Perfectly Pro-life?
My post and all comments submitted so far have been moved to The Black Dwarf in order to set them in the context of the ongoing discussion. Click here to view the entire conversation.
Politics
When your brother sins, or acts like a jerk…
I’ve been encouraged by a couple of folks to write on some topics. One wants me to talk about witnessing to Jewish friends, and another has encouraged me to say something really noisy and radical — to stir things up a bit, so to speak. So here’s my effort to satisfy both requests.
Jewish folks will often respond to witnessing attempts by saying that Christians have persecuted their people practically forever, and asking why they would want to join the ranks of their oppressors. It’s a valid question, and shouldn’t be blown off. Sometimes the conversation will go something like this:
Jew: Christians killed six million of us in the Holocaust [Jewish folks often don't distinguish between Christian and non-Christian Gentiles].
Christian: Those were Nazis, not Christians. Real Christians wouldn’t do something like that.
Jew: Oh yeah? What about the Catholic kids in my neighborhood who used to beat me up, calling me “Christ Killer”?
Christian: They were ignorant kids — you can’t generalize to all Christians based on the behavior of kids!
Jew: And their parents egged them on!
Christian: OK, so their parents were ignorant idiots too.
Jew: And what about the Inquisition? When we wouldn’t convert, we were murdered in the name of Christ. When we tried to escape, we were chased and persecuted everywhere we went, even to the New World!
Christian: But they were Catholics! They weren’t even necessarily Christians!
Jew: Luther wasn’t Catholic. He hated us too. In fact, the Nazis used his anti-semitic comments to justify what they did.
…and the conversation just keeps on deteriorating.
Here’s the thing, and this applies to pretty much any witnessing experience: Our brothers and sisters sin and act like jerks. Sometimes it’s just the ordinary folks who get caught while doing wrong — your neighbors or coworkers, for example. And sometimes it’s the big names, like major church or political leaders. Regardless, these sinners are still our brothers and sisters and we have to relate to them as such. In the context of witnessing to those whom our brothers and sisters have offended, we need to admit their sin and own them as family members — otherwise we end up constantly setting the bar higher and higher as to who is really a Christian. And the reality is this: How do you, or I, or anyone other than God know who is or isn’t a believer?
I could easily list a number of fairly well known folks whose historical or recent actions have made Christians look pretty bad, but what the heck — let’s go for the big names. (more…)
The political Christian
I’ve been thinking for quite some time about how we as Christians should relate to political issues. One thing that I’d like to see discussed has to do with the diversity of our politics: If we’re all starting from the same Bible, why do we have such different political views? It seems to me that we often let our background rather than the scriptures govern our views about such matters. With few exceptions, we seem to be as likely to seek scriptural backing for our political views as we are to allow those views to be formed by scripture. Liberals stay liberal, and conservatives stay conservative.
Recently, I’ve been considering some verses in Jeremiah 29, a passage familiar to most of us, I would think:
Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.
Jeremiah’s words to the exiles of Jerusalem apply to us as well: we are strangers and sojourners in this land, with our true citizenship in God’s heavenly Kingdom. Nevertheless, we are to live our lives as usual and do the normal things that people do: live, marry, have children, and participate in the life of the land. But God gives us a set of additional responsibilities: “seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.” I did a bit of checking, and found that the word translated as “welfare” is the Hebrew word “shalom”, usually translated as “peace”. Thus, our engagement in the political process has a goal: the shalom of the town, state, and nation in which we find ourselves. And while this doesn’t necessarily resolve the conservative/liberal/democrat/republican baggage that we bring with us when we come to the Lord, it at least tells us what ought to be seeking. It seems to me that we should at least have a common definition of the welfare or shalom that we seek on behalf of where we live, even though the means through which we seek it may differ according to our respective politics.