Politics, Part 2

In this political year, the divide between parties is showing up in the divide among believers--especially evangelical believers. This year more than any in the past two decades, there is a rift between evangelicals. The rift has been a long time coming. It's getting a lot of attention in the media, both secular and Christian. The secular press seems to be playing the story as a "cultural shift" away from "the Religious Right" and towards a more moderate (hopefully liberal?) evangelicalism. But in fact the rift is the fruit of dissatisfied believers who want to live out the Gospel more fully.

I've wondered in the last two national elections if I were the only one who saw my votes as "the lesser of two evils." I've cringed at Bible-thumping crusaders who have made Americanism an integral part of their faith. I hear them proclaim that God has a plan for America and wonder: Is there any country He does not have a plan for? I hear the rhetoric about reclaiming America for God and wonder what exactly that means. Is it a moral vision? A moral nation is not a righteous nation. And when I hear them talk about persecution of American believers, I look through the latest news from Voice of the Martyrs.

But the rhetoric from the left is just as wrong-headed. It's an anything-goes, "Judge-not" kind of love that hasn't a hint of holiness, except in poverty issues. Even there, the solution isn't to bring the poor into your home for a banquet; it's increasing government programs. This is a poor substitute for the Gospel, but a nice dodge. It lets a man feel good about meeting the needs of the poor without ever actually meeting the poor themselves. It wants government to play the role of the church but in an inoffensively secular way.

There are so many things about this that are wrong. I have been left wondering where the complete men and women are, the ones who want to follow the Gospel in all its fulness. These would be the ones who proclaim Jesus as Savior of the world, as righteous Son of God with something to say about every part of our lives: how we spend our money, whom we go to bed with, how we dress, what we say of or to those we disagree with and how we say it. . . . Such people would be looking for a way to show love without compromising the holiness of the Gospel. Some aspects of their lives would be "conservative" and some would be "liberal."

You can see this as the expected norm in the New Testament church. The apostles taught believers to give to the poor among them and to have nothing to do with believers who lived immoral lives. If a brother were taken in a fault and refused to repent, he was to be expelled from the congregation.

All this might go to explain why I've begun to take the Anabaptist view of politics, at least to some degree. Political involvement has been a thing that divides and distracts us. We are not the people of God; we are Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal. We do not define ourselves fully by Scripture but more by the bits and parts that our sub-culture finds acceptable. Politics changes faith. Do we stand for America, for a better future, for a transformed culture, or for the Kingdom of God? Are we first and foremost believers in Jesus Christ or partisans of one or the other party?

Politics and the Death of the Church

Super Tuesday is coming fast, and the political season is in full bloom. Everyone's telling everyone else how to vote and why, and this year marks something different from the past in one respect:  There's a real contest on for the evangelical vote. Some of this is due to the Iraq war, some due to disillusionment with Republican policies, and some is simply a sea-change brought about by the emergent movement. The last is the most important, because the Iraq war will come to an end in time (perhaps a long time) and Republican policies will change in response to the electorate. The emergent church, though, is going to have long-lasting effects because it is, for better and for worse, reflecting change in America's culture. I don't mean to air grievances with the emergent scene; I just want to blog on politics for a bit.

I've come to wonder lately if the Anabaptists, in turning their backs on the politics and the governments of their day, might have been taking the right and "Christian" approach to politics. Just saying this will get a lot of heat from activists on left and right who will tell me that this is turning away from the Church's activist mission to change the culture and to establish the Kingdom of God in the earth. Both sides whole-heartedly and heatedly think we need to engage the political culture of the nation and of the world.

Problem is, we're not engaging the political culture. We're marrying it.

If we were engaging the political culture, we wouldn't be taking sides. We wouldn't split ourselves into Religious Right and Religious Left. We wouldn't hold political allegiance closer to our hearts than the Name of Jesus Christ or the unity that the Holy Spirit gives and that we are commanded to maintain. We would call even our political heroes to account when they sin. We would keep in mind the difference between the Kingdom of God and the kingdoms of this world.

But we don't.

We take sides. We choose a party. We pick and choose from the Scriptures to justify ourselves--there's as much "proof-texting" by liberals as by conservatives.  What we choose has more to do with what pulls on our emotions than with what the Bible really says. And we make excuses when someone on "our" side clearly violates the Word of God. 

To quote J.P. Moreland, "If one approaches Jesus with either a democratic or republican agenda, Jesus will turn out to be just a big Ted Kennedy or Bill Frist in the sky!" This makes Jesus just another false god--remaking God into the image of man. God is not what He is but what we feel comfortable with.

At the root of the problem is this:  We think more in terms of the Old Testament state than of the New Testament Church. The Old Testament is full of laws for setting up a government and living under that government as a state. The New Testament isn't about a state. There are no kings anointed to rule except Jesus. There are no covenants except one, that God Himself will make and keep:  "I will put my laws into their minds and write them on their hearts, and I will be their God. . . . I will be merciful towards their iniquities, and I will remember their sin no more." The New Testament just doesn't tell us how to set up a civil government. Constitutional monarchy? Republic? Dictatorship? Big government? Small government? We're left on our own. Which leaves me to wonder:  Does God care about that as much as we do? Maybe His priorities lie elsewhere.

Technorati Tags: politics,religion,church/state

On With the (One-Man) Show

Okay, so I been bad. No posts for 2 WHOLE MONTHS! My apologies, my very sincere apologies, to all 3 of you who've read the past posts.

I was going to blog about something a while back, but now something completely different came up. This last Wednesday night at our home fellowship, I was teaching about gifts of the Spirit. I read from the 12s--Romans 12 and 1 Corinthians 12--to show the NT lists of the gifts. 1 Cor., of course, has the "charismatic" gifts while Rom. has the "structural" gifts (my terms). We separate the two lists but Paul puts them all together as one group, the "gifts of the Spirit." And notice that when he writes about the church as the body of Christ, it's in the context of the gifts of the Spirit. He is saying, not that we need each other, but that we need all the gifts operating in the assembly.

Evangelicals, during the Reformation, exalted one gift above all others: the gift of teaching. Pastoral ministry became teaching; the sermon became the main focus of the worship service. When the Pentecostal renewal began, teaching was again just one of many gifts. Now we are once again copying the Evangelicals here. We leave no room for the other gifts to really operate. We stifle prophecy (mostly because we have more pretenders than prophets). We let the pastor do everything, and usually that means teaching. Gifts of mercy and administration are locked away rather than brought to the front. Evangelists are professionals who move from church to church rather than working within one assembly. Other gifts (discerning of spirits, for example) operate only in one-on-one situations rather than for the whole body. But teaching and teachers have become the focus of the church.

The problem is that 60% of leadership is then non-existent. No apostles, prophets, or evangelists; only pastors and teachers. And the vast majority of the gifts of the Spirit go unused and (even worse) unsought. The Average Churchgoer hears a one-person show on Sundays, maybe ties into a small group in the week, and wonders what he/she is there for. To be a clone of the pastor? To provide an audience? Is this the sum of Christianity today? Is it any wonder, when our corporate worship is so uncorporate, that we narrow our day-to-day focus to personal spirituality?

How can we change this? How can we make our leaders know that we hunger for more than their Sunday messages? How can we put teaching in its right place, making room for the rest of the gifts of the Spirit? And how can we put into practice the "charismatic" gifts without falling prey to disorder, false moves of the flesh, and "miracle-ism"? What do you think about this? What answers would you give from Scripture?