Christian Thought

further and further thoughts

By pgepps ⋅ May 9, 2008 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

Further Thoughts on Phil Johnson and the Christian Right

I wanted to lead off with a straight-up agreement with my gracious host:

If Phil thinks things are bad now, what would America look like if the New Left had been handed carte blanche to refashion our society? Conservative Christians have been the primary defense against the New Left’s radically immoral and anti-Christian agenda.

Beyond a doubt, the weakest point I could see in Phil’s discussion in these posts was his tendency (and this habit of argument runs among preachers a bit, I think) to dismiss all that has been achieved by the fusion of “Religious Right” with small-government conservatives, fiscal supply-siders, and anti-Communists (one should not forget the “Bear in the woods“).

At the same time, I’ve already anticipated a disagreement in how I phrased that.

See, without small-government conservatives, the “Religious Right” and the “Religious Left” would be playing power politics for the right to impose their particular flavor of “pure” or “tolerant” morality, with similarly unpleasant results either way.

Without fiscal supply-siders, we’d be at the mercy of “compassionate conservatives” who manage to use God-talk to make both “Religious Right” (faith-based initiatives!) and “Religious Left” (Jesus was homeless!) ply the Providence of the State for their well-being.

In other words, to say that “Conservative Christians” form the front line against “the New Left” is to miss the point that many a non-Christian conservative (like Jonah Goldberg) has had a hand in saving us from many a non-conservative Christian (like Mike Huckabee).

And that many of those non-conservative Christians have been Republicans, and darlings of the “Religious Right.” There are virtues to be found in opposing Gore or Kerry or Dukakis, even if the results are Bush presidencies; but we should know “it wouldn’t be prudent” to attribute that too much to Christians as God’s people, however much it may be attributed (for better and worse) to some subgroup of American voters and consumers who say “Christian” when they’re polled.

For there is no metric in Scripture by which we can judge the “success” or “decline” of the nations; there is only the surrender of their citizens to the Kingdom to come, their inclusion and incorporation into the Body of Christ, their serving one Lord, professing one faith, submitting to one baptism, zealous for the unity of that Body, the building of that Temple, of which they are members in the redoubled body.

For here lies the key of our disagreement:

“The church as a body has no calling to organize and protest in the political realm.”

What room does this leave for the prophetic role of the church? The church had no calling to organize against slavery, genocide, or the the killing of the unborn?

“The prophetic role of the church” is a misnomer; it suggests precisely the category error which, I hope, we’ve all agreed must not be made. The error of picturing the church as the prophet, and the country as the People.

No nation-state on Earth is God’s People. And we all agree to that, I think.

But the prophet is sent to The People, for the sake of The People, who have received The Promise and begun to dwell in The Land. The prophet speaks of “the nations” as those who the “royal priesthood” have not yet reached, and who will be called to be the tormentors and goads to The People, and condemned justly for so being. The prophet may address “the nations” in the presence and for the sake of The People, but there is no call to repent and obey The Law for the sake of The Promise, for they have not received them. (The people of the nations receive the Promises according to The Law given to the People, in the case of the church “the perfect law of liberty” in the Gospel, ceasing to be “the nations” and being incorporated into The People.)

So, no. The church that dwells as God’s People in the “time between times” will make disciples who will find slavery, genocide, and abortion actively reprehensible, who will be offended by them and hurt by their very complicity in orderly living in a society which tolerates, much less funds or supports or practices them–and yet in that church, Paul could write a letter on behalf of a newly-converted slave who Paul sent back to his Christian master, Philemon; and while that letter did not, in the end, leave much doubt about which order trumped which, yet he did not overthrow the order, either; just as Paul did not overthrow the sexual tyranny of Greco-Roman culture, or command (as Christ also did not) tax resistance. Rather, Paul (as Christ did) gave commands among and to believers such that, if they followed them, they could not subjugate wives they had not surrendered themselves, like Christ, to save; could not receive their believing slaves except as brothers, whose debts were paid and offenses forgiven, and in Christ maybe even their elders; could not pay taxes, nor withhold them, without considering that the imago on the coin, as the imago of their created being, denoted their surrender. These instructions would be meaningless to Jupiter-worshipping heathens, Jews who passed over Messiah, as they are to the Last Men who populate our legislatures. The Word Christ is and spoke, and in words and Spirit speaks still, are for those who “are being saved.” It calls to we, The People, and not the nations however constituted, to wake up and “strengthen what remains.”

There is a legitimate role for critique. (There better be, or this cultural critic has some ’splaining to do. And don’t think I haven’t wrestled with that one!) There is a reason we may, and must, and should, continue to know how to understand and expose the evil, and praise the good, in what lies around us. How else would we call them to repentance? But this is the repentance which turns the heart to Christ, and not the repentance of a rightly resentful dissenter under authoritarian rules made by men, to bend the body and break the heart. It cannot be achieved by becoming partners in their enterprises; it should certainly not be achieved by wedding the Body of Christ to the nation-state. They have irreconcileable differences; it will never work out. “Do not be unequally yoked” was not primarily about our dating lives, after all. (It applies there, too.)

In other words: the prophetic role in any church is for the church,

to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes.

To which I suggest for comparison the OED definition of “politician”:

A. n.
1. a. A schemer or plotter; a shrewd, sagacious, or crafty person. In later use also (esp. U.S. derogatory, influenced by sense A. 2b): a self-interested manipulator, whose behaviour is likened to that of a professional politician.
b. U.S. Prison slang and Navy slang. A person who obtains preferential treatment, esp. an easy or desirable job, through manipulation.
2. a. An expert in the theory of politics, or in the governance and business of a State or polity; a person appointed to or inheriting a position in government, a statesman. Now chiefly hist. or as merged in A. 2b.
b. A person who is keenly interested in practical politics, or who engages in party politics or political strife; now spec. one who is professionally involved in politics as the holder of or a candidate for an elected office.
In the 17th and 18th centuries, usually with opprobrious overtones.