Author Archives: Rob Harrison

The idolatry of American politics

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Someone with sharp eyes may have noticed that I added the Anchoress to the blogroll. Why it hadn’t occurred to me quite a while ago that she wasn’t on there, I’m not sure, but that oversight is now rectified. At least it was good timing; I checked in just in time to catch her asking the question, “Are Our Ideologies Our Idols?” Some might disagree with me, but I’m pretty sure (and have been for a while) that the answer is “yes,” and she provides some good evidence for the proposition.

The truth is, I’ve been convinced for a while that our politics is idolatrous, ever since God convicted me about some of my habits. For instance, I’ve tried (and I think succeeded) to stop saying, “I’m a Republican.” I most often vote Republican, and to say that is a simple statement of fact; but to say “I am a Republican” (which I was—I paid dues to the Republican National Committee and kept my membership card in my wallet, for a while) was to define myself in terms of the Republican party. It was to say that the Republican platform was a defining part of my identity, and that the leaders of that party were my leaders. As a Christian, I have no right to do that, nor do any of us.

We’re called to be in the world, yes, but not of the world; to vote, to participate in our government, is to be in the world, but to attach ourselves to a political party and adopt it as our own is to be of the world. Our Christian faith—the content of our beliefs, our commitment to each other, and above all our commitment to follow Jesus the Messiah—must be the source and control of all our political beliefs and actions, and that cannot be the case if we have a pre-existing commitment to the positions or the political success of any political party. Jesus said, “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also,” and it’s equally true that where your goals are, where your sense of identity is, there you will find your heart as well; and when we let that happen, when our politics shapes our faith rather than the other way around—when our identity is defined even in part by a political party or a political cause—then our political commitments have claimed a place that belongs only to God, and we are guilty of idolatry. We are to find our identity in Christ and him only.

It’s worth noting that the same applies to patriotism. I’m not saying that love of country is always or necessarily idolatrous, because it isn’t; but it can be, very easily. After all, America is a concrete reality which has benefited us in concrete ways, and which needs improvement in concrete ways; the kingdom of God, by contrast, can be a little harder to see, and easier to forget about. Plus, we all get to pledge allegiance to our own concept of what America ought to be, and to define our patriotism accordingly; which makes America a very flexible idol indeed. We need to be careful of ourselves.

Testing, testing, 123 . . .

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Thanks, Erin. 🙂

Herewith, the rules:
Pick up the nearest book of 123 pages or more. (No cheating!)
Find Page 123.
Find the first 5 sentences.
Post the next 3 sentences.
Tag 5 people.

My wife happened to be walking up to me with a book just as I caught the tag, so the book is Camp’s Unfamiliar Quotations from 2000 B. C. to the Present (which should be a fruitful source for this sort of thing).

(Our topic is “Greed,” btw; the book is arranged thematically.)

“Yuppies’ creed: ‘I want it all and I want it now.'”

—Russell Baker, New York Times, February 6, 1988

“I think the enemy is here before us. . . . I think the enemy is simple selfishness and compulsive greed. . . . I think he stole our earth from us, destroyed our wealth, and ravaged and despoiled our land.”

—Thomas Wolfe, You Can‘t Go Home Again, 1949

Weird meme. 🙂 So, tags:

Sara
Wayne
Ruth
Doug
Bill

Another idea of a good Christian woman

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So there’s a discussion going on elsewhere regarding a conservative Christian stereotype known as the Better Christian Woman, or BCW—the label comes from Erin, who may well have coined it (as a sardonic label, anyway), and I know Hap and my wife have joined in, as have others; Barry contributed a post or two addressing the fact that men in the church deal with these sorts of expectations as well, which seems to have surprised some (female) folks.

I’ll be honest and admit that while I see the effects of this in the lives of people I know and love, it’s all a little alien to me. I grew up in a conservative family and a conservative church, but apparently a somewhat different kind of conservative; after all, one of my grandmothers was a career pastor (specifically, she and Grampa were officers in the Salvation Army), and my mother was an ICU nurse who got her start in the Navy. The women in my family show a distinct tendency toward the helping professions (add in a couple social workers, for instance), but then, so do the men (ditto, plus a couple more ministers, including me). I guess I just grew up with the idea that God calls people on an individual basis, depending on who he made each of us to be and what particular set of gifts he’s given us, rather than a categorical one.

It might be in light of that, and it’s certainly in light of the ongoing discussion, that I was interested to read this piece by the Rev. Dr. Linda Schwab, a chemistry professor turned Methodist pastor, on her career path and choices. Her situation is a little different, but ultimately I think her piece raises and deals with the same basic set of questions: who am I, and who am I supposed to be? One of the things I value about her essay is that she understands where the answer to those questions is to be found: not in human expectations, but in God.

Justice and mercy

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“Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just:
that his justice cannot sleep for ever.”

—Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 289

God is our judge; he is a God of justice. It’s a major biblical theme, a heavy biblical truth, and it’s one that a lot of people don’t like; we tend to prefer the warmer biblical language that God is love, that he’s our good shepherd, and so on, and so a lot of times, we quietly shuffle the “judge” language out the back door into the shed. In some ways, this is ironic, because many of those who most dislike thinking about God as judge are quite convinced they want justice, even folks who really should be asking for mercy (as the Calvinator noted in the comments a while back); I guess the lesson here is that people want “justice” defined as them getting whatever it is they happen to think they deserve. We want justice measured by our own standard, and God uses his standard, not ours.

If we’re going to be faithful to Scripture, though, we just can’t go along with that. All through the Law, the Psalms, and the Prophets, as God declares himself the God of the weak and the powerless, of whom the archetypal examples are the widow, the fatherless, the homeless foreigner, and the stranger; over and over, he condemns the evildoers who “kill the widow and the stranger, [and] murder the orphan.” Again and again, we have the affirmation that God is a God of justice, and that those who exploit the poor and defenseless will be punished. The psalmist may ask, “How long shall the wicked exult?” but he does so in the certainty that the one who disciplines the nations will dig a pit for the wicked in the end. Those who build their mansions on the backs of the needy may prosper for a time, but not forever.

And in the end, though talk of God as a God of justice and judgment rings a harsh note, it’s important for us to remember that the judgment of God comes on those who do evil, on those who reject his ways; and it’s important to remember that it’s rooted in his insistence on making right all that is wrong, and on his concern for the powerless—and that his concern includes us. The highest and greatest expression of this concern came in Christ, in his death and resurrection on our behalf, taking the punishment for our sin and paying the price that we were powerless to pay, winning for us the freedom we were powerless to win.

Which means, I think, that here we see justice and mercy meet; God’s greatest act of mercy was also his greatest act of justice, as here he defeated not just human evildoers but the power behind them, the slavemaster who bound all of us helplessly in sin. In showing us mercy, he was working justice on our behalf.

Sigh of relief

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Rudy Giuliani has dropped out of the presidential race (as has John Edwards on the Democratic side), which removes the only “Republican” contender I simply could not support. Once John McCain came roaring back and re-established himself as a contender, that just sucked all the oxygen out of the room for Rudy; once he’d been one-upped on national defense, he simply didn’t have a compelling pitch. For my part, I’m glad.

Church as consumer option?

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I’ve been troubled by Richard Mouw’s defense of church shopping, published recently in Christianity Today; I have a great deal of respect for Dr. Mouw, but I think he’s really missed the boat with this one, and I’ve been trying to figure out what needs to be said in answer to his article. As such, I was grateful to see Anthony Sacramone’s response today on the First Things website; he makes some points which really need to be made, and I think he makes them well. Check it out.

The Jesus heresy?

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Perhaps the most thought-provoking session I attended last week was one I took as a second choice after something else had filled up, a session with Lester Ruth on the view of God in contemporary worship music. I thought it would be interesting, but I didn’t expect a lot more than that. I was positively surprised. Dr. Ruth (no jokes, please) is a Methodist pastor and worship historian who teaches at Asbury Seminary and the Webber Institute for Worship Studies, and what he had done was to take 15 years’ worth of top-25 lists from CCLI and analyze the songs they included (72 in his sample) for their Trinitarian content. The results, which can now be found (in updated form) in chapter 1 of the book The Message in the Music: Studying Contemporary Praise & Worship, were dispiriting; they revealed not only a near-total absence of the Trinity in the most popular songs of the contemporary church, but very little explicit awareness of either the Father or the Holy Spirit. Jesus got the most attention, but even then, only about half the songs were addressed to him; most were generic. As Dr. Ruth noted, on the whole, the songs he examined could be described as “functionally Unitarian.”

There’s a lot that could be said about his findings, including various aspects I haven’t mentioned (such as the paucity of references to the saving work of God, even with all the songs directed to Christ), but what struck me the most was this question Dr. Ruth posed to us: “Is it possible to worship Jesus too much?” In thinking about it, I’d have to say that it is. There’s a lot of insistence in evangelical circles that our faith is all about Jesus, that Christian piety has a cruciform shape, that our worship has to be Christ-centered, and the like, and in a way, all of that is true; but when it leads us into a sort of Jesus-only Unitarianism, which seems to be the case in a lot of churches, then that ceases to be true. British Methodist scholar Susan White, in raising this question, titled her paper, What Ever Happened to the Father?: The Jesus Heresy in Modern Worship, and if her title is provocative, I think it’s on point.

The reason for this is that if our worship is Christocentric, as it should be, but not fully Trinitarian, as it also needs to be, then it distorts our understanding of Jesus; we cannot be properly Christocentric if we are not also Trinitarian. We need to remember that it isn’t all about Jesus, because Jesus wasn’t all about Jesus; his purpose was to point people to the Father. Similarly, while we are united with Christ, we are united by the Holy Spirit, and so we cannot understand who we are in Christ if we leave the Spirit out. It is in Christ that God most fully revealed himself to us, and God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, and so Jesus is our entry point into the life of the Triune God; our worship must be Christocentric because there’s simply no other place to start. However, while we must start there, we must not stop there; to borrow from Stephen Seamands, we need to offer worship in Jesus Christ, the Son, to the Father, through the Holy Spirit, if we are to worship God truly. If we direct our worship to Jesus alone, our worship is false—even our worship of Jesus.

Morning prayer

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I watch this morning
for the light that the darkness has not overcome.
I watch for the fire that was in the beginning
and that burns still in the brilliance of the rising sun.
I watch for the glow of life that gleams in the growing earth
and glistens in sea and sky.
I watch for your light, O God,
in the eyes of every living creature
and in the ever-living flame of my own soul.
If the grace of seeing were mine this day
I would glimpse you in all that lives.
Grant me the grace of seeing this day.
Grant me the grace of seeing.—J. Philip Newell, Celtic Benediction: Morning and Evening Prayer, 2.

As a pastor, that’s a beautiful note on which to begin the service of the Lord’s Day.