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February 24 - March 2, 2019
American culture is shifting, it seems, into a different era, an era in which religion is not necessarily seen as a social good. Christianity in its historic, apostolic form is increasingly seen as socially awkward at best, as subversive at worst. This is especially true when it comes to what, at the moment, is perhaps the most offensive aspect of such Christianity: our sexual ethic.
The Christian message isn’t burdened down by the miraculous. It’s inextricably linked to it.
Jesus came to do something else; he came to wreck our lives, so that he could join us to his. We cannot build Christian churches on a sub-Christian gospel. People who don’t want Christianity don’t want almost-Christianity.
The problem with American Christianity is that we often assumed there were more of “us” than there were of “them.” And we were sometimes confused about who we meant when we said “us.”
The problem was that, from the very beginning, Christian values were always more popular in American culture than the Christian gospel.
God was always welcome in American culture. He was, after all, the Deity whose job it was to bless America. The God who must be approached through the mediation of the blood of Christ, however, was much more difficult to set to patriotic music or to “Amen” in a prayer at the Rotary Club.
The closeness of American culture with the church caused many sectors of the American church to read the Bible as though the Bible were pointing us to America itself.
The church has an opportunity now to reclaim our witness, as those who confess that we are “strangers and exiles on earth” (Heb. 11:13). That strangeness starts in what is the most important thing that differentiates us from the rest of the world: the gospel.
A Christianity that is without friction in the culture is a Christianity that dies. Such religion absorbs the ambient culture until it is indistinguishable from it, until, eventually, a culture asks what the point is of the whole thing.
Our call is to an engaged alienation, a Christianity that preserves the distinctiveness of our gospel while not retreating from our callings as neighbors, and friends, and citizens.
We must put priority where Jesus put it, on the kingdom of God. But while we are a Kingdom First people, we are not a Kingdom Only people. Jesus told us to seek both the kingdom of God “and his righteousness” (Matt. 6:33).
We witness to a gospel that seeks not only to reconcile people to one another but to God, by doing away with the obstacle to such communion: our sin and our guilt.
The church now has the opportunity to bear witness in a culture that often does not even pretend to share our “values.” That is not a tragedy since we were never given a mission to promote “values” in the first place, but to speak instead of sin and of righteousness and judgment, of Christ and his kingdom.
Our end goal is not a Christian America, either of the made-up past or the hoped-for future. Our end goal is the kingdom of Christ, made up of every tribe, tongue, nation, and language.
We are, in Christ, the heirs of this kingdom. The worst thing that can happen to us is crucifixion under the curse of God, and we’ve already been there, in Christ. The best thing that can happen to us is freedom from death and life at the right hand of God, and that’s already happened to us too, in Christ.
Political scientist Alan Wolfe points out that the heated and outraged rhetoric of evangelicals in the political and media spheres is often directly related to the ineffectuality of Christian distinctiveness in our living rooms and pews. Of conservative Christians, Wolfe writes: “Their inability to use their political power to lower the abortion and divorce rates, instill a sense of obedience and respect for authority among teenagers, and urge courts and legislatures to give special recognition to Christianity’s power role in American religious life creates among them a perpetual outrage
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the center of evangelical Christianity today is, theologically speaking, well to the right of the old Religious Right.
As American culture secularizes, the most basic Christian tenets seem ever more detached from mainstream American culture. There is, for those who came and will come of age in recent years, no social utility in embracing them. Those who identify with Christianity, and who gather with the people of God, have already decided to walk out of step with the culture.
If Christianity is a means to American values, America can get by without it, because America is learning to value other things.
A church that assumes the gospel is a church that soon loses the gospel. The church now must articulate, at every phase, the reason for our existence, because it is no longer an obvious part of the cultural ecosystem.
But if we see the cosmic contours of the gospel, we must not swing into a kind of libertarian spirituality that reduces the gospel simply to matters of personal salvation and personal morality. First of all, the culture increasingly finds personal salvation and personal morality to be themselves politically problematic.
More importantly, an attempt at wholesale withdrawal might exempt us from some of the hucksterism and moralism of some figures in our parents’ and grandparents’ generations, but it will take us back to the opposite errors of some in our great-grandparents’ generation, back to divorcing the gospel from the kingdom, the love of God from the love of neighbor.
If we are not a “moral majority” in this country, then what are we? I would argue that we should see ourselves as a prophetic minority.
In fact, the call to a gospel-focused engagement is a call to a more vigorous presence in public life, because it seeks to ground such witness where it ought to be—in the larger mission of the church.
The catacombs represent simplicity and earthiness; the cathedrals transcendence and wonder. We need them both.
But the catacombs and the cathedrals taken together remind us of two things we need to know: God’s sovereignty in sending down the faith, and the frailty of humanity as stewards of that faith.
As a Baptist committed to church/state separation, my skin crawls at the mention of Constantine. His vision of a Christian empire was, in my view, a failed experiment that led to persecution and to all sorts of nominal Christianity, which is the antithesis of my believers’ church conviction. And yet, God used Constantine to end a sometimes bloody persecution and to, among other things, call together the church to put down a deadly heresy or two. In the providence of God, the Trinitarian theism and the orthodox Christology with which I critique the idea of Christian empire came down to me due
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If we see ourselves as only a minority, we will be tempted to isolation. If we see ourselves only as a kingdom, we will be tempted toward triumphalism. We are, instead, a church. We are a minority with a message and a mission.
That’s why Jeremiah’s prophetic call is described by God this way: “Behold, I have put my words in your mouth. See, I have set you this day over nations and over kingdoms to pluck up and to break down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant” (Jer. 1:9–10). In no prophet’s ministry, in either Testament, is the prophetic calling merely one of pulling down, or of “discerning” error. The call to repentance is itself a word of hope because the voice crying in the wilderness is preparing the way for the revealing of the glory of the Lord (Isa. 40:1–5). And the glory came to have a name:
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How often have I tried to correct some behavior, only to have my own instruction backfire on me? But the more I thought of it, the more I identified with the son too. How often do I rage rather than lament?
God’s anger is not a means of catharsis, and it certainly isn’t the theatrical display of an out-of-control temper. That’s why the Bible warns us that “the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God” (James 1:20).
more often than not, prophetic is simply another word for a bureaucratic action that is unpopular with the people in the pews who pay the bills for such advocacy. For some, on the Left and on the Right, prophetic is just another way to say “consistent with every aspect of my political agenda, whatever it is.”
The prophetic office is, after all, different from the kingly office. We do not rule in the present era as kings. We have been given no such authority as the church. We have, however, been given an assignment to bear witness. The prophets bore witness to the kings and rulers and nations, pointing to what their consciences already know, if only at the subliminal level. But the judgment was left to God.
To say that our witness is to be prophetic is also to say that it is limited.
King pointed out “an appalling condition,” the fact that Americans were, in large numbers, still exiles in their own land. With such injustice reigning, there was no room for the “tranquilizing drug of gradualism.”18
Whatever King’s personal doctrinal commitments were or weren’t, he didn’t preach Fosdick or Tillich or Niebuhr in these moments. He confronted the consciences of his hearers with the word of One with authority, and not with some of the scribes.19
King dismantled gradualism not just with arguments but by causing his hearers to travel, with him, beyond the limits of their lowered expectations.
Jesus, as with the prophets before him and the apostles after him, consistently called out sin, and not merely in generic, abstract terms, but by uprooting all the ways sinners creatively find to consider our sins acceptable and justified.
I wonder how much weightier our witness would be if we remembered to thunder God’s justice, while always following with God’s welcome, through the vision of a God who in the crucified Christ is both just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus (Rom. 3:26).
More than simply reading the signs of the times, we must be able to see ourselves through multiple lenses. We are a minority in earthly terms, but we are not merely an earthly people. We are part of a great cloud of witnesses, a number that “no man can number.” They are the resurrected majority.
Our frightened ancestor could only see the overwhelming horde against him. But the old prophet Elisha prayed that he would see beyond what is visible to what is real. “And behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha” (2 Kings 6:17). That can only be seen by prophetic authority. And it can only be seen by a minority humbled to the point that we are blind enough to ask to see.
The priority of the gospel doesn’t mean that we shrug off injustice or unrighteousness, but it means we fight a different way. But behind all of that, and above all of that, we do what prophets are always called to do: we bear witness. That requires a different vision of who we are, and where we fit, in this time between the times, between Eden and Armageddon. That vision requires us to start where Jesus does—with the kingdom of God.
The first step to a renewed vision of our mission is to see the kingdom of God, in its future glory and in its present reality. In the kingdom, we see how the gospel connects to culture and to mission. We start to be patterned toward what we should long for, what we should lament, and what justice looks like. And, perhaps most importantly, in the kingdom of God, we see who we are and where we are headed. That changes both the content and the tone of our witness.
In his hometown synagogue, Jesus was handed the scroll of the prophet Isaiah. He read the words there: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor,” he read. “He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” (Luke 4:18–19).
The kingdom of God is a declaration of war.
Jesus began with the end, with the place where God wanted to take his people, and with them the universe he had made.
In the ancient command, there was always the presupposition that life would be growing and expanding, a life filled with family and agriculture and statecraft and artisanship. God’s purpose is not to condemn the world that he made, but to save it (John 3:17). And, in that saving, God is restoring the harmony between humanity and himself, between humanity and nature.
(Isa. 11:1–9). The people of God would be triumphant over all their foes, including that last enemy, death itself (Isa. 25:6–12; Ezek. 36:24–38; Jer. 31:31–36). Jesus’ kingdom preaching continued this expectation. When Jesus spoke of the kingdom of God, he told his disciples, not just that they would go to heaven, but they would share with him in the ruling authority granted to him by his Father. They would “sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel” (Luke 22:30). When the mother of James and John asked Jesus to grant that her sons would sit one on his right and one on his left, her
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We will ignore that Paul’s point is not that heaven is away from earth, but that Jesus is in heaven. Of heaven, Paul wrote: “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” (Phil.
Worldliness means that we acquiesce to the priorities and the agenda of the systems now governing the world, in many cases because we don’t even question them.
