Threads from Henry's Web

Category: Politics

  • Scot McKnight on Dominion Theology

    Well, actually he’s summarizing Paul C. McGlasson. I recently wrote about hearing Dutch Sheets speak and mentioned what he had to say about the term “dominionism.”

    There is something that concerns me here, and that is that Rushdoony and those who agree with him are lumped in with folks like C. Peter Wagner, and of course Sheets. There are similarities and there are differences. There are differences in goals, such as the basis of whatever biblical law various leaders would apply. Is this a reapplication of at least the civil portions of the Mosaic law, or is it a gentle application of the Sermon on the Mount? I don’t see either of these as a basis for civil administration in a pluralistic society, yet the two goals are substantially different. Then there are differences in terms of strategy. Is force permitted? Is one simply working through the democratic process, or is one trying to undermine the entire system?

    I happen to believe that the Kingdom of God, insofar as it is manifested on earth, should be manifested through the people of God, what we often call the “upper case Church.” I believe that civil administration should be secular or as religiously neutral as possible. (I’ll have to write sometime about how I combine those two potentially conflicting ideas.) But at the same time I believe that we need to be careful when we lump groups of people with quite different goals and approaches together.

     

  • Real vs. Hypothetical Evil

    In an article on the Huffington Post, Aaron Taylor suggests a variant of the famous saying, All that is needed for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.

    His variant? “Sometimes evil triumphs not when good people do nothing, but when good people fail to distinguish between hypothetical evil and real evil, and end up doing something about the former when they should be doing something about the latter. ”

    I’m not going to go over his post in detail, so you need to read it to follow what I’m about to say.

    The specific example is the Arms Trade Treaty which is under discussion. Taylor sees this as a good, while the claim that there is a threat inherent in that treat to the 2nd Amendment rights of Americans is the hypothetical evil. Thus one puts up the real good of the treaty (even incomplete) against the hypothetical evil of potential erosion of the 2nd Amendment.

    Before I go forward let me note that I would like to see an effective Arms Trade Treaty completed and put into effect. There are some very nasty people around the world getting weapons all too easily. At the same time I would note that in many cases such weapons start out with perfectly legal sales, such as sales by governments to people they support. Sometimes they are weapons we have sold. Just how much good would such a treaty do?

    My point here is that even though I support such a treaty, the good it proposes is also hypothetical. Neither the good that is proposed, nor the evil that is feared have actually occurred. Both are hypothesized. The question, rather, is which of these hypotheses is correct, and what the balance is going to be.

    Contrary to Taylor’s assertion, we can’t simply accept the real good of the treaty and assume that the hypothetical evil is less important. Neither is yet real. So we must ask first whether the treaty is likely to do the good that its sponsors claim. Then we must ask whether the treaty will, in fact, have an impact on the 2nd Amendment rights of Americans, and indeed one might ask whether such impact would be an “evil” or a “good.” Americans might also ask whether such a treaty can be entered into legally, i.e. constitutionally.

    But the question is not which is hypothetical and which is not. The question is which is likely to happen, and which is not, and which effect is truly good, and which evil.

    By calling the good real (by implication) and the evil hypothetical (explicitly), Taylor privileges the position he favors (ratification of the treaty) without doing the hard work of demonstrating that it will, in fact, have the good results he claims.

    This type of argument is all too frequently used in debating bills and treaties. Proponents make the assumption that the bill will accomplish that which its name implies. Very frequently that is not the case. How can one oppose a bill to reduce crime, for example? Well, one can simply note that the crime reduction implied in the bill’s name is hypothetical, and ask whether that hypothesis is likely to be confirmed by reality. If all the bills passed accomplished precisely what their titles claimed, we’d likely live in a utopia. But they don’t and they won’t.

    I’m afraid I don’t see that Taylor has improved upon the traditional statement.

  • Pundits Are Generally Wrong

    I always thought so, but now it’s official. (HT: Allan R. Bevere.)

  • Link: Great 4th of July Story

    As the son of naturalized American citizens, I really appreciated this story from a guest blogger on The Agitator. My own citizenship is derived, as I was a minor when my parents were naturalized, but I distinctly remember going with my parents to the ceremony in Atlanta, GA where they took the oath and became American citizens. I have had to explain the idea of “derived” citizenship a number of times, including to investigators for security clearances who had never heard of it.

    And no, it doesn’t make me a “natural born” citizen, so I could never run for president. Somehow that doesn’t bother me!

  • Jury Nullification in New Hampshire

    Since I will always favor justice over strict adherence to the letter of the law (and I believe the two frequently collide), I’ve always kept an eye on stories about jury nullification. Nullification is a fact of life, though not all that frequently is it done openly and explicitly. There is rather little that a judge can do about it when a jury acquits, even if he thinks they violated his instructions. (Interesting article on this here, from someone who doesn’t think nullification is a good idea.)

    If I correctly understand it (HT: The Agitator), the new law in New Hampshire permits defense attorneys in their argument to mention that the jury a right to judge both the facts and the law as they relate to those facts. To quote the new statute: “… to judge the facts and the application of the law in relation to the facts in controversy” (source).  That’s a fairly roundabout way of saying it, but it does broaden the jury’s scope.

    I personally have mixed emotions about this. Juries can, as noted in the article I linked above, use such a power for good or for ill, much like any other government official. (And yes, I would consider a juror a government official for the duration of his or her service).

    I knew one could get by with nullification, but I didn’t expect to see a law actually supporting it, even in a small way.

    PS: After writing this, I found that New Hampshire is not the first state to have such an instruction.

  • Trusting God less than the Government

    Or I could say, I think we trust the Gospel (God’s plan), less than we trust the government.

    Yesterday I posted something from Dave Black to Energion.net (with permission), and e-mailed several of my friends (and Energion authors) to see if they might have a comment on it. As I’ve been thinking about the post, I decided I had a few words of my own to say about it. That post in turn links to a post titled Evangelicalism == Christian Legislation at Juris Naturalist. Though the original post specifically uses abortion as its key example, I am not posting about abortion here, but rather on the question of Christian involvement in politics. Also, I am not going to talk about evangelical Christianity, but rather about mainline Protestantism, of which I am a part.

    I confess that when I went to read the post the first thing that jumped out at me was this:

    I don’t think morality can or should be legislated.

    It seems fairly obvious to me that morality not only can be legislated, we do it all the time. I’ll continue to argue that point. But then I thought of some of the idioms I’ve studied in the Bible, and how the meanings of the words as such may not convey what the phrase has come to mean. So I think it might be possible that this obviously false statement (read one way) might mean something rather different. In fact, over the last few months, I’ve asked some folks who use this just what they’re trying to say. In this very informal and unscientific survey, nobody intended to say that a law couldn’t prescribe doing something that would qualify as moral, nor that it could not proscribe something immoral. Rather, they meant that the law could not make people more moral. Perhaps some linguist will get a good research paper out of surveying what people are actually thinking when they say this.

    I actually have a problem with that as well, in that I do believe that carrying out moral behavior on a regular basis, even when one is constrained to do so by someone in authority, may contribute to one becoming a moral person. Habits do make mental impressions. I think there is a good deal of this illustrated in the Torah. But that is for another time.

    The key issue here, it seems to me, is the strategy that Christians should use in promoting what we think is right in the broader society. The contrast presented in the Juris Naturalist post is that exercising self-sacrifice would be a better strategy for accomplishing our goals than action in the public square. The illustrations used were paying a woman not to have an abortion (with a related question of just how much that would be worth) as opposed to participating in the March for Life in Washington, D.C. While I personally dislike marches as a means of accomplishing political goals, I will admit that’s a prejudice, and I would also see plenty of drawbacks to the proposal to pay women not to have abortions.

    Let me illustrate with a slightly less heated issue. In my home church (which is mainline protestant rather than evangelical), we have a group that is interested in reforming the juvenile justice system. I have great sympathy with their goals, but I’m interested not in the validity of the goals, but in the strategy here. I suspect that nobody would suggest they can accomplish their goals without political action. The juvenile justice system is, and must be to a large extent, run by the government. If one is to reform it, one must make changes at the political level.

    Such changes come slowly. There is a tendency right now to believe that harsher punishment and more cases of trying juveniles as adults is the best approach. Ignoring the validity of each option, let’s think strategy. The temptation is to become frustrated and angry when the government doesn’t go our way. I’m not going to comment on the state of the evangelical church, but for mainline protestants here in the south there is a great deal of frustration.

    What do we tend to do about it? We tend to throw up our hands and say that in this atmosphere there’s really nothing that can be done. It’s not that we trust government so much, it’s that we tend not to see any other options.

    And that’s where, I believe, we need to start thinking much more about the gospel. There’s a stereotype of those who think the gospel can solve these things, one that suggests that “solving a problem with the gospel” means that we preach to people, get them to accept Jesus as Lord and Savior, and when we have accomplished this they no longer commit crimes that result in them being in the juvenile justice system, they no longer use drugs, and they no longer consider abortion an option. I don’t know how many people might mean something like that, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I do believe in transformation of life through the gospel, but that’s one aspect.

    What we need as well is a gospel based transformation of life at the church and Church level, that is churches who are living the gospel on a daily basis, where Christianity is not just what you do on Sunday morning but drives everything. We’ve come a long ways since the church was acting in unity as described in Acts 2:43-47, and the long ways hasn’t all been in the right direction, to say the least! Coincidentally, my wife is reposting some things I wrote about this on her devotional blog. The first part, Church: Alive or Dead – Part I was posted this morning. The result of such a transformation would be to keep many youth out of the juvenile system in the first place, and while this does not eliminate the need for reform, it does help young people. And it isn’t exclusive either. We can do both.

    We no longer expect a community of faith as they did. In fact, our expectations of members are rather low. We no longer assume that when a member of the church is in trouble the primary source of help, encouragement, and support is the church. Similarly, we don’t see the church as the source of accountability. Being part of one body will involve rebuke as well, but I fear we have lost the skill (and perhaps the discernment) to do that right. But even further, we don’t see the church so much as the people as a matter of buildings, programs, and organizational structures.

    I’m sure someone will point out how many people have said things just like what I say, and that my accusation is unfair. I recall a church where I spoke on prayer. I was told that prayer was the second highest priority of that church. (I didn’t inquire as to what the first priority was.) In view of this, the prayer coordinator was shocked that only about 20 people from a 500 member church showed up for the prayer seminar my wife and I were there to conduct. I simply pointed out that our real priorities are not necessarily indicated by what we say. Looking at the church grounds, I’d have to say that sports was a higher priority at that church. That’s where the time and the money were going.

    Similarly look at your church’s budget. Where does the money go? That will give you a good idea about priorities. Yet it isn’t all about money. Where does our time go? Is it looking inward? Is it taking care of a core group of “important” members? I recall a case in which a church board rejected an outreach project to young people. They said it was not a good outreach project because most of the youth involved were not church members. Besides, of course, learning the English language, that board needed to consider just what their church was there for. We often have nice mission statements, but the question is whether our actual mission is the same as our mission statement. You can tell what the mission of a church is by what it actually does.

    And this is what I mean by trusting God less than we trust the government. We take our issues to the political sphere and when that fails us we often give up or we make token efforts. There are a huge number of Christians in this country, even a huge number of active Christians. If our money was backing up our words we could accomplish great things. We’d have to find ways to get around some of our structures. I consider church buildings the most wasted structures around. Whole sanctuaries getting used just on Sunday morning and perhaps Wednesday night! Gymnasiums used just a couple of times a week!

    Then there are our denominational structures. When I look at downtown Pensacola, I see Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Episcopal churches, along with quite a number of others in close proximity. There are some really good things going in terms of cooperation between these churches. I suspect much more could be accomplished if we dropped some of our concerns with denominational identity and credit. And there are many places were dozens of churches exist close together and the members of one church don’t know what the next church is doing. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone points out to me something happening in the downtown area of Pensacola as the result of this blog post–something I should have known about.

    In fact, there are many small lights around the country. I have been tremendously impressed with things I see in smaller churches. What we need is for those things to spread. My mother’s home church has a program that prepares a personalized bag of supplies, including a quilt and other helpful items for children who are going into foster care. I’ve been telling people about that program and over and over people have said, “What a wonderful idea!” And there are plenty of wonderful ideas that result simply from living the gospel on a day-to-day basis, a plan God had in place quite some time again.

    I think we could carry out major reforms in our country simply through active discipleship. I don’t think that would keep us out of the public square. In fact, I think it would find us there quite a lot, and much more successful. I just think many of us have given up on the gospel as a force in the church. If so, it is no wonder we are doing poorly as a force in the world.

     

  • A New Testament Political Theology

    Dave Black has some very useful comments on political activism, responding to a video by N. T. Wright, which I’ll embed here:

     

    I appreciate this video for several items, but I even more appreciated Dave Black’s comments. I personally am politically active. I always vote. I often advocate for various causes or candidates, and in the past I have even gotten involved in political campaigns, though not recently.

    One of the difficulties I think Christians have is distinguishing one’s own standards from those that should be imposed on others. In my view, the state should not be there to force the public to live according to Christian values or any other separate agenda. I think we always need to distinguish between “I like that” and “there ought to be a law.” It’s not just Christians that have trouble making that distinction.

    But more importantly, in my view, I see our political approaches to problems infecting the church. If we’re law and order people in society we often lose the redemptive idea of Christianity. What is the solution to the drug problem? Is it more drug enforcement, or might it just be more reaching out to those who abuse drugs? It seems to me that as a Christian, my solution to such a problem is contained in the gospel, not in the making of laws. While laws may well be necessary, I shouldn’t let the need for such laws make me despise the violators or forget about the grace of God.

    In any case, Dave’s comments resonated with me today.

    Faith in the Public SquareFor a somewhat different, though not incompatible view on our involvement in politics, I want to quote from the recently released book Faith in the Public Square (Bob Cornwall). Bob is comfortable being called progressive.

    I understand why some of my co-religionists have chosen to stay clear of government entanglements, though I’m not convinced that it’s possible to work for justice or work for the common good without engaging the political system in some way. It is for this reason that I have involved myself in efforts to engage elected officials in conversation and when necessary even pressuring them to do what I believe would be the right thing. Additionally, even as I recognize that political parties are not perfect instruments, I have chosen to support one of the two major parties and its candidates for office during elections. It’s not that I believe God favors one party over the other, but I do believe that one party better fits my own understanding of the common good, an understanding that
    is informed by my faith.

    Even as I align myself with one of America’s two political
    parties and accept the realities of being a citizen of a particular
    nation, I’m also cognizant that I’m called to give allegiance not to the flag or the nation for which it stands, but to God whotranscends national interests. That is, if I faithfully pray the Lord’s Prayer then I must give full and complete allegiance to God and to God’s realm. Whatever I do in the public sphere must be done in the light of that prior commitment.  Remaining faithful to one’s ultimate allegiance, while engaging the public square, is not an easy task. It requires humility and a willingness to recognize that not everyone shares my beliefs or values. My goal in engaging the public square isn’t purely religious; that is, while my goal is not to impose my faith on the populace as a whole, I am committed to being present in the public square, which involves political action. This
    political action is informed by my faith. I may engage it as a private citizen, which allows more partisan engagement, or I may come to the square as part of the faith community, but in this case the engagement should be less partisan or even non-partisan (pp. 4-5).

    I think this is a topic that deserves wider discussion. The consequence of simply letting things ride is that we will follow the path of least resistance, and that path will make the church reflect the culture, in which case, what value remains in the church?

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  • What Disastrous Situation

    … could possibly make Donald Trump a “great” candidate for president? It’s one of the worst comments on our political system that anyone even pretends to take him seriously.

  • This Does NOT Represent Family Values

    In a blog on the American Family Association web site, Bryan Fischer has named Jessica Ahlquist, the High School student in Rhode Island who was plaintiff in a case against a prayer banner in her school, to his “American Association of Religious Bigots.” In doing so he calls her a “little atheist bully” and a “small-minded and vengeful brat.”

    One may, of course, disagree with Jessica Ahlquist. One may think such a banner harms no one. One might even think it’s helpful. But even so, does that justify those words about a teenager who acted in precisely the right manner if she felt her rights were violated? She went to court. She didn’t pull the banner down herself. She didn’t start a riot. She hasn’t been guilty of the kinds of nasty threats that so-called Christians have issued against her. (For a summary of more recent responses to the school board’s decision not to appeal the case, see Dispatches from the Culture Wars – Public Response to Decision Not to Appeal Prayer Case.)

    If one believes what happened in Rhode Island is wrong, one has the recourse of the political system and the courts. That’s the proper forum. I happen to think having a proclamation of one religion in a public school is not a good idea and that Jessica Ahlquist was right to oppose it. But the important thing here is that the disrespect, vengefulness, and brattiness have all come, not from her, but from the other side.

    Bryan Fischer’s column makes elementary school playground taunts look good by comparison. He should be ashamed of himself. The American Family Association should be ashamed of itself. This is not an example of family values.

    (HT: The Agitator)

  • Dutch Sheets and Dominionism

    I have previously written about the term “dominionism,” one which I don’t find very helpful as a label for a political position. So I was very interested to hear Dutch Sheets, one of those called (by some) a dominionist, make reference to the term.

    I was invited as a Christian leader to hear Dutch Sheets speak at Kingsway Church in Pensacola, Florida (I was unable to locate a web page for Kingsway). I’m thankful for the invitation to this session for pastors and leaders. This post isn’t a critique of that talk, but rather deals with just a few moments of his presentation that relate to the term “dominionism” which has been very controversial. I will need to mention some of my own political views in delineating the various positions.

    The bulk of the presentation dealt with the role of the church. Sheets is anxious (as I am) for us to get away from the idea that “church” is a building or a gathering at which we babysit the pew-sitters. That’s an incredible simplification of what he was saying, as he has some very specific points to make about just how we do it, but I think disagreements over details of strategy shouldn’t make us miss the main point.

    He says that the church has elevated just one of the offices (or better, gifts), pastor, over all the others, and thus has gotten unbalanced. By nature, pastors nurture people. But a group that wants to get something done needs leaders who will also get people moving. Pastors may do that to some extent, but we’ve emphasized the care and nurture part.

    He builds the way in which this happens around a broad scope of biblical history, starting with creation and the fall. Humanity is created and given dominion, then loses that dominion at the fall. Christ comes and restores what was lost. He takes the specific meaning of “legislative assembly” for the Greek word “ekklesia,” and uses it as an example of what the church is to do—act with authority. One might debate his extension of that particular meaning of the word to the New Testament, but nonetheless it gives the flavor of what he means by the church taking authority.

    It was in this context that he brought up the term “dominionist.” He indicated that he didn’t like the label, but at the same time, he noted that if it’s defined as noted above—that humanity had dominion, lost it, that Christ came and restored it, and that the church carries on that mission—then in those terms he’s a dominionist.

    I can see this term from a theological point of view. His view places a strong emphasis on the word “dominion.” You’ll hear him use that word much more than your average speaker. And if you make differences of emphasis central, then you could say his view is somewhat different from what is usually preached on this point. How frequently do you hear the word “dominion” in a discussion of the atonement? But as I mentioned earlier, I’m not writing to critique his presentation, but to clarify what he means.

    What that dominionism, as he (reluctantly) accepted the term, means in politics became clear when he discussed specifically what it would mean for the church to be “ekklesia” as he defined it. In politics, he used the example of the young man who is interested in changing education. He said that as Christians we do not use force (he repeated this a number of times). What we want, he said, is for a young man to go out, get a PhD, become the superintendent of schools, and then we would be able to do things about prayer in schools. (Prayer was the specific example he used.)

    Since it is currently quite legal for students to pray in school in the United States, despite some school boards’ overreactions, but not legal for school officials or teachers to lead or prescribe prayer, I’m going to assume that what Sheets wants here is for officially led or prescribed prayer. That would seem to be the one thing a school superintendent could work on regarding prayer in public schools. Of course, one would need to have lawyers educated and on the Supreme Court, legislators at various levels of government (a constitutional amendment might be required), and so forth.

    This was the example Sheets used of the impact of the church acting as a legislative assembly (ekklesia as he defined it) for the world. So there is a particular political strategy that comes out of the church behaving as he is calling on it to do. Understand that the presentation was only about two hours, so he did not have time to flesh it out. I have used the most fleshed out example I heard.

    So how much different is this from the basic idea that Christians should live their values in the public sphere? (I’m avoiding the “seven mountains” terminology, though that did come up.) I would simply note that there are a variety of views on how a Christian acts as part of one of the “kingdoms of this world” while being a citizen of the kingdom of heaven. For some, being part of the kingdom of heaven means no political participation at all. We witness for the kingdom of heaven, but we do not become part of the political structures. At the other extreme would be Christians who believe that we will successively take over the world’s governments until, by that means, the rule of Christ will extend to the entire world. In addition, there would be variations on just what methods are justified in pursuing those goals. Sheets specifically rejected the idea that Christians would take over the whole world; he said God would come in and finish it in a sweep.

    I personally believe that Christians should participate in a secular, pluralistic society as moral and ethical people, but not in a way that would make the society less friendly to those of other beliefs. In fact, because of the freedom I believe God gives us, I think we should make society more friendly. If the Muslims in my community want to build a mosque, I’m there to back them up. At the same time, this means I disagree on the issue of prayer in public schools. My imaginary Christian young man would grow up, get a PhD, and be the person who makes life more comfortable for an atheist student, rather than the one who requires that the atheist student hear a prescribed prayer or do Bible study.

    Sheets emphasized that he does not believe in force. I appreciate that. It distinguishes him from some extremists, and it’s a critical distinction. At the same time, my concern is that, as soon as we as Christians have the power of the state behind us, we are, by nature, employing force. I think Christian history suggests that when we bring the power of the state to bear in religious issues, the results are not good either for the church or the state. Sheets explicitly said “no separation of church and state,” though it’s important to note he said that from the church’s point of view, i.e. the church doesn’t separate itself from the state.

    At this point I see “dominionism” as a possibly useful theological label. I’m still not convinced it’s useful as a political label, and hearing Sheets speak only further convinced me of this. His position on political issues, and on the church’s action in the political sphere, is essentially the dominant position of the Christian right. They wish to get elected and enact laws that favor Christianity in the public sphere. It’s no secret. I don’t see the need for a separate label. In Escambia County Florida, where I live, that’s pretty much the definition of a conservative Republican, with the note that there’s hardly any other kind of Republican around these parts.

    Theologically, there is a greater difference, because Sheets has tied theology and the action of the church much more closely to this specific agenda. But it’s specifically of that usage that he acknowledged the term “dominionist” in the first place. And I want to note that I see his theology as a different emphasis on various elements of existing theology, and not something created out of whole cloth.

    My concern is that the more detailed of a political strategy we pursue, the more opportunities we have for division over things that are not central. That could be further illustrated by how very American both Sheets’ presentation and my response are. How does this relate to various countries in Africa? What about to Christians living in the Muslim world? How does our tying Christianity to American political goals impact the gospel message worldwide?

    I know there are dangers working from memory on hearing someone talk. As a writer and speaker myself, I generally prefer people to work from my written works, and I’d prefer my views to be taken from my books rather than my blog, if there’s a conflict. At the same time, what someone says in a more informal setting may well reflect one’s views more accurately.

    So take this as my impressions. It didn’t really shift my view on the application of the term “dominionism.” It reinforced and clarified my existing position.