is that the keystone of their agenda, once they have the votes to make it happen (which they probably will as of next January), will be to change the rules to make it as difficult as possible to vote them out. The Baseball Crank dubs this “partisan entrenchment”; the folks over at RedState have compiled a list of steps the Left is already advocating by which they can accomplish this. These steps would, collectively, enable unions (which are a major Democratic money source) to regain power through coercion, empower voter-registration fraud on the Left, silence conservative voices in the media, skew redistricting to favor Democrats, and, of course, put more liberals in the judiciary to suppress challenges to the other steps. Again, all of these are things which Sen. Obama and congressional Democrats are already trying to do, so it’s not as if it takes a leap of imagination to come up with this agenda: it’s taken right from the existing record. I don’t mind losing a fair election—well, no, that’s not true, I do mind, but I accept it—but I mind intensely when people (on either side, my own included) are willing to break the process just to achieve their desired outcome. The first job of our politicians, I believe, is to shepherd the process to ensure that it’s as fair as it can be to everyone, whether fairness is in the best interest of their careers or not; things like the abolition of secret ballots in union elections, or of requirements designed to prevent vote fraud, are nothing short of reprehensible.In the end, on a practical level, I’m less concerned about this than the folks at RedState are; I think the next year or two are likely to go in such a way as to produce a major backlash against the Democratic Party, which I think will overwhelm and wash away these efforts before they can produce the kind of forcible political realignment for which the likes of Nancy Pelosi are hoping. Even if not, I suspect that some, perhaps most, of the measures on RedState‘s list could be successfully challenged in the courts. One way or the other, let’s hope so—for all our sakes.
Author Archives: Rob Harrison
This should be the integrity election
but I’m pretty sure it won’t be.We have, running for president, a man of an unusually long and clear record of integrity in political life, in John McCain—not spotless, no, but several standard deviations above the norm—versus a man who has no such record, in Barack Obama, who abandoned his pledge to take public financing, whose campaign has taken deliberate steps to enable illegal donations, whose past is still largely unexamined (and who has taken significant steps to keep it that way), and who has shown himself willing to enlist surrogates, including political supporters and government agencies, to destroy those who challenge him, if they can. It’s gotten to the point, if I were a liberal, I still wouldn’t vote for Sen. Obama—I’d be organizing a write-in campaign for Hillary Clinton.
Keeping perspective on the election
If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.
—Colossians 3:1-4 (ESV)
Our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself.
—Philippians 3:20-21 (ESV)
Citizenship, for all that Americans tend to be pretty blasé about it, is a profoundly important thing. It’s all about where we belong, and to whom, and where our allegiance lies; it’s about our identity in this world. As such, it means a great deal, whether we ever think about it or not.
It certainly was something the apostle Paul took very seriously, in a couple ways. In the first place, he was a Roman citizen—remember, under the Roman empire, not everyone was, by any means; there were a great many people, including most Jews, who weren’t citizens and thus didn’t have full legal or civil rights. Paul, however, was, and he used that to his advantage on more than one occasion. At a practical, concrete level, he knew just how much citizenship meant. In the second place, though, he also understood that his earthly citizenship had limits, because he owed God a higher allegiance. He understood that this world is no longer our primary allegiance, because this world is no longer where our true life is. We have a new and very different life, the life of Christ.
This is important for several reasons.
One, this tells us something important about salvation. In Colossians 2:20, Paul says, “If you died with Christ”; he begins chapter 3 with “If you have been raised with Christ.” Our salvation, as we usually understand it, isn’t just about a decision we made or an action we took or even the actions we take now; it’s about death and resurrection. It’s about a living God raising dead people. It’s about our old selves being crucified with Christ, nailed to the cross with him with all our sin and all our guilt and all our shame, and us dying with him and being raised to new life in his resurrection. It’s about a cataclysmic change in us, a change worked by the will of God in the power of his Holy Spirit through the death and resurrection of his Son Jesus Christ, that makes us all new people. Our salvation is not merely a reversible act of our fickle human wills, it’s the irreversible act of God’s unchanging will.
Two, this tells us something equally important about the implications of our salvation: namely, being saved isn’t just about going to heaven. It isn’t even just about going to church and supporting the church. Both of these things are part of the picture, but only part. It’s about a complete transfer of allegiance that comes from a complete change of identity: we no longer belong to this world, and we’re no longer primarily identified with it. Our true life is elsewhere.
Does this mean we’re supposed to withdraw from the world? With a few exceptions, no; God has placed us in this world to live in it for him. What it means is that, to borrow language Paul uses in 2 Corinthians 5, we should regard ourselves as his ambassadors—we live here, but not because this is our home; rather, we live here as his representatives, in order to serve him and carry out his ministry in the community and country in which he has placed us. From the point of view of this nation, we’re citizens here and owe it our allegiance, but from God’s point of view—which should be ours as well—our allegiance to this nation is and must be secondary, and our primary citizenship is not on earth at all, but in heaven. Our focus should be not on the things of this earth, but on the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God; the goods we seek should be the goods of heaven, and the goals on which we set our minds and hearts should be the goals Christ has set for us.
None of this is to say that we should ignore the things of this world, or that there’s something wrong with them; God created them too, and he created earthly pleasures, and he wants us to enjoy them. But we should see them in their proper light, not as goals in themselves but as things to enjoy along the way; we should remember that they come to us as blessings from God’s hand, and that they’re not what life is about, or what we’re supposed to be living for. We need to keep our priorities straight.
This is of course particularly important to remember on the threshold of a presidential election. As John Piper writes in the piece I linked to last Thursday,
Christians should deal with the world. This world is here to be used. Dealt with. There is no avoiding it. Not to deal with it is to deal with it that way. . . .
But as we deal with it, we don’t give it our fullest attention. We don’t ascribe to the world the greatest status. There are unseen things that are vastly more precious than the world. We use the world without offering it our whole soul. We may work with all our might when dealing with the world, but the full passions of our heart will be attached to something higher—Godward purposes. We use the world, but not as an end in itself. It is a means. We deal with the world in order to make much of Christ.
So it is with voting. We deal with the system. We deal with the news. We deal with the candidates. We deal with the issues. But we deal with it all as if not dealing with it. It does not have our fullest attention. It is not the great thing in our lives. Christ is. And Christ will be ruling over his people with perfect supremacy no matter who is elected and no matter what government stands or falls. So we vote as though not voting.
As Christians, as the ambassadors of the kingdom of God on earth, we have the responsibility to work for the good of our community, of the nation in which we live, and of this world; God told his people through the prophet Jeremiah, “Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf,” and that command applies to us as well. We need to use the minds he’s given us to come to the best conclusions we can about what this country needs and what ought to happen, and then we need to act on that; which means, at the very least, voting. But having done that, we need to be careful not to put too much weight on it, or to get too tied up in it; we need to leave the results in God’s hands, for whatever his purposes may be.
Of the options we have, there’s no doubt in my mind who would make the best president—but that doesn’t mean I know whom God intends to set in that position, or what his reasons and plans are, or to what purpose; and so on Tuesday, I’m going to do my part, and trust God forhis, remembering that “no matter who is elected and no matter what government stands or falls,” it remains true that “Christ will be ruling over his people with perfect supremacy”—and that my life, our life, is not in a political party but in Christ. Our salvation is not in this election, or any election, but in Christ; for we are citizens of another city, the city of God, and it is from that city that we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who is our life.
Citizens of Another City
I’m told that there’s a guy who recently filed suit against Barack Obama demanding that Sen. Obama produce his birth certificate. His argument, if I understand this correctly, rests on the fact that when Sen. Obama’s mother married Luis Soetoro, Soetoro adopted her son Barack, and the family moved to Soetoro’s native country of Indonesia, mother and son became Indonesian citizens, and under US law at that time had to give up their US citizenship to do so. This guy contends that as a consequence, they can no longer be considered natural-born citizens, and thus that Sen. Obama is constitutionally ineligible to be the President of the United States.
Now, on its face, this lawsuit is laughable. First, it’s true that up until recently, US law forbade dual citizenship (except for citizens of Israel)—but that only really applied to adults; children of American citizens born overseas could be considered citizens both of the US and of the country of their birth until they turned 18, at which time they had to choose between those two nations. Second, this is a matter of interpretation, not of black-letter law, because this specific issue isn’t addressed anywhere in the US Code or in the text of the Constitution, and it’s a question which up until this point has not been raised; thus what this guy asked the courts to do was, on the basis of no supporting precedent, declare the frontrunner in Tuesday’s presidential election ineligible. There isn’t a judge in this country that would have the guts to do that, even if he believed it was an open-and-shut case that he should; and it isn’t, not by a country mile.
As a result, the whole lawsuit is just so much wasted effort. I’m not really a believer in deciding elections in the courts anyway, but if he was going to try to do that in this case, there are much worthier legal issues to raise than this one. The only merit to this guy’s suit is that he takes citizenship seriously. Which he should. Which we all should, and probably quite a bit more seriously than many people in this country do, because for all that Americans tend to be pretty blasé about it, citizenship is a profoundly important thing. It’s all about where we belong, and to whom, and where our allegiance lies; it’s about our identity in this world. As such, it means a great deal, whether we ever think about it or not.
It certainly was something the apostle Paul took very seriously, in a couple ways. In the first place, he was a Roman citizen—remember, under the Roman empire, not everyone was, by any means; there were a great many people, including most Jews, who weren’t citizens and thus didn’t have full legal or civil rights. Paul, however, was, and he used that to his advantage on more than one occasion. At a practical, concrete level, he knew just how much citizenship meant. In the second place, though, he also understood that his earthly citizenship had limits, because he owed God a higher allegiance; in Philippians, he even frames this in political terms, telling them, “our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.” Here in Colossians, he doesn’t use that particular language, but the same core idea is in view: this world is no longer your primary allegiance, because this world is no longer where your true life is. You have a new and very different life, the life of Christ.
This tells us several things. One, this tells us something important about salvation. In our passage last week, Paul says, “If you died with Christ”; he begins this section with “If you have been raised with Christ.” Our salvation, as we usually understand it, isn’t just about a decision we made or an action we took or even the actions we take now; it’s about death and resurrection. It’s about a living God raising dead people. It’s about our old selves being crucified with Christ, nailed to the cross with him with all our sin and all our guilt and all our shame, and us dying with him and being raised to new life in his resurrection. It’s about a cataclysmic change in us, a change worked by the will of God in the power of his Holy Spirit through the death and resurrection of his Son Jesus Christ, that makes us all new people. Our salvation is not merely a reversible act of our fickle human wills, it’s the irreversible act of God’s unchanging will.
Two, this tells us something equally important about the implications of our salvation: namely, being saved isn’t just about going to heaven. It isn’t even just about going to church and supporting the church. Both of these things are part of the picture, but only part. It’s about a complete transfer of allegiance that comes from a complete change of identity: we no longer belong to this world, and we’re no longer primarily identified with it. Our true life is elsewhere.
Does this mean we’re supposed to withdraw from the world? With a few exceptions, no; God has placed us in this world to live in it for him. What it means is that, to borrow language Paul uses in 2 Corinthians 5, we should regard ourselves as his ambassadors—we live here, but not because this is our home; rather, we live here as his representatives, in order to serve him and carry out his ministry in the community and country in which he has placed us. From the point of view of this nation, we’re citizens here and owe it our allegiance, but from God’s point of view—which should be ours as well—our allegiance to this nation is and must be secondary, and our primary citizenship is not on earth at all, but in heaven. Our focus should be not on the things of this earth, but on the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God; the goods we seek should be the goods of heaven, and the goals on which we set our minds and hearts should be the goals Christ has set for us.
This isn’t to say that we should ignore the things of this world, or that there’s something wrong with them; God created them too, and he created earthly pleasures, and he wants us to enjoy them. But we should see them in their proper light, not as goals in themselves but as things to enjoy along the way; we should remember that they come to us as blessings from God’s hand, and that they’re not what life is about, or what we’re supposed to be living for. We need to keep our priorities straight.
Three, on this Sunday before our presidential election, this all has a very particular application this week. One of the great preachers and teachers of our time, John Piper of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, has written a wonderful piece on this, a meditation on 1 Corinthians 7:29-31, called “Let Christians Vote as Though They Were Not Voting”; with permission, I’ve made some copies available on the table in the back, and I’d encourage you to take one and read it, because I think he’s dead on. As Piper says, we’re in the world, and God has given us this world to use for his purposes and to his glory, which means we have to deal with it, in all its manifestations; the key is that we don’t take it too seriously. And so, as he continues,
There are unseen things that are vastly more precious than the world. We use the world without offering it our whole soul. We may work with all our might when dealing with the world, but the full passions of our heart will be attached to something higher—Godward purposes. We use the world, but not as an end in itself. It is a means. We deal with the world in order to make much of Christ.
So it is with voting. We deal with the system. We deal with the news. We deal with the candidates. We deal with the issues. But we deal with it all as if not dealing with it. It does not have our fullest attention. It is not the great thing in our lives. Christ is. And Christ will be ruling over his people with perfect supremacy no matter who is elected and no matter what government stands or falls.
As Christians, as the ambassadors of the kingdom of God on earth, we have the responsibility to work for the good of our community, of the nation in which we live, and of this world; God told his people through the prophet Jeremiah, “Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf,” and that command applies to us as well. We need to use the minds he’s given us to come to the best conclusions we can about what this country needs and what ought to happen, and then we need to act on that; which means, at the very least, voting. But having done that, we need to be careful not to put too much weight on it, or to get too tied up in it; we need to leave the results in God’s hands, for whatever his purposes may be.
Of the options we have, there’s no doubt in my mind who would make the best president—but that doesn’t mean I know whom God intends to set in that position, or what his reasons and plans are, or to what purpose; and so on Tuesday, I’m going to do my part, and trust God for his, remembering that “no matter who is elected and no matter what government stands or falls,” it remains true that “Christ will be ruling over his people with perfect supremacy”—and that my life, our life, is not in a political party but in Christ. Our salvation is not in this election, or any election, but in Christ; for we are citizens of another city, the city of God, and it is from that city that we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who is our life.
Hymn for All Saints’ Day
For All the Saints
For all the saints who from their labors rest,
Who thee by faith before the world confessed,
Thy Name, O Jesus, be forever blessed.
Alleluia, Alleluia!
Thou wast their rock, their fortress and their might;
Thou, Lord, their captain in the well-fought fight;
Thou, in the darkness drear, their one true light.
Alleluia, Alleluia!
For the apostles’ glorious company,
Who, bearing forth the cross o’er land and sea,
Shook all the mighty world, we sing to Thee:
Alleluia, Alleluia!
For the Evangelists, by whose blest word,
Like fourfold streams, the garden of the Lord
Is fair and fruitful, be thy Name adored.
Alleluia, Alleluia!
For martyrs who, with rapture-kindled eye,
Saw the bright crown descending from the sky,
And seeing, grasped it, thee we glorify.
Alleluia, Alleluia!
O may thy soldiers, faithful, true, and bold,
Fight as the saints who nobly fought of old,
And win with them the victor’s crown of gold.
Alleluia, Alleluia!
O blest communion, fellowship divine!
We feebly struggle, they in glory shine;
Yet all are one in Thee, for all are Thine.
Alleluia, Alleluia!
And when the strife is fierce, the warfare long,
Steals on the ear the distant triumph song,
And hearts are brave again, and arms are strong.
Alleluia, Alleluia!
The golden evening brightens in the west;
Soon, soon to faithful warriors comes their rest;
Sweet is the calm of Paradise the blessed.
Alleluia, Alleluia!
But lo! there breaks a yet more glorious day;
The saints triumphant rise in bright array;
The King of glory passes on his way.
Alleluia, Alleluia!
From earth’s wide bounds, from ocean’s farthest coast,
Through gates of pearl streams in the countless host,
Singing to Father, Son and Holy Ghost:
Alleluia, Alleluia!
Words: William Walsham How
Music: Ralph Vaughan Williams
SINE NOMINE, 10.10.10.4.4.
Worthy of honor
I know I’ve mentioned our time in Vancouver, British Columbia, where I attended seminary at Regent College, and how much I enjoyed both the school and the city. Living the young married student life, we didn’t have the money to take advantage of nearly as much in the city as we would have liked to—the time Ragtime came through the Chan Center, for instance; one of my classmates who was a Juilliard graduate went and told us all about the performance, but tickets for that were nowhere near our budget—but we did what we could, and there were always a great many wonderful opportunities to choose from.From an arts perspective, one of the best of those opportunities was, and continues to be, the Pacific Theatre, a small company with a large artistic vision and the ability to back it up. PT had a fair bit of difficulty establishing itself in highly secular Vancouver because that vision is uncompromisingly Christian: co-founder and artistic director Ron Reed is another former Regent student who considered being a pastor for a while. The key is that his vision isn’t Christian in the VeggieTales sense, but something broader and deeper; as he put it in an interview with CanadianChristianity.com,
I, and the company, are preoccupied with the things Jesus talked about and embodied: reconciliation, forgiveness, restoration, new life and a new start, the supernatural, ethical and moral decisions, and peace and justice. So we put on plays that explore these themes.
The result is art which honors God not merely in its message, but in its quality; PT does good work, and so has earned a hearing, and a following, and a great deal of respect, in a city that loves art but does not love the church.
Rory Holland declared: “Ron Reed’s singular vision, accompanied by the many people who have stood beside him, has provided Vancouver a unique theatre experience. Often we see theatre as just another mode of entertainment.”PT, he asserted, “chose more, chose to see the stage as a place where people can be moved, hearts changed, thoughts provoked—all through the medium of damn fine writing, directing and acting. I know we are a better city because of Pacific Theatre.”Playwright and actor Lucia Frangione observed: “Most Christian theatre is actually ‘family oriented’ theatre. There’s nothing particularly Christian about it, aside from the exclusion of certain material that some would find offensive—or not suitable for children, or seniors with a heart condition.”PT, she added, “is one of the rare true ‘Christian’ theatres, where issues of faith, morality, religion, Christ’s teachings—and how they relate to the modern world—are honestly examined. The material they explore often is too bold for ‘family oriented’ theatre, and too controversial for secular theatre.”For many theatre troupes, she contended, “religion is a ‘red flag’ which they try very hard to avoid in their programming, out of fear they will alienate certain audience members. Thank goodness Pacific Theatre has the courage for red flags.”
If you want to understand how to be a true Christian and a true artist, Ron Reed is one of those (along with our own Dr. Patrick Kavanaugh and his Christian Performing Artists’ Fellowship, among others) who points the way; and whether that’s you or not, if you ever happen to be in Vancouver and up for a performance, go check out the Pacific Theatre. You won’t be disappointed.HT: Jeffrey Overstreet via Stephen Ley
Not a holiday for introverts
Halloween isn’t, that is. For all that, I’m pretty sure I enjoyed it as a kid, if only for the candy; but when the candy lost its charm (I have a sweet tooth, but for pastries), so did the holiday, for it’s a rather exhausting process. In recent years, I’ve discovered that it’s all the more so for parents. This year was easier; living someplace where we actually get trick-or-treaters, and with our daughters going around together with their friend from the neighborhood and her mother as well as their own, I got to sit on the front porch, read Dorothy Sayers, and hand out candy.Now, to a lot of folks, the idea that that might be preferable to going around extorting candy from neighbors probably sounds strange; those folks are, with (possibly) a few exceptions, extroverts. To extroverts, who are the loud majority of the human race, they are normal, and those of us who are introverts are “moody loners” who should be treated with some care because “some of them are serial killers.” My thanks for that phrasing goes to New Reflections Counseling, Inc., of western Ohio, for their “Introvert’s Lexicon,” which they describe as “a humorous look at the world from an Introvert’s point of view”; if you’re an extrovert and there’s an introvert in your life, I suggest you read it (and the material which follows it on that page), as it could be helpful to you. (If you want further information, you might also check out Jonathan Rauch’s 2003 piece in The Atlantic titled “Caring for Your Introvert,” as well as the sidebar materials.)HT: cranekid
Ecclesia reformata semper reformanda secundum verbum Dei
or, in English, “The church reformed and always being reformed according to the word of God.” This 16th-century Latin motto captures the spirit and purpose of the Reformation, and so it has continued to be used through the centuries by those of us who consider ourselves heirs of the Reformation and students of the wisdom of the great Reformers. (You know, the sort of people who look at October 31 and think “Reformation Day,” not just Halloween, and write blog posts in honor of the day.)
Unfortunately—aided by a common mistranslation, “the church reformed and always reforming“—in recent times we’ve seen this motto misused in support of ends which are completely contradictory to the spirit and intent of the Reformation and the Reformed tradition; this sort of thing is quite common in the Presbyterian Church (USA), the denomination in which I serve as a pastor. The tendency is to interpret “always reforming” as the ongoing work of the church, reinventing itself to fit the culture, and set that over against “reformed” as if these are two separate things. Thus, for instance, we get this comment from Adam Walker Cleaveland from a few years ago on his blog pomomusings (emphasis mine):
I think that one could fairly easily make an argument that many of our Presbyterian churches today have focused primarily (almost exclusively) on the “Reformed” aspect, and have not critically evaluated how the church may need to continue to be “always reforming” in light of our current context.
Always reforming. Always being sensitive to the radical openness and movement of the Spirit. Always being aware that we may need to be critically evaluate our theology and methodology. While at the same time, being aware of and sensitive to the things that are part of the tradition of the Presbyterian church, and those things that are important in the holy scriptures. The Bible is an important part of the heritage of the Presbyterian church and the Christian tradition, but we must be wary of creating logocentric churches, where we become strict-constructionists when it comes to our theologies and methodologies, only allowing whatever the scriptures and tradition says. That must be balanced and held in tension with the new waves of the Spirit that may be calling for new theologies and new methodologies in a new world.
In Cleaveland’s case, he was coming from a self-consciously “emergent” position, an influence which is only beginning to emerge (if you will) in the PC(USA); but we see this sort of argument all the time from liberals in the denomination. “The Bible is an important part of our heritage, but the world is evolving and we need to evolve with it. Yes, Christians used to believe that homosexuality was sinful, but we know better now. God is doing a new thing, and his Spirit is calling for a new theology that’s appropriate to the times. We’re supposed to be always reforming—we can’t afford to cling to the dead past, we need to move with the present.” And so on, and so forth. In a nutshell: “Always reforming, new wind of the Spirit, therefore whatever we don’t like about historic Presbyterian theology and morality, we can throw out.”
The problem is twofold. First, these are folks who are very interested in reforming the church, but not so interested in the secundum verbum Dei part; I don’t know what “according to cultural assumptions” would be in Latin, but that would be more to the point. This is not to say theyreject the Scriptures, just that they reject the idea that the Scriptures could be telling them something they really don’t want to hear; they want the church to believe what they want the church to believe, and they’re happy to offer any interpretation of Scripture they can which supports that, but if they decide they can’t sustain those interpretations, they don’t respond by changing their position. Instead, they respond by rejecting the authority of Scripture on that point, declaring essentially, “that was then, this is now, and we know better.” (Some would point out that secundum verbum Dei is a later addition, which is true; it is, however, a clarifyingaddition—it adds nothing new to the older motto, but rather makes explicit what was already implicit.)
(It should be noted at this point that most of this can also be said of many who consider themselves evangelicals; the primary difference is that evangelicals don’t justify themselves by explicitly rejecting the authority of Scripture. Rather, the evangelical tendency is to privilege the individual interpretation of Scripture and simply insist that yes it does mean what I want it to mean. It still ends up locating primary authority in the autonomous individual rather than in the voice of God speaking by his Spirit through the Scripture, but by a different route and in less straightforward fashion.)
Second, there is the belief that the church is the agent of its own reformation, and that this is about the church reinventing itself and evolving. As McCormick theology professor Anna Case-Winters pointed out in Presbyterians Today several years ago, this is directly opposed to what this motto actually means, and what the Reformation was all about. As she says, this doesn’t mean that “newer is better,” nor does it leave it to us to determine what “reforming” looks like. Rather, it’s about
restoring the church to its true nature, purified from the “innovations” that riddled the church through centuries of inattention to Scripture and theological laxity. . . .
God is the agent of reformation. The church is rather the object of God’s reforming work. God’s agency and initiative have priority here. . . . Theologian Harold Nebelsick put it well: “We are the recipients of the activity of the Holy Spirit which reforms the church in accordance with the Word of God.” The church is God’s church, a creature of God’s Word and Spirit. As we say in our Brief Statement of Faith, “we belong to God.” God’s Word and Spirit guide the church’s forming and reforming.
What we need to understand here is that this motto isn’t about justifying anything we might want to do; it is rather about acknowledging that being the church isn’t about justifying what we want to do. It isn’t about getting what we want, or believing what we’re comfortable believing; instead, it’s about the negation of that approach. It’s about recognizing that the reason we keep needing God to reform us is that we keep slipping back into building churches that are about us, giving us what we want and keeping us comfortable, and thus keep needing to be called back to the will of God as revealed in Scripture. It’s also about recognizing that yes, God still speaks by his Spirit—but that he will not contradict anything he has already said, because who he is doesn’t change, and thus that if we think we feel God leading us, we need to test that sense against what he’s already revealed in Scripture.
This is why what Dr. Case-Winters says about the 16th century remains true for us today:
In the 16th-century context the impulse it reflected was neither liberal nor conservative, but radical, in the sense of returning to the “root.” The Reformers believed the church had become corrupt, so change was needed. But it was a change in the interest of preservation and restoration of more authentic faith and life—a church reformed and always to be reformed according to the Word of God.
Being Reformed means being radical in precisely that sense, for it means not that we’re always becoming something new, nor that we’re always changing, but that we’re always being conformed and reconformed to the unchanging standard of the Word of God, which means of the character and will of the one “whose beauty is past change,” as Hopkins put it. It means not that we adapt to this world, but rather we’re pulled away from adapting to this world; the goal is not to let this world squeeze us into its mold, but to be transformed by the renewing of our minds. It means accepting that we don’t set the agenda, but rather that we’re called to surrender to God’s agenda, and thus recognizing that we’re people under authority—the authority of God, and thus of his revelation to us in his Word—and that we must bow to that authority even when we don’t like what we hear, rather than trying to find ways to rationalize what we want to do instead.
It means, in short, allowing ourselves to be Reformed, not by our word and our will, but by the will of God in accordance with his Word.
As though not voting
This is what I mean, brothers: the appointed time has grown very short. From now on, let those who have wives live as though they had none, and those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though they had no goods, and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it. For the present form of this world is passing away.
—1 Corinthians 7:29-31 (ESV)
John Piper’s election message on this text, “Let Christians Vote As Though They Were Not Voting,” has been cited all over the blogosphere this last week, and rightly so; if you haven’t read it, I strongly recommend you go and do so, because what he has to say is both true and important. It’s also worth reading his sermon from this time twenty years ago on “Believing God on Election Day,” because while the names have changed, the truth of his points in that sermon hasn’t.
To this, I would only add a point that my wife has been talking about quite a bit lately (I thought she’d blogged on it, but I haven’t found the post): we as Christians are called to do things for the value of the thing itself, not in the expectation of results. Thus, for instance, we are called to evangelism, not in order to improve the attendance and giving numbers at our church, buteven if we don’t, simply because telling people about Jesus is a good thing and one of the tasks to which he calls us as his disciples. Similarly, we are called to vote, but if the candidates for whom we vote lose—if we don’t get the desired results—that doesn’t mean that our votes are “wasted.” God has commanded us to seek the welfare of the communities in which he has placed us, and that gives us the responsibility to vote, as wisely as we can; the results of that, however, are not in our hands, but God’s. We need to do our part, not to try to do his.
On reasons for an Obama victory
I’ve said before that I expect Barack Obama to win next week, and that I expect his presidency to be bad for America. I’m afraid we’ll see a major national-security crisis to which he’ll respond ineffectively (especially since Joe Biden essentially predicted as much), a resurgence of the abortion holocaust (and especially among blacks) under one of the most pro-abortion politicians in the country, the return of stagflation with the revival of the redistributionist economic policies that produced it, a Carteresque ineffectiveness in the face of challenges, a crackdown on free speech to stifle criticism of his administration, and the domination of our government by the hard-left wing of the Democratic Party.That said, I think Obama’s going to win, and for all that I don’t think he’ll be a good president, I think it’s important for this country that he win. For one, I do not assume that America deserves to be blessed simply because we’re America; if I’m right that there are hard times ahead, I can’t deny the possibility that we as a nation have them coming to us. As nations go, this is a great one and a good one, but we are far from perfect—and those Christians who object to my saying this because they believe America has a special place in God’s plan should remember that “judgment begins in the house of God.” For another, I believe the church in this country deserves to be judged for its political idolatry; and it seems to me that this judgment must begin with its conservative wing, who must relearn not to put our trust in princes.And perhaps most importantly, I believe that John McWhorter is right: the time is such that an Obama win may well be necessary for its effects on “race” relations in this country. For all my pessimism about an Obama presidency, part of that is that I see tough times ahead regardless, and I think it’s quite likely true that the cost of an Obama defeat would be greater than the benefit. As McWhorter argues,
For 40 years, black America has been misled by a claim that we can only be our best with the total eclipse of racist bias. Few put it in so many words, but the obsession with things like tabulating ever-finer shades of racism and calling for a “national conversation” on race in which whites would listen to blacks talk about racism are based on an assumption: that the descendants of African slaves in the United States are the only group of humans in history whose problems will vanish with a “level playing field,” something no other group has ever supposed could be a reality.The general conversation is drifting slowly away from this Utopianist canard, but nothing could help hustle it into obsolescence more than an Obama presidency, especially for the generation who grew up watching a black man and his family in the White House and had little memory of a time when it would have been considered an impossibility. At the same time, nothing could breathe new life into this gestural pessimism like an Obama loss. It would be the perfect enabler for a good ten years of aggrieved mulling over “the persistence of racism,” which, for all of its cathartic seduction, would make no one less poor, more gainfully employed, or better educated. . . .The grievous result of this fetishization of racism would be that it would put a kibosh on the upsurge in black voters’ political engagement amidst the Obamenon. Newspaper articles would quote blacks disillusioned from getting excited about any future black candidate—e.g. “I thought maybe America was finally getting past racism but it turned out not to be true.” 2009 would be a year of countless panel discussions, quickie books, and celebrated rap couplets wallowing in the notion that the white man wouldn’t let Obama into the Oval Office where he belonged, urgently reminding us that to be black is still to be a victim.
HT: Justin TaylorFor all my pessimism, I think it’s important to remember this, and not to deprecate the very real symbolic value of an Obama victory—or the very real practical benefits of that symbolic value; I also think it’s important to recognize that justice demands something of this sort in partial balance for the national sin of slavery. I could wish it were someone else, a Harold Ford or a Michael Steele, but Barack Obama is clearly the man God has chosen for this moment, for his own purposes; and it remains true that “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”