Scripture

Salt and Light in a Political World

/ JRLonas / 1 Comment

About 35 minutes into Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life (2019), we see Austrian dissident Franz Jägerstätter assisting a fresco painter in the small alpine church he serves as sexton. As he works, the painter muses:

I paint the tombs of the prophets. I help people look up from those pews and dream. They look up, and they imagine that if they had lived back in Christ’s time, they wouldn’t have done what the others did. 

They would have murdered those whom they now adore. I paint all this suffering, although I don’t suffer myself; make a living of it. What we do is just create sympathy. We create, we create admirers. We don’t create followers. 

Christ’s life is a demand. We don’t want to be reminded of it, so we don’t have to see what happens to the truth…I paint their comfortable Christ, with a halo over his head. How can I show what I haven’t lived? Someday I might have the courage to venture; I have not yet. Someday I’ll, I’ll paint a true Christ.

Several reviewers have seen the director himself in the Painter, with Franz’s holy suffering as his “true Christ.” Whether or not this is Malick’s intent, the scene is a turning point. From this day forward, Franz has set his face toward obedience to Christ’s hold on his conscience—he cannot, will not, swear loyalty to Hitler.

Jägerstätter resisted not simply the evils perpetrated by the Nazi regime, but the very idea that he could be compelled to swear an oath of complete loyalty to a human being in the place of God. He attacked the foundation (the führerprinzip) on which others based their trust in Hitler to bring prosperity and protect cultural “Christian” values. As a result, he endured the scorn of erstwhile friends and even family long before he faced the wrath of the state. He is today regarded as a martyr.

His life reminds us that action doesn’t always look the same as activism, but quiet, honest faithfulness in deliberate resistance to the spirit of anti-Christ is often the profoundest political act. His story, as told in Gordon Zahn’s In Solitary Witness is said to have inspired resistance to the Vietnam war in Muhammad Ali and Daniel Ellsberg among others.

A Costly Witness
Jägerstätter’s example provides a starkly drawn case, but whatever worldly system you find yourself in will eventually come into conflict with the grace-filled (chesed) system of God’s kingdom. The world, under the sway of Satan, doesn’t have a category for the covenant love of God (cf. Ex. 34:6-7) that He pours out on His people and its outworking in their community ethics (the Mosaic law, especially as exposited in the Sermon on the Mount and New Testament epistles). In this conflict, the way of life of the people of God is designed to contradict and convict the world’s systems so they could be transformed by the witness of the church.

Courtesy Fox Searchlight Pictures

More often the powers that be will demand that the church bow to them. Whether the demand to bow down comes in large ways (like Nebuchadnezzar’s image and furnace), small ones (the proverbial pinch of incense to Caesar), or the trivialities of being misunderstood and questioned by your neighbors and coworkers, it will come. The world forces the issue of faith. You can never isolate enough to avoid the confrontation.

The church’s call is to stand out enough that the confrontation is clear, living together in such a way as to silence the ignorance of evil men (1 Pet 2:15), and if we are called to suffer for the name and way of Jesus, we are to suffer as He did (1 Pet. 2:20-25).

But we do not like to suffer.

The Compromise of Christian nationalism
Not only do we dislike suffering, but we dislike getting anywhere near it. Wealth is attractive because it promises to insulate us from discomfort.

The slide starts with an implicit deal—the promise of peace and prosperity in exchange for silence about the violence against God and man inherent in the system. We grow accustomed to the prosperity, and before long, the church is willing to bless the violence so long as it gets to partake of the benefits. This is the shift at the heart of Christian nationalism.

If we find membership in any political party or allegiance to any government to be a more pressing concern than our adherence to all of Jesus’ teachings, we are well on our way down a dangerous road. When we find ourselves justifying our comforts and our political positions when the Spirit, through conscience and prophets, coaxes us to see and reject our idolatries, digging in our heels, we are in grave danger indeed.

Christian nationalism is a ready temptation for all of us, as it bubbles up from conflating God’s kingdom with our comfort, wealth, and power—even Jesus’ disciples were banking on it, after spending 3 years listening to His teaching and witnessing the clarifying events of his death and resurrection! As he prepares to ascend to the Father, their burning question is “Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?” (Acts 1:6).

The temptation will call out to us from any political direction, from the left and the right, in moderate or extreme positions, from imperialism, monarchy, republicanism, democracy, communism, oligarchy, anarchy, etc. The church of Jesus Christ can (and has, and does, and will) exist and even thrive under each of them. It cannot, however, fully and faithfully *co-exist* with any of them. Absolutizing any political position—even in the name of justice—makes politics an idol, not a tool. And a politically empowered idol becomes a cult.

Politics is Downstream from Desire
Christian nationalism doesn’t come knocking with a tract or appear on the street corner with a poster outlining its explicit aims (well, it did not used to). It is a subtle enemy, attacking from within—more like the favoritism condemned by James or the heresy of the judaizers than the wholesale persecution endured by our brothers and sisters in many countries.

It can sneak in because our politics is downstream from our desires. Political allegiances masquerade as righteousness, but are usually just emblematic of our idols. And our idols are always outworkings of our pride and greed—we follow after that which promises power & wealth. Our economic dreams are inseparable from our political actions.

See, for example, Solomon. He was supposed to be the great king, the promised Son of David who would build God’s house and reign in the promised land with wisdom, justice, and peace under the blessing of God—a picture of the coming, perfect, glorious reign of Jesus Christ over all the earth. 

But Solomon longs for a more tangible “secure” blessing, something that has cash-value among his peers on the thrones of surrounding nations. While building the temple—which was designed to speak God’s glory to the nations (1 Kings 8:43)—he builds his own house to be even more magnificent (1 Kings 7). Against God’s commands (Deut. 17:14-20) he pursues military power (1 Kings 9), gold (1 Kings 10), and the lust of the flesh (1 Kings 11). These pursuits lead him to idolatry, and even enslavement of his fellow Israelites (1 Kings 9:15ff). 

The Lord judges Solomon, in part by having the northern tribes rebel against him and his son Rehoboam. But the lesson continues—the rebellion could have been a righteous confrontation, exposing and addressing injustice. Indeed the separation is accomplished somewhat peacefully, with Rehoboam heeding God’s instruction not to fight through the prophet Shemaiah. Instead of resolution, though, the rebel leader Jeroboam decides he would rather hang on to his newfound power, setting up idols to keep people from going to Jerusalem to worship (1 Kings 12). The people of the Northern Kingdom never look back, doubling down on Jeroboam’s idolatry, and chasing after Ba’al and all manner of wickedness. 

Lusting after wealth & power always leads us to sacrifice faithfulness. It’s a predictable progression. Lust leads to idolatry (spiritual failure) which leads to injustice (ethical failure). Injustice seeks justification, furthering idolatry, but in greater blindness. “Those who make [idols] will be like them” (Ps. 115:8). Idols demand sacrifice, but offer no blessing in return. In the same way, we demand ever-increasing sacrifices to our pride, which eventually comes out in political action to gain what we want from others and keep it.

Our Present Apocalypse
None of this repudiates legitimate petition of powers and authorities to do what they are called to do (to preserve the good and punish evil—Rom 13, etc.), but seeking to wield the worldly power of the sword under the aegis of “the people of God” is always going to go poorly. We need to cultivate a political theology of humility that recognizes that various temptations of Christian nationalism are always knocking at our door, hoping to be let in by our pride and overconfidence.

It will result, in the long run (and sometimes in an astonishingly short one) a church that looks less and less like Jesus, the embodiment of God’s mercy and provision, and more and more like the cutthroat, corrupt systems of the world. 

In America, most churches are pretty deep into this ditch. My prayer—and it is a prayer not, sadly, a hope based in any empirical evidence—is that the current crisis (of Covid-19 and its disastrous economic effects) can catch us in our tracks, and lead our churches back to being communities that demonstrate God’s love in all our social and economic arrangements. I pray it may be a moment to take stock, to repent, and to rebuild in ways that show just how distinct the church is. I pray for a spiritual revival in our country, and with it a revival of justice and mercy in our churches, and how we interact with politics. This time is an apocalypse—unveiling the depth of cultural depravity in ways that I hope will not be allowed to ignore any longer.

The church needs to re-assert its distinctiveness from the world, boldly proclaiming an alternative witness against the status quo. This, I think, is precisely what Jesus speaks of in his statements about salt and light (Matt. 5:13-16). We are to season the world, to preserve God’s image & likeness in how we live among one another. We are to illuminate the world, to reveal injustice & light the path to restoration. 

The salt without savor is a church in which the character of God has been pushed aside in favor of the characteristics of the world. The light under a bushel is a church that is not doing justly and loving mercy and so has nothing to offer to those seeking hope in the midst of oppression. If we think we’re upholding Christian values but see no conflict with worldly political power, we may already be worshipping the false god of Christian nationalism. That’s what Franz Jägerstätter was trying to teach us.

“Dear children, keep yourselves from idols” (1 John 5:21)—or as another John (Prine) sang, “your flag decal won’t get you into heaven anymore.”

Image: The church of St. Valentin in Seis am Schlern, Italy, used in filming A Hidden Life. Courtesy Fox Searchlight Pictures.

Men and Women, Image-Bearing, and Scripture

/ JRLonas / 3 Comments

Second of four pieces reflecting on some of the cultural threads at work in the mistreatment of women, particularly within the church. Read part 1.

Any theological discussion should wrestle with the foundational relevant Scripture before going much further. In the case of how women are regarded in the church, this starts at the very beginning.

There, we see man and woman clearly intertwined, right down to these two words themselves (in the Hebrew). In a world that did not yet know sin, the first man defined the first woman with a poetic exultation: “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman [‘ishshah], because she was taken out of Man [iysh]“ (Gen. 2:23). Whatever the relationship between men and women that emerges through the rest of Scripture, the opening of our story marks us out as inseparable yet distinct parts of a revelation of God’s image, set apart from the rest of the animals, fulfilling and completing His creative work.

The language in this passage is revealing and instructive. All other men forever will be born of women, but this first woman is formed by God from the man. When she is revealed to Adam, his hymn of praise says that she is of him, to be with him as companion and “help [‘ezer, a word most often used in the Old Testament to refer to God Himself]” (vv. 18, 20), not for him as a subordinate laborer (as the animals).

In context, God brings forth woman in the midst of His commissioning of man to cultivate and care for the garden. He purposes to provide completion for the man, and then to show him his need by bringing all the rest of the creatures before him to name and describe (vv. 18-20). Once the woman enters the picture, they are naked and unashamed (v. 25), in respect and awe for this harmonic revelation of the image of God. We are told, as well, that this is the foundation of marriage the rest of us (2:24). In the flow of this text, it is almost as though God creates woman to cultivate and care for man, changing him for the better, drawing out his fullest flourishing without deforming his nature, just as man is called to care for the garden.

If, then, there is any allowance in Scripture for a consumeristic relationship between the genders, it is not in Genesis.

In the New Testament, the go-to text that describes with relative clarity (in contrast to the hermeneutical difficulties of, say, 1 Cor. 11) a subordinate role for women in the church is 1 Timothy 2:11-14, where the Apostle Paul bluntly states that women should “learn quietly with all submissiveness,” and that he does “not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet.” This is a hurdle to women’s ordination to authoritative roles within the church that those of us who hold to biblical inerrancy are reluctant to leap, even in light of reasonable cultural hermeneutics of the peculiar circumstance of Paul’s writing to Timothy (under the shadow of the cult of Ephesian Artemis).

But this passage in no way excuses a demeaning understanding of women (or even an exclusion of women from various and sundry other official roles within the organized church). Are women, being excluded from leadership, Chiesa_Santissimo_Salvatore_(Cosenza)29somehow also excluded from respect, from a voice, from community life? Are male leaders, having attained that station, no longer obliged to listen to anyone outside of the inner ring, anyone “beneath” them? May it never be!

Look at Paul’s own application toward his female co-laborers, women like Phoebe, Prisca, Junia, and Mary, whom he praised and sent public greetings from (such as in Romans 16). These are not insignificant relationships, but friendships and partnerships in mutual submission to the ministry of the Gospel. Look at how Paul (in the same letter as above!) urges Timothy to speak to women as mothers and sisters “in all purity,” even when rebuking them for sin.

This is not even to mention Christ’s admonition to the disciples on how one is to bear power and authority within the kingdom community: “You know that those who are considered rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. But it shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all. For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” (Mark 10:42-45). We’ll reflect further on Jesus’ own relationships to women in a subsequent post.

I’m attempting to speak primarily from Scripture here, for the benefit of my theologically conservative tribe—who perhaps most need to hear this message now—but the weight of church history bears witness as well. As Gracy Olmstead has pointed out, “In American evangelicalism, traditionalism uncoupled from a robust understanding of church history has been bad for women. For all the conservatism of their beliefs…. [they] have done a poor job conserving or appreciating their ecclesiastical past, and have not always passed on the rich tradition of female leadership and protection of the abused that has existed throughout church history.”

No serious hermeneutical framework, whether egalitarian or complementarian, should ever find in Scripture the license or encouragement for men to treat women as inferiors before God. If any manmade system of interpretation lends itself to the defense of those who would dehumanize others, its proponents ought to be willing to continually examine their view against the Bible to plug the holes that let such evils leak in. At God’s throne, worldly distinctions (even those based in created differences) between members of the household of faith are not determinants of anyone’s worth. Quite the opposite—those whom the world would disinherit and demean are made heirs of the promise (Gal. 3:23-29).

Any justification for the culture and behaviors being revealed in this season is found only in the way of the world, not in the text of Scripture. That these patterns are present within the church is a manifestation of sin (both individual and systemic) and should be condemned as such.

This should all be fairly obvious, but some of our sins, particularly those reinforced by our culture, can become so entrenched as to all but blind us to their presence in our hearts and congregations.

Part 1: Tasteless, but Excusable?: Dehumanization, Women, and the Church
Part 3: Cultivation v. Coercion
Part 4: A True and Better Way to Be

Image: Saints Andronicus and Junia, Byzantine Icon

Tasteless, but Excusable?: Dehumanization, Women, and the Church

/ JRLonas / 3 Comments

The first of four pieces reflecting on some of the cultural threads at work in the mistreatment of women, particularly within the church.

“Because I’ve been catcalled and leered at twice just while walking to work this week, #MeToo. The worst part is that the safest option in those moments—on foot, on the street—is passivity as people consume me and treat me as property. And the past year…shows that far too many people—even in the church—think [sexual abuse & harassment] is tasteless, but excusable sin.”

Seeing these words last fall in a series of Tweets from a good friend called my attention to what the #MeToo moment was dredging up—a breadth of pain, fear, filth, violence, and injustice endured by women on a daily basis. Many had been reluctant to speak out, cowed by threats or simply exhausted from responses of disbelief, but the growing groundswell of shared stories has helped them bring all manner of individual and institutional offenses to light. More troubling, such attitudes show up and seem to hold sway in far too many corners of the #ChurchToo.

As multitudes of women have broken the silence of shame, the rest of us (i.e. men) have been given an opportunity to reflect on all the implications of a side of life and culture that far too many of us had previously had the privilege and position to ignore. Their stories have shaken the foundations of companies and institutions that covered up such things and protected the powerful men who perpetrated them.

I want to respond to the courage of my friend and so many others both by digging into the higher-level cultural phenomena they’ve uncovered and in trying to help plot a path for a different future.

Dignity vs. Consumption
Blatant evils like sexual harassment and assault can only become, as my friend said, “Tasteless, but excusable,” when we deem victims as somehow less than human. Her choice of words there is telling: dehumanizing people always leads to their consumption or disposal, replacing inherent dignity and worth with cold value-assessment or “taste”.

As was often the case, novelist and essayist Walker Percy sniffed out this tendency well in advance of the cultural mainstream. In his 1966 novel The Last Gentleman, Percy crafts a revealing exchange between his protagonist, Will Barrett, and Kitty, the suburban Southern girl he thinks he loves, who he thinks might finally help him find a “normal” life. Will is concerned with the on-again-off-again nature of their relationship and can’t seem to figure out how to relate to her as person. He nervously recounts a story of how his grandfather took his father to a brothel on his 16th birthday to avoid having him “worrying about certain things.” Kitty responds to that grotesque thought by trying on different personae to get Will’s attention and affection. She first offers, “I’ll be your whore,” which he ruefully accepts (to her dismay), leading her to say instead, “Very well. I’ll be a lady.”

Later, Will is lost in thoughts of existential angst, musing: “But what am I, he wondered: neither Christian nor pagan nor proper lusty gentleman, for I’ve never really got the straight of this lady-and-whore business. And that is all I want and it does not seem too much to ask: for once and all to get the straight of it.”

Percy’s jarring either/or reveals more than we may be comfortable with about our culture’s understanding female personhood. What Will couldn’t “get the straight of” while lying awake that night, it seems, is that we (in the rich, comfortable, “liberated” echelons of the Western world) still don’t know how to appreciate women as humans qua humans. We perpetually want to classify them in relation to men. In this telling, women exist for men as a sort of “consumer product”—either in marriage and polite society (as “ladies”) or in sin and secrecy (as “whores”), and various shades between the two extremes—rather than as fully formed persons and citizens of God’s kingdom in their own right. Both categories demean, measuring every woman’s worth not by the content of her character, but by the man that chooses her, or doesn’t.

As a result, we don’t know how to understand men as humans either. We can never dehumanize others without also losing a proportional part of our own humanity. This is also a part of Will’s question above. Is there a path to fully formed manhood aside from becoming the “proper, lusty gentleman” his family and culture expected him to be?

Church: Part of the Solution, or Part of the Problem?
That this pattern of dehumanization shows up in the wider culture seems like a given. And if we are struggling, in the midst of an open, liberal culture, to welcome women as full participants in humanity, how much more in other parts of the world. Under Islam? Under Hinduism? In poverty? In slavery?

When it shows up just as vividly in the church, we’re left with two ways to interpret this tendency (and I should emphasize that it is a tendency, a general bent from which many, many men faithfully dissent and diverge). Is it a holdover from a fallen, unconverted world? A brokenness and sorrow from which we should flee, repent, and repair? Or is it, like in so many other religions, just the logical outworking of an understanding of the world shaped by its ancient text (with a simple caveat that the lustful side of the consumer coin should be avoided)?

I’m tipping my hand in the way this question is phrased, for I do believe repentance is called for as the only biblical response—even from those whose ministries and churches have not willfully engaged in these patterns. If #MeToo, #ChurchToo (and #YesAllWomen before that) have shown nothing else, they’ve shown that half the image-bearers in the world have routinely been given a lesser status than the other half. This is a systemic sin, often as invisible to its perpetrators as it is pervasive. Time does not heal sin. Injustice may fade in its visibility, but when the Spirit brings conviction, we have no choice but to see, grieve, repent, and restore, and then call others’ attention to the sin so that they may do likewise.

Lastly, lest we think that the church—the embodied family of Christ on earth—has better things to worry about than what gets hashed out on the Internet, my friend adds: “There is a reason the corporate lament and community of [this moment] happened on social media, even for your sisters in Christ. It’s because, as a general trend, that corporate lament isn’t happening in our churches.” With that in mind, what follows in these next few pieces is, to be sure, a theological and social reflection, but with a firmly pastoral focus. How we think through these things should inform how we weep with those who weep.

Part 2: Men, Women, Image-Bearing and Scripture
Part 3: Cultivation v. Coercion
Part 4: A True and Better Way to Be

Image: Madonna di Campagna, 15th-Century Italian painting

God, the Ruler of All the Earth: Psalm 46

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Many Psalms look inward at our personal righteousness in the face of God’s holiness (like Psalm 1), Others, such as the one we turn to now, focus outwardly on God’s strength and power and His dealings with the nations of the earth.

One of the great themes of the book that emerges very clearly in Psalm 46 is God’s power over and desire for praise from every nation, not just the Israelites.

Looking back from the perspective of the modern West, as inheritors of the work of faithful believers through the centuries to bring the Gospel to far shores, it is easy to see such messages in the words of the psalmists and “connect the dots” to the New Testament reality of God’s love poured out for all people. When we read a passage like Psalm 67:3-4, “Let the peoples praise You, O God; let all the peoples praise You. Let the nations be glad and sing for joy; for You will judge the peoples with uprightness and guide the nations on the earth,” it is for us wrapped in the warm joy of the Church around the world praising God and yearning for the day when we will do so together in His presence.

For the Israelites under the Old Covenant, however, the notion of God’s love for the nations would have sounded like a haunting prophecy, a departure from the status quo, and (for some, at least) a threat to their special status with God. Of course, God’s plan was always for redemption of the whole world through Israel (as we see in the promise to Abram in Genesis 12, Solomon’s dedication of the temple in 1 Kings 8, and many other places), but most of the Israelites were blind to this truth. It was not until after the death and resurrection of Christ that this message broke forth under the influence of the Holy Spirit (as we see in Acts 2) and spread like wildfire.

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