On Faith & Politics

 I'm writing this post early on the Saturday after the election. I'm listening to Gerry Mulligan and looking forward to going to a men's breakfast at church.

We don't generally talk about politics at church. I could guess at what some of my brothers are thinking, and I'm pretty sure of which way one of them voted, but that's about it. We are not a red or a blue or even a purple church. This reticence about politics probably speaks to a determination to not let ourselves be divided along political lines. 

And not to be distracted. A church is a group of people who think they are on to something. On to something big. Virtually everything else seems like a lesser thing, and on these lesser things we may and often do differ. 

We have no authority apart from Jesus. Our authority runs in very narrow but not insignificant paths. We have the authority to forgive. To withhold judgement. To offer grace far and wide in the interest of displaying the beauty of of God in Christ (God as seen, as revealed, in Jesus).

But of course there are Christians who do put politics first. Personally, I think they are making a big mistake. I think it's corrupting. Show me a politics-first person who does not believe his or her political opponents are stupid and evil, and you will have shown me the exception, not the rule.

[Note: I've moved on from Mulligan to the Houdak Trio for my background music. This stuff is incredible!]

Where was I? Oh yeah, the matter of politics and faith. I do think a political program may well flow from a faith position. Actually, it would be strange if one didn't. And I also think that many of us (us Christian believers) have not thought these connections and transitions through. Our political views are alongside our faith-understanding, but unrelated. Our politics is a sort of cultural inheritance, and we have been careful to give it preferential treatment, protected status.

It's similar to not letting your faith disturb your attraction to violence, or to pornography. I am not equating political views to sin, but when anything has a protected and untouchable place in our psyche, it is an idol.

A sign of this sort of idolization is our willingness to lie on behalf of our political interests. You see, if our politics flowed from our faith in Christ, we would never lie for politics. Or for a politician. If Christ comes first, lying is off the menu, sorry.

That is what has disturbed me most about Evangelical supporters of Trump. The willingness to pass on the official lies of the administration. To call lies truth. When you think a man is beyond the reach of ordinary sensible skepticism, that man is your idol. You are enmeshed in sin.

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Read also:

We Are All Revenants, by Bradley Jersak

From languishing to flourishing, by God's grace

I've been languishing.

Spiritually speaking, that is. I've been spiritually languishing.

Def.: (verb) to lose or lack vitality; grow weak or feeble

Yeah, that's me. For some time now. A kind of subsiding, as of a dying flame.

This can't go on. As any Christian believer will tell you, this simply can't go on. Whatever measure you want to use--Bible reading, prayer, praise and worship--all these things have suffered. That is, the practices that make up the life of faith

I've been that guy who reads the Bible front to back in a few months, keeps a prayer journal, sings loud at church, and plays the role of encourager with other men. I've been. But am not now.

What is the explanation? I'm not at all sure. But I sure now that I want to do something about it. I want to da a few little things, small steps, to return to daily Scripture reading and prayer, and to incorporate some hymn singing into my regular quiet time.

These are all more-or-less private matters, of course, but in time it begins to affect your outward walk, the way you think and thus the way you speak, and the kinds of work you lay your hands to. It begins to affect the way you interact with people, the choices you make about your time and your money, the things you set your mind to: in short, the lived life.

I plan to read briefly from the Scriptures each morning. Not large chunks, but brief passages from the life of Jesus. This will keep me in the four Gospels for the foreseeable future. I'm going to write out a verse or two that I want to focus on, and I'll seek to form a prayer from the passage as a whole.

Finally, and this is new to me, I'm going to sing a worship song. This is probably the most revolutionary thing I'll do, in the sense that it goes against my more or less inhibited nature (not to mention my deep dissatisfaction with much that falls under the heading of worship song).

That's the beginning. Together they are a way, I hope, of setting my mind on things above, as Paul urges, or as he says elsewhere of putting on the new man. Or, to put it yet another way, of exalting God in my daily life. But I also intend to involve A Stranger Here in this process. I'll be sharing the Bible verses and the songs. In so doing, I'm taking the blog back to its roots as a devotional journal of sorts, and I hope also to be much more frequent in my posting here. You may see other changes here in due time as well.

Pray, please, for the languishing to turn to flourishing, by God's grace.

More thoughts of this "Evangelical" Christian in the aftermath of 11/8

First, a few links:

• The Evangelical Immigration Table. Boy, are they swimming upstream! May their like prosper.

• I have thought fleetingly of dropping the term "Evangelical" as my own self-description as a Christian. Just because, especially since 81% of us just voted for Trump, the term has come to have associations that actually impede the progress of the Gospel. To put it another way, because of these associations, the term becomes a barrier between me and others when I may have an opportunity to share my own testimony. But here is one who says no, despite everything, he's sticking with the term.

• Then there's this author, who says, "If only Jesus were the stumbling block and scandal to the Evangel, not White Evangelicals’ political uniformity."

My take: As a Christian, I'm going to lean toward mercy, and that must be reflected in my voting as in everything else. As Hauerwas says, "the Gospel is not information, it is a way of life." In other words, there should be no separation, no conflict, between faith and doing. And that includes voting. We like to rail against legalists in our theological conversations, but when it comes to the real world we are often the stiff-backed legalists. Like secular Pharisees we keep on supporting new and more stringent laws and see no reason not to fill our jails with yet more people, always under the guise of love-of-country. Since when, though, does patriotism trump mercy in the Christian conscience. In the name of patriotism some of us now want to throw people in jail for burning the flag. 

But as I was saying, I'm going to lean toward mercy. I tell you, something greater than the legal code is here. Something greater than ICE is here. Something greater than Republican lock-step is here. Something greater than fear of being associated with the liberals is on the scene. Something greater than border walls and KEEP OUT signs. Something greater not only than Make America Great Again hats, but greater even than America. Greater than identity politics. The love of God, when it once enters our hearts, makes us strangers and aliens ourselves. Our stake in this country is not as rooted as our stake in the Kingdom. In the Kingdom we are rooted, in this world we are wayfaring strangers. And it is because we are strangers that we welcome the stranger. 

The RCs and the LCs

Evangelical Christians fall into two broad categories, it seems to me. Neither of them are necessarily wrong, but they differ on points of emphasis, and I do think one of these groups strikes the right emphasis, and the other, not so much. As I've said here before, you have your Righteousness Christians (RCs), and you have your Love Christians (LCs).

This has been a useful way for me to think about faith-presentations. Key words in the RC presentation are righteousness, holiness, and conversely sin, wrath, and damnation. These latter are the things people need salvation from. I have known RC parents to pray for their unbelieving children that they would know the wrath of God toward sin so that they might be saved from it.I find that kind of prayer rather mystifying, and would rather God drew me to himself with love than with wrath (but that's just me!). For RCs, the Gospel is essentially the doctrine of justification. It's what their songs of praise are all about, and its in that direction that they carry off almost every verse of Scripture.

Well, I suppose my bias is showing. I would consider myself and LC, not an RC. LCs are not necessarily oblivious to the wrath of God toward sin, but their prayers for a lost child would be that the person know the love of God, because the love of God is the most beautiful and transformative thing for people to know and it is the most essential thing one can say about God. Keywords for LCs are love, forgiveness, restoration, relationship. Their songs are about God's unrelenting love. For them, the gospel includes the doctrine of justification but it is far more than that.

John MacArthur is an RC. Eugene Peterson is an LC. Manly Mark Driscoll is an RC (judging by this). [To tell you the truth, I haven't watched that video, not being a proponent of self-inflicted mind mutilation, but Andrew Arndt gives a profound reading of Driscoll's, ummm, "preaching," here]. Indeed, I'm guessing that men gravitate toward the RC perspective, women toward the LC, although not by huge margins. RCs tend to think that the LC perspective is fruity, namby-pamby, emotional. LCs might think that the RC perspective tends toward the judgmental, and could result in fear-driven legalism. I think they may both be right, and both have spotted the potential dangers of the other's perspective.

But I'm an LC at heart, no doubt, and I've even noticed that long-time Christians as they grow older sometimes grow more toward the LC perspective. Some do, anyway. I haven't noticed the opposite trend, LCs moving toward the RC perspective as they get older. I think a Christian's heart softens gradually over time. That's what some might call sanctification: the gradual softening effect of the Gospel on the human heart. I have seen Christian men falter tragically over these matters: struggle with the Christian concept of meekness, or that Biblical concept of the soft heart as a primary descriptor of the Kingdom man that God is developing in us.

In the Andrew Arndt blog post cited above, which is really fine and deep and you should read it, Arndt says the following.

To give the benefit of the doubt, it’s likely that Driscoll and Platt [referring to a couple of video excerpts of their preaching] and others like them don’t necessarily intend to paint a picture of God as a moral monster, but from where I stand, I don’t know how one can see that god as otherwise.  When John declares that “God is love”, he doesn’t feel the need to give us a caveat–”yes, yes, yes, but you should also understand that God is righteous wrath too!”  He simply says it.  And he’s a sophisticated enough theologian (as the rest of the Bible writers are) to understand that God’s righteous wrath emerges out of a basic coherence of character and intent that lies at the core of his being: the Good God of Scripture is love, and anything in God’s world that doesn’t line up with his Good Love he will one day exorcise from his Good World–and if we human beings choose to cling with all our might to the sin, evil, and rebellion we’ve been working, then (this is my reading of Scripture) we’ll be exorcised too.  That’s wrath.  Emerging out of love.  Love is what he is and does.  Wrath does not “trump” love.  Neither does love trump wrath.  There is no competition.  Wrath is what happens when love pursues the beloved into the outer darkness to drive the demon of depravity out of her and bring her back.

That's it. But there's much more over there, so go read the whole thing. Arndt is profoundly right here, and what he says is important.