Daddy Political
First, a request. I did not know Pastor John Powell. He died tragically over the weekend. Pastor of Emmanuel Baptist Church in the Houston area, John stopped to help a stranded motorist on Saturday night and was killed by an 18 wheeler. He leaves behind his wife, four children, and a congregation in mourning.
We met briefly at an event in Texas a while back, but only in passing. I wouldn’t even call him an acquaintance. But John left an indelible mark on God’s kingdom and many of my friends in ministry were very close friends of his.
A Go Fund Me has been set up to help his family if you are so inclined.
While I, above, call your attention to the untimely death of Pastor John Powell, the world is focusing on Congressman John Lewis’s passing. We need to note a monumental giant of the twentieth/twenty-first century has also died. J.I. Packer is one of the most influential theologians in the past 100 years. His writing and thinking has shaped much of current Protestanism and even made some incursions into Catholicism with Pope Benedict XVI, then-Cardinal Ratzinger, among others citing Packer’s Knowing God.
His book Knowing God is a must-read and you must, to get the rest of where I’m going, read this quote:
You sum up the whole of New Testament religion if you describe it as the knowledge of God as one’s holy Father. If you want to judge how well a person understands Christianity, find out how much he makes of the thought of being God’s child, and having God as his Father. If this is not the thought that prompts and controls his worship and prayers and his whole outlook on life, it means that he does not understand Christianity very well at all. For everything that Christ taught, everything that makes the New Testament new, and better than the Old, everything that is distinctively Christian as opposed to merely Jewish, is summed up in the knowledge of the Fatherhood of God. ‘Father’ is the Christian name for God. Our understanding of Christianity cannot be better than our grasp of adoption.
Christianity in America and, in particular, Christians in politics too often lose sight of that. We want a Daddy Political to save us. We want a father in politics. Conservatives who pride themselves on rugged individualism go off and find someone to tell them what they think and Progressives, who believe in the collective, want the whole world attached to Uncle Sam’s man boob.
John Calvin noted, “The human mind is, so to speak, a perpetual forge of idols.” What people miss is his further explanation.
The human mind, stuffed as it is with presumptuous rashness, dares to imagine a god suited to its own capacity; as it labours under dullness, nay, is sunk in the grossest ignorance, it substitutes vanity and an empty phantom in the place of God. To these evils another is added. The god whom man has thus conceived inwardly he attempts to embody outwardly. The mind, in this way, conceives the idol, and the hand gives it birth.
The American church and American Christians seem perpetually in pursuit of idol worship. The present fixation on racial reconciliation is becoming one.
Don’t get me wrong. I think Jesus would weep at the lack of integration in Christianity in America. We should pursue orthodoxy and color blindness and to the extend there is monochromatic worship, we should work for technicolor worship, friendship, understanding, and faith.
We should, in fact, be mindful that black Christians and white Christians worship the same Jesus, but put emphasis on different syllables of faith. How much more meaningful is Exodus to those whose ancestors were slaves?
I actually think churches in America should make an actual practice of having multi-racial pastoral voices on staff to reflect the full body of Christ and I would encourage conservative, reformed seminiaries to work on building up a multi-racial pool of talented pastors.
But some Christians are so now wrapped up in the spirit of the age on this issue that they’re preaching reconciliation and not Jesus. Southern Baptists right now are arguing over critical race theory and how it can be used — though I think they are well on their way to rejecting it. Critical race theory is Marxist and there really is no way to read God into something that explicitly rejects God.
I know pastors who have spent so long focused on racial reconciliation that they think it is the key to the gospel and Jesus just serves as the utensil with which race can be spoon-fed into the mouths of believers. They have become so convinced that this is the problem that everything else, the gospel included, becomes about the problem. It is idolatry. Some, in response to the offensiveness of those flat out rejecting the need for racial reconciliation, have swung into heresy to double down on its need. Overcorrection is a thing even in the church and it goes in both directions.
The same holds true in politics. God is our father. No politician can protect you like your father. So many Christians have decided they need an America that supports religious liberty in order to build faith, but history has shown us repeatedly that the more Christians build up the bulwark of the state to protect the faith, the more the faith crumbles under that bulwark.
One cannot commit themselves to a defense of Christianity through fostering a strong state because they are fostering a relationship with sinners who covet power. They need to remember that God is their father, they will get persecution, but God will see them through it.
Christianity always becomes stronger with the pruning of persecution and Christians fixated on political protections always turn to idol worship and get pruned. Go back to Amos in the Old Testament where the priests of the Northern Kingdom turned into king whisperers who felt threatened by Amos preaching real religion. The Northern Kingdom’s high priest actually told Amos to go on back south and make money there, upset Amos might cut in on the good thing they had going. See e.g. Amos 7:10 et seq.
This is not to say Christians should cheer on or champion persecution and it is not to say they should not be engaged, as Americans, in their political process. But it is to say priorities matter and when our priorities get too political, we risk forging idols like Supreme Court majorities and strong Presidents who will save us, as opposed to God himself, who is our Father. When Christians mount political fights to stave off persecution as their big goal, they’re going to get it anyway. After all, Jesus told them they would. It is not avoidable, even if it might be mitigated in some ways.
Along the way, much like those who treat racial reconciliation as an idol and lose those thirsty for the real gospel, political Jesus loses Christians thirsty for the real gospel. The real Jesus needs to be the message and the focus as through Him we are adopted as children of the living God.
You are restrained, as a person of faith, from behaving in ways those not children of God may behave. You may try to justify the adoption of that behavior. You may try to claim your behavior in politics is separate and distinct from your behavior in the church and you may try all sorts of dances, justifications, nuances, and excuses to claim your political views, behaviors, and ideas are irrelevant to whether you believe God is your Father and you are His child.
We tell ourselves those things that let us sleep well at night in the comfort of a god of our own design.
But Christian, you’re a child of the living God. If you aren’t acting like it in every aspect of your life, including your politics, have you really embraced the adoption you claim? “A theology without practice is a theology of demons.” Practice your theology in every aspect of your life.
Wow. There is so much here. I'm going to be thinking about all of your points, all of the nuance, for a long time, writing comments in my head that will never get passed on.
A few things though. Don't people often treat God, as they might their own fathers, as an ATM? Put in this behavior or these many prayers, and out comes the response or result we want. But like a father, God withholds because it's to our benefit. Or because what we're asking for doesn't really matter in the long run.
Something you wrote -- don't know what -- started me thinking about the whole slippery slope concept. Maybe it's responsible for a lot of what's wrong now. For both parties. The idea that you question this particular belief and somehow that sends you down the slope into unbelief in what those parties stand for. Hence cancel culture. Hence people freaking out because we say, "You know, the other side has a point on this." The idea that because George Will won't vote for the President that he's magically become a Democrat. (Ha. But I bet he gained a lot of left-wing followers who will be very upset at some point in the future.)
Ultimately, there is only God to guide us. Because we mess it up.
Erick, There is no political Jesus. There is no God of free trade or a God of nationalism or a God of EU-socialist-democracy. Many political concepts are both independent of God and yet connected to him. For example, it is not casting aside Father-God for Daddy-Political to believe strongly in the need to support certain political policies and to oppose others just as it is not daddy-Modern-Medicine to believe that Father-God is not by his nature anti-Modern-Medicine. Although Father-God insists on his supremacy (Exodus 20:3). he created a world where he coexists with very many other activities. For example, people may choose to focus their time and efforts on sports, their work, their vacations, their food, their cell phone, or their pleasures in ways that are both pro-God and anti-God. Focusing one’s time and efforts on political issues is conceptually no different. The game one chooses to play isn’t as important as the how and why one chooses to play that game.