christian faith?
"Well, professing is the operative word," Keyes says, in a moment of snarkiness conspicuously absent from the rest of the interview.
"I thought it was pretty clear. Maybe it wasn't," he says, reflecting on his acceptance speech a few days earlier. "What I meant by it was the victory is in God's hands for his will and decision. That's why I couldn't promise it to people. I might lose. I don't know. None of us knows.
"The notion that you can stand there and say, 'Rah! We're gonna win!' I know you're supposed to do that, but I find it very difficult to say stuff that I know, even if it's rhetorical, is not true," he says.
Keyes is puzzled by the idea that some people would be afraid of the notion of "God on our side."
"I rather want people to think God is on their side, because that means they know he's watching them, and that his rules still apply to what they do," he says, smiling. "I hope that's the result."
"I often tell people that my greatest problem in the Bible is that in any serious way I've never been able to get past Genesis. Now, I have read the whole Bible and I read other books, but what I mean is the book I keep going back to over and over again is Genesis."
http://www.suntimes.com/output/falsani/cst-nws-keyes22.html
Because whatever happens is part of God's providential plan, even a victory for Obama.
God works everything to the good for those who love him.
Keye's explanation defies any normal interpretation of his statement.
But not a Christian interpretation.
You might illustrate your wisdom better by addressing what a poster actually says instead of trying to lecture them on what topics they are allowed to comment and in what context.
Just a suggestion.
What nonsense- he makes every other Republican candidate look like a moderate!
Compared to him, they are.
no it doesn't.
... I have been asked of late to not criticize alan. jim rob supports alan.. it is his forum...
got it?
No, Jorge, there just gets to be a limit as to the time and energy I'm willing to spend on Anti-Conservative-Keyes posters in FR.
If you look closer, you will see that nothing in this calls Bush an evil person. In Keyes reaction, he viewed evil at work in his administration, particularly as it pertained to embryonic stem cell research. I was concerned about the decision, myself. Next question?
Because whatever happens is part of God's providential plan, even a victory for Obama.
God works everything to the good for those who love him.
Sorry but this explanation doesn't work for anybody.
Keyes said "The battle is for us, but I have confidence because the victory IS FOR GOD!"
Break it down. Keyes refers to HIS battle, and HIS confidence BECAUSE of the victory being for GOD.
Please don't tell me a person going into battle has "confidence" because of "GOD", means they have equal confidence that they were going to lose the battle, as win it.
"Keye's explanation defies any normal interpretation of his statement."
But not a Christian interpretation.
It defies a Christian interpretation ABOVE all others.
God is not a God of confusion.
Nobody goes into a battle in the Bible with confidence in God that they will lose. That's absurd.
Keyes made a statement that he knew could only be interpreted as "God is on my side" and then backpedaled when confronted on it.
Keyes is such a political klutz he should probably do God a favor and say he's an atheist. :)
I remember a governor who lost a battle and he told us (his supporters) not to feel bad,defeated or worry too much. He went on to say that we had lost a battle,nonetheless,we all knew that in the end,in the final battle,God wins.
I think that's what Alan was saying,he was stating a truth albeit without his usual crystal clarity.
Interesting. They said very similar things about Lincoln, when in Illinois he took up with an upstart party that formed in order to give an 100% accreditation of human life to all living humans.
BTW, as an evangelical Christian, I can assure you that while I have worshiped the Lord your God in many fellowships, none of them dealt with snakes during worship. (Not the fleshly kind, I mean.)
Are you calling me an idiot, BTW?
Interesting the color of glasses through which you choose to look at this man.
I do hope you answer the question to yourself. Feel free to respond by FReepmail. I appreciate how Alan Keyes challenges. I find I can learn.
An excellent summation from that thread:
To: who knows what evil?
[135] It seems that many on this thread are more interested in questioning the motives of Alan Keyes rather than debate the issues he brings forth. I thought spirited debate was what FR was all about...guess I was wrong. Now we get petty bickering and name-calling...in the halls of power, the socialists must be laughing their backsides off.
I haven't been on FreeRepublic since the election - my god! all the same people still harper on Keyes!
You are right - there is never a discussion of the ideas the good old doctor articulates - it is always condemnation of the "motives", the scrutiny of the past, the dismissal of the "loser" who do not win elections, the never-ending bashing for daring to question darling Bush or the sainthood of the Republican Party (this is not the time! to be different - unite! unite!).
I noticed that Keyes bashers got much better (with practice) - I believe they only search for articles about Keyes to pounce on - seems they dedicated themselves to sheppard us (the masses) in the "right" direction by guarding against Keyes influence. Poor people.
475 Posted on 09/06/2001 23:16:59 PDT by Symix
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buzz off and stop pinging me to threads.
for the third time.
thanks.
I noticed that your time and energy are VERY limited when it comes to addressing what posters actually say. Probably because you spend so much of it labeling them as "anti-conservatives" and lecturing them as to what topics they can or cannot comment on.
If you look closer, you will see that nothing in this calls Bush an evil person. In Keyes reaction, he viewed evil at work in his administration, particularly as it pertained to embryonic stem cell research. I was concerned about the decision, myself. Next question?
That would be like me saying that we don't have to be as worried about the evil of the DU but rather the GREATER evil of the posts of "unspun" that sneak behind FR lines.
BUT that is NOT calling unspun "evil".
Talk about tortured logic! Can't you come up with a better defense of Keyes than this?
bttt
I remember a governor who lost a battle and he told us (his supporters) not to feel bad,defeated or worry too much. He went on to say that we had lost a battle,nonetheless,we all knew that in the end,in the final battle,God wins.
That's fine and every Christian should have confidence that the God wins the ultimate battle, in the end.
But NOBODY goes into a specific battle saying their confidence is in God and the victory is His and yet believe God could be on the side of the opposition which means they could lose too...
With few exceptions,those who have posted their concerns over Keyes' recent comments and his past words/actions,not to mention Ill. voting patterns,have NOT insulted those avidly cheering Keyes on.
Since people have and still do post replies and even entire threads about what they find wrong with President Bush and his wife and Mr. and Mrs. Cheney,and a variety of other GOPers/Conservatives here,without the threat of suspension and banishment,it is a manifestly new and different tact to start doing this with Keyes;but that's the way it is.
I suggest that ALL Keyes threads,from here on out,be only for those of his avid supporters.In that way,they can praise him till the cows come home,without ever having to look at any facts.
I takes this pledge here and now.Anyone else care to join me?
I take this pledge here and now. Anyone else care to join me?
A truly beautiful gesture.
But I think now is the time for tough love.
We cannot allow the Keyes supporters to bask in his mere 41% deficit in the polls believing victory is at a hand when we know the are deluding themselves.
Waking them up to reality here on FR assures them a softer landing on election day. That is merciful.
This subset of FR,contains some of FR's oldest members,who have contributed to FR for many years in all sorts of ways.Yet,they have been condemned by mostly newbies,who rarely add much of anything to FR.But,since Jim runs this site,he can easily get rid of those he sees fit to and he sets the rules.
The Keyes supporters and Jim do NOT want the facts posted,so please,let's just leave them to their threads.
Personally, I think your decision to stop posting on Keyes threads is awesome, but must say for the record that your definition of 'the facts' and mine is not the same.
Perhaps we'll run into one another on an 'am I logged in?' thread or something...
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