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February 24 - March 2, 2019
A Christianity that doesn’t prophetically speak for human dignity is a Christianity that has lost anything distinctive to say.
The church must proclaim in its teaching and embody in its practices love and justice for those the outside world would wish to silence or to kill. And the mission of the church must be to proclaim everlasting life, and to work to honor every life made in the image of God, whether inside or outside the people of God.
Human dignity is about the kingdom of God, and that means that in every place and every culture human dignity is contested.
The demonic elements of the universe wish for us to see ourselves as either more than we are or as less than we are. They wish for us to see ourselves as beasts, animals driven along only by our appetites and our instincts, and thus unaccountable morally to God, or as gods ourselves, those with no ethical boundaries other than those we impose on ourselves, and thus morally unaccountable to God.
In the mystery of Christ, the mud of the earth—the substance from which humanity is formed—is joined to the eternal nature of God himself so that the material world is now connected, without confusion but also without separation, to God himself.
Jesus identified himself with humanity—in all of our weakness and fragility. He did not arrive fully mature, on a white horse in Jerusalem. He took on a human nature at every stage of development—from “embryo” to “fetus” to infant to child to man. He was conceived as an orphan—without initially a human father—and was dependent for his very life on an adopting father who was willing to sacrifice his own life-plan to protect him and to provide for him (Matt. 2:13–15). He lived as a migrant refugee in a foreign land, a land long hostile to his own. He died helplessly convulsing on a cross,
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If the kingdom is ruled by those from every tribe and nation (Rev. 5:9–10), then how can the believing community stand by while some of the cosmos’s future rulers are denied justice because of the pigment of their skin? We ought to be listening to see who the world-system wants to devalue and degrade, most often first with words, so that we can know for whom we should be speaking and standing.
The culture of death seeks to disconnect humanity from nature and body from soul.
Dominion isn’t a Caesar-like rapaciousness, but a Christ-like stewardship. Dominion is in the context biblically of cultivation of land, which takes conservation and care, and the mandate to be “fruitful and multiply.” Dominion is about inheritance, about stewarding with future generations in mind.
The culture of death also reveals itself in the unnatural and unbiblical disconnect of body from soul.
The ethical anarchy around us is the result of a society that thinks it can divide the life of the body from the life of the soul (if, in fact, there is a soul).
We shouldn’t be surprised by any of this. Money and power, abstracted from the kingship of Christ, always lead to violence.
When capital becomes god, it is no longer merely something but someone. The demonic force of rapaciousness so distorts the soul that, when it is threatened, someone is going to be exploited and someone is going to die.
Wendell Berry warned that “the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.”26 And that might be a more literal question than what even he imagined.
the pro-life movement has kept both an internal focus—showing the people of God theologically why the image of God matters—and an external focus. The external focus, unlike other aspects of the culture wars, has remained (with some exceptions and outliers) marked by kindness and civility, often in the face of vitriolic mischaracterization. This was by necessity since the goal was not label good guys and bad guys in order to assemble electoral coalitions. The goal was also to persuade people not to abort their children or euthanize their parents.
our God sees the plight of the fatherless and the blood of the innocent, but he also tells us that because he loves the sojourner and cares for him so should we, “for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt”
Even more than that, a pro-life people ought to be those constantly uncloaking the invisibility behind which the poor are often covered in the systems around us, and asking how they are being exploited, both economically and culturally. We cannot surrender to the social Darwinist idea that the poor are “takers” and “losers,” which is itself simply a republication of the “pro-choice” arguments about the unviable unborn child.
We should also remember that human dignity is not just a matter of rights, but of responsibility.
The most important aspect of our mission, as it relates to human dignity, isn’t our social action or our responsibilities as citizens or as culture-makers. The most important aspect of our mission for human dignity is the gospel itself. When we recognize that human dignity is contested by spiritual warfare, we understand that politics is indeed downstream from culture, and that culture is downstream from conscience, and that conscience is downstream from the kingdom of God.
We warn of justice, but we always, this side of the grave, offer mercy.
Our call to remember human dignity is, before anything else, a call to remember who we are.
But as Walker Percy put it a generation ago to the abortion-rights movement of his day: “According to the opinion polls, it looks as if you might get your way. But you’re not going to have it both ways. You’re going to be told what you’re doing.”27 That’s called bearing witness, and it’s not a matter of politics or power but of gospel and of mission.
The question of religious liberty is, first and foremost, a question of the kingdom of God. That question starts, first of all, with the imagery of kingship itself, imagery that points to God’s approval of order and government.
James Madison was partly right when he said in the Federalist Papers, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” Certainly, without a doctrine of sin there would be no need for the coercive, penal force of the law—no need for prisons or armies or police forces. But this is not to say that there would be, apart from sin, no need for government.
That government is more than merely a necessary evil is also seen in the end goal of the cosmos: the kingdom of Christ. The universe is not hurtling toward anarchy or toward tyranny but toward the servant kingship of a rule in which Jesus refers to his joint-heirs not as his servants but as his friends (John 15:15).
the separation of church and state wasn’t invented by secularist progressives, but by orthodox believers who didn’t want the state empowered to dictate, or to suppress, doctrine and practice. A government in the business of running the church, or claiming the church as a mascot of the state, invariably persecutes and drives out genuine religion.
Church/state separation means that the church does not bear Caesar’s sword in enforcing the gospel, and that Caesar’s sword is not to be wielded against the free consciences of persons made in the image of God.
The state should not be in the tare-pulling business—or even in the tare-inspecting business—but should only work for public order, safety, and well-being.
The Scriptures do teach that the “powers-that-be” have legitimate authority, but this is not an unlimited authority. The apostle Paul bounds in the power of Caesar’s sword to the punishing of “wrongdoers” (Rom. 13:4). The apostle wrote that taxes are to be paid, along with honor and respect, to those to whom such things are due (Rom. 13:7). Such is in continuity with Jesus’ oft-quoted teaching to “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (Mark 12:13–17).
The Beast state oversteps its bounds, sets itself up as a god, and seeks to regulate worship through threat of violence or economic intimidation (Rev. 13:15–17). Every authority, under God, is limited.
The limits on the power of the state demonstrate that there is a moral law behind expressions of human law, so that the voting majority is not always right.
We can render unto Caesar and we can render unto God only if we know the difference between the two.
The distinction between the temporal government and the kingdom of Christ, expressed now in the church, means that not everything that is wrong should be criminalized.
A religion that needs state power to enforce obedience to its beliefs is a religion that has lost confidence in the power of its Deity.
The gospel drives us to an understanding that the ultimate accounting of justice doesn’t rest with the state, or with ourselves, but with the Judgment Seat of the kingdom of God.
Not everything that offends us should offend us, and not everything that offends us is persecution.
This means that religious liberty is as much about children’s Sunday school as it is about the Supreme Court—indeed more so. If we’re going to claim a future for liberty, we must remember why we have it: for the gospel and for the advance of the mission.
In a democratic republic, the people are the ultimate ground of authority (under God). As citizens, we bear responsibility for electing officials, for the laws that are made in our name, for the setting of precedents by our actions. We are not, in questions of religious liberty, simply standing where Jesus stood, before Pilate.
When Christians work for religious liberty, for everyone, we are not simply acting in our own best interests, but for the common good. The conscience and the carrying out of one’s religious duties are of no legal interest to the state because these matters are deep motivations that hit at the very core of our humanity.
The shifting of American culture, toward a view of apostolic Christianity as stranger and more distant from a “normal American life,” will bring with it increasing challenges to religious liberty. The state and the culture will wonder why it matters whether people are mandated to participate in actions they believe would imperil their consciences, when spiritual realities seem so distant and other matters—such as sexual freedom or economic advancement—seem so paramount.
We must not shirk our callings as citizens, but we also must not see our citizenship of the moment as the final word. We are Americans best when we are not Americans first.
The family is more than a “haven in a heartless world,” but is an embedded pattern of icons of Christ Jesus, his church, and the gospel of his kingdom.
In Christ, God achieves unity in one new man, for a humanity fractured by the Fall since Babel (Eph. 2:1–6). One key aspect of this unveiled mystery is that the family structure is not an arbitrary expression of the will of God, but is an icon of God’s purpose of the universe in Christ.
Doesn’t the apostle Paul teach us that there is neither “male nor female” in Christ (Gal. 3:28)? Certainly in terms of the issue addressed there—that of inheritance—there is no distinction. Men and women alike—not just firstborn sons—share in Jesus’ identity, and thus, in his inheritance of the universe. The same was true from the beginning, when both men and women, were given the image-bearing rule over the rest of creation (Gen. 1:27).
Marriage is not about domineering or dominance, but about cooperation through complementarity. When Scripture speaks of “headship,” the issue is not privilege but the exact reverse.
The husband then pictures Christ by crucifying his own privileges and plans and pouring out his life for his family (Eph. 5:26; Ezek. 16:9). The “headship” here is self-sacrificial and other-directed.
The submission is that of the church, which is spoken of in the gospel as joint-heirs with Christ himself.
That’s why trusting obedience to parents, and faithful rearing of children, is tied to inheritance of the land of promise (Eph. 6:1–4). And this is why those who will not care for their own households are spoken of in Scripture as “worse than an unbeliever” and as those who have “denied the faith” (1 Tim. 5:8). The household is not just a “relationship,” but an economy, an economy where we learn something of what it means to be the children of God.
Throughout the canon of Scripture, there’s a close tie between family breakdown and spiritual breakdown. That’s why idolatry and immorality are linked repeatedly in the Old Testament. The mystery of the Christ/church pattern itself was revealed, it should be remembered, to a congregation in the shadow of a fertility goddess (Acts
A Christian view of reality means that the body is a temple, set apart to be a dwelling place for the Holy Spirit. Sexual immorality, then, is not just bad for us (although it is); it’s also an act of desecrating a holy place.
