The link below is to an
op-ed piece by David Rourke, published yesterday (January 19, 2018) in the
Dallas Morning News.
In the piece, Rourke
points out what he sees as a split among American conservative Christians—a
split defined by “how inconsistent the Christian
right has been on policies that line up with the principles the Bible
would deem to be true, good and beautiful.”
On one side
of the split is the new guard: those who “appear unwilling to make the moral
compromises necessary to support the GOP as we know it.”
On the other
side is the old guard, whose…
“…problems
are enormous despite positive intentions. Many of these traditionally religious
right evangelicals pick and choose what parts of the Bible they apply to
American society, especially when it comes to the sanctity of human life. For
example, many are passionately pro-life when it comes to unborn babies but not
when it comes to women, refugees, minorities and the poor. Further they
entangle the agendas and ideologies of the church and the Republican party.
Instead of seeing America as a type of wayward Babylon, they see America as a
type of Jerusalem.”
It's not a new
distinction. Rourke uses the language of St. Augustine (4th century):
“the city of God and the city of man have competing aims. Until conservative
Christians get this, we will fail to faithfully be in the world but not of the
world” “In the world but not of the world” is a distinction implied (but not
directly stated) by Jesus in his Gethsemane prayer for his disciples (John 17).
Standing before Pilate, Jesus said, “My kingdom is not of this world” (John
18:36).
That distinction is consistent
throughout the New Testament between the kingdom of God (or the kingdom of
heaven) and the kingdom of the world, the former ruled by God and the latter
ruled by Satan. Christians live by a different standard (spirit) than that of
the world (flesh).
Augustine used the terms,
city of God/city of man. John Calvin (16th century) would try to
reorder Augustine’s city of man to make it become the city of God. His vision
for a Christian community still inspires many, although his vision of a
brutally judgmental God became counterproductive to his vision.
In Christ and Culture (1951), H. Richard Niebuhr outlined five
prevalent viewpoints with which Christianity has confronted the distinction and
relationship between the kingdom, or city, of God and the kingdom of the
world/city of man:
o
Christ
against Culture.
o
Christ of
Culture.
o
Christ
above Culture.
o
Christ and
Culture in Paradox.
o
Christ
Transforming Culture.
Today’s
evangelical Christians fall, it seems to me, in either the Christ against
culture, or the Christ Transforming Culture mode. Christ against culture is
generally the position taken by dispensationalist premillennialists, who
believe the world is beyond saving, and that they are called to win as many individual
souls as possible for Christ before he returns to destroy the Prince of this
World (Satan) and establish the kingdom of God once and for all, either here on
earth or in some totally different realm.
The Christ-transforming-culture
camp believes it possible for humans to make the world Christian, and attempt
to do so by taking over the political structures of government and enacting
Christian legislation to win America back for God. It is to these
conversionists that Rourke refers in his comments.
In perhaps the
most comprehensive commentary on these distinctions to date, Gregory Boyd’s The Myth of a Christian Nation: How the
Quest for Political Power Is Destroying the Church,[1]
suggests that the two realities (the kingdom of God and the kingdom of the
world) are mutually exclusive, and cannot be merged, because they emerge out of
mutually exclusive paradigms.
The kingdom of
the world is established and maintained by what Boyd calls a “power over” model,
which he calls the power of the sword: the ability to enforce specific values
and cultures on another, with or without the other’s approval. By contrast, the
kingdom of God is established and maintained by a “power under” paradigm, which
Boyd calls the power of the cross: a Christ-like sacrificial, loving service
extended to all, including one’s enemies.
Boyd says
Christians should be involved in the political process, but should not confuse
their involvement with a manifestation of the kingdom of God. Christian
legislators can enact policies that reflect God’s will; nevertheless, those
policies do not transform a nation into the kingdom of God, because they are
established and maintained by a power over model. Only a Calvary-like love will
transform the world.
Meanwhile, the
unworkable effort to merge the two kingdoms increasingly distracts Christians
from their calling, which is to mirror the loving, inclusive, sacrificial servanthood
of Jesus of Nazareth.
Yet, we are not
simply to do nothing. We are called to “do justice, love mercy and walk humbly
with (our) God” (Micah 6:8). We are called to live as witnesses to Christ’s
Calvary-like love, even for his enemies, trusting in God’s promise (manifested by Jesus) that love is more powerful than the sword; trusting that God
can and will work through our love to transform the world.
But we are not
called to inflict or enforce that paradigm on anyone else. To do so would make
it a kingdom of the world reality.
Rourke
concludes: “The mission of the church and the
mission of the Republican Party cannot cohabitate in a strategic partnership,
regardless of how well the GOP seems to line up with Christian thought in a
given era. The closer these institutions come together, the more the church
will lose credibility and power, the more the church will look less like itself
and more like the world. To use the language of St. Augustine, the city of God
and the city of man have competing aims.”
I concur.
That’s the way
it looks through the Flawed Glass that is my world view.
Together
in the Walk,
Jim
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