The pilgrim lens

This follows on from the previous post, here.

What should Christians do when they see things in their society, country or culture taking a turn for the worse?

We should, of course, always pray. And since we are rational creatures, made in God's image, intended to live in a creation without death in it, we will naturally mourn, and desire that it were otherwise. We should seek to be salt and light, to show a better way, and to preserve the blessing of what remains.

What we should not, though, do is turn to fear and anger, as if God had promised that in the last days, no terrible times will come (2 Timothy 3:1ff), and that things will just get progressively better. Rather, we should understand that were that to happen, it would be very bad for the health of the Christian church. What our real situation is, both corporately and individually, is usually masked by prosperity, but revealed through trials. Moreover, earthly trials remind us of what the actual calling of God's people is. Even though the patriarchs were promised that their descendants would have an earthly inheritance, yet the patriarchs themselves understood that this was not their true hope or motivation in their actions. As Hebrews 11:13-16 says:

13 These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off were assured of them, embraced them and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. 14 For those who say such things declare plainly that they seek a homeland. 15 And truly if they had called to mind that country from which they had come out, they would have had opportunity to return. 16 But now they desire a better, that is, a heavenly country. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for He has prepared a city for them. 

Earthly trials are routinely sent by God as a spiritual blessing. He uses them as his means to sanctify his people, to mature them, and to prepare them for their true inheritance, in the presence of Christ and then at his return and the renewal of all things. Seeing things in this world rot, crumble or be torn down by plain stupidity or malice, performs a valuable spiritual function for us. We remember that we were not meant to seek our inheritance here, in this life anyway. Here, we are strangers and pilgrims. As God purifies and sanctifies us, so that we might be the pure bride of Christ, to be presented spotless in him on the last day, everything that is part of that process is ultimately a blessing, with a glorious end. It is towards that end that we should orient our hopes and desires. How foolish, then, how lacking in understanding, if the deep thought of our hearts when we enter into troubles is one of resentment and disappointment, as if God was doing something wrong? How worldly, if we can only judge things at the level of immediate outward appearance, and not understand (James 1) that we are to count it all joy, because God is working in us to lead us to a perfection beyond our imaginings?

Joy and hope

As I look at some Christians on X or elsewhere, it is evident that they have become defined by fear and anger. The world is changing, their countries are changing, and their expectations of how their life would run (reasonably comfortably and predictably) have been up-ended. They are angry and afraid, and they demand urgent national and/or political action to give them back the previous version of reality that they preferred. And, as I say, this has become a major part of their outlook on life and the world. Moreover, they present this response not as being fear and anger, not as a moral/spiritual failing on their behalf, but as an important Christian principle that other people should follow too.

Well, no thank you. What Christ and his apostles taught us is much better - even their their own political or national situation was much worse.

"You mean we should do nothing, as things fall apart!" No, I don't. I mean that whatever we do, we shouldn't be people whose joy and hope is defined by what's going on in the wider scene of this world, in which we are pilgrims and exiles. If your joy and hope aren't based upon your circumstances in this world, then why behave as if they are? To be sure, the policies of the rulers of this world can cause us plenty of real trouble - Christ and his apostles all knew a fair amount about that too (far more than any of us). But what has that got to do with becoming people defined by fear and anger?

Christmas apologetics

If you have questions about any part of the Bible's records about the birth of Jesus, or other incarnation-related issues, then Triablogue has an excellent set of resources.

The New Testament clearly taught slave-owners to work towards the release of their slaves

I was asked by someone to justify the claim that the New Testament teaches slave owners to release their slaves. This was in arguing against the viewpoint that because there is no explicit command to immediately release all slaves, therefore the New Testament is neutral on the question of whether slavery is by its very nature an evil or not. In response, I wrote the below. Accept my apologies for not adding the Bible references, and other things that could be tidied up; I hope and believe it's still of use as it is.

* * * 

I don’t agree that slavery is condoned in the Bible. To regulate is not to condone. Jesus explained to the Pharisees that when God gave regulations concerning divorce, this did not mean that it was compatible with his original intention, but was because of the hardness of men’s hearts (without any regulations, men would carry out de facto divorces that would leave their abandoned wives without any protection or ability to be legitimately received into another home - they would be destitute). Thus, Jesus teaches us to examine God’s original intention.

But to answer your question about teaching believers to dismantle slavery, I believe that this is implicit in Paul’s teaching both about slaves in general, and in the one specific named case that he handles. He does not explicitly command the immediate release of all slaves, in line with the general wisdom of God, that the gospel is intended to bless people, not curse them: if all Christians were simply to put their slaves out into the street immediately, this would be a greater evil than remaining as slaves in many cases. Rather, Paul teaches both masters and slaves that they are equal in the sight of God; if Christians, they are brothers in Christ, who descended to the lowest place for us all and gave up his rights for us, whose example we should follow. A Pharisaical mind will say “but there’s no direct command, so, I don’t have anything I’m required to do!”, but Scriptural law is case law, and we are expected to apply it to specific cases that haven’t been explicitly touched upon using the case law that we do have as a guideline, as per Exodus 21-24, and the Sermon on the Mount. The inevitable, unavoidable tendency of Paul’s teaching is to force slave-owners to face up to the fact that owning a slave, instead of paying a servant, is a violation of God’s law to love one’s neighbour (who is a divine image-bearer, not a possession) as oneself, and to lead one to voluntarily make that change.

Notice in Philemon that Paul states his apostolic authority to command Philemon, and that Philemon has an eternal debt to Paul for receiving the gospel… and yet Paul does not wish to use this authority; he wishes Philemon to release his slave voluntarily. The Pharisaical mind, as I say, refuses to admit the validity of any law that is not spelled out for him in words of one syllable in the imperative mood. The Bible’s approach is different; love is to work through wisdom, with discernment of the circumstances, and actions should generally be free.

It is, of course, implicit in this that retaining a particular slave was not necessarily (the circumstances of the enslavement might differ) in the same category as adultery, which must always be stopped immediately, no mitigating factors. I don’t claim that Paul demanded immediate total manumission (which as I say, would have caused significant harm). If you’re taking another man’s wife then you must always stop, immediately. Having a slave who perhaps lacked skills, opportunity or other resources to exist outside his present condition (usually as a consequence of having been enslaved) instead placed upon the slave-owner a moral responsibility to invest his own resources in order to move, at a wise pace, the slave into the position where he did have the resources to survive as a free person. So, it’s more akin to having fathered an illegitimate child: repentance doesn’t look like saying “this child should not be, so I shall cast it out”, but rather “this child is, because of my actions, so I am now responsible for it, and for mitigating the evil consequences of my actions in this child's life as much as possible”.

Another, perhaps clearer, analogy would be with polygamy. Polygamists were forbidden to be church leaders, because church leaders are required to not only teach the truth that all Christians should live up to, but to be actually be implementing it in their lives visibly as an example for both believers and outsiders. Nevertheless, polygamists in the church were not (as some missionaries have unfortunately taught, causing significant suffering) required to send all wives after the first away, disclaiming all further responsibility. Polygamy is an evil, and Paul’s teaching on marriage inevitably means the end of polygamy for disciples of Christ, but Paul’s method was not to demand immediate revolutionary actions that would cause innocent people to suffer. We find it hard to get our heads around that because of the abundance of our times, and because many of us have multiple potential safety nets if our circumstances change. But in the days of the Bible, things were otherwise.

So, I hold that Paul’s teaching placed a definite responsibility on the church to work definitely and energetically towards the end of slavery. The fact that the church has in fact being doing this since that time, with many notable successes, is not a case of “mission overreach”, but of obedience to God’s revealed will. The fact that in 19th century America professing Christians used their energy to oppose it and claimed that slavery in principle was legitimate and did not need to be dismantled, is a cause of shame. The analogy with polygamy is really a very good one here in my view. Apologists for polygamists really make the same arguments as slavery apologists (they observe its existence, and observe no command for its immediate abolition, and wrongly reason from that to divine approval), but neither can ever deal with the point that Jesus told us to look at God’s original intention for our race and to take that as the standard for all Christians living under the gospel.

Even to the end

“For Christ has not enlisted us on this condition, that we should after a few years ask for a discharge like soldiers who have served their time, but that we should pursue our warfare even to the end.
”

 John Calvin on Hebrews 10:32. 

God of the impossible

Christian ministry is essentially impossible.

We could develop that thought in several directions. But let's go with just one. Once we become meaningfully involved in peoples' lives; once, like Paul (and more importantly, his Master) we learn to serve not just "up front", "in public", but also from "house-to-house", we meet with certain realities. We meet with the impossible situations of peoples' lives, and the mess that sin (whether theirs or someone else's) makes of them. We come up against the labyrinthine maze of false teachings, false ideas and false understandings that have been blended together with fragments of truth in people's minds, and the difficulty of untying those knots. We see how many things are working against them, at so many levels.

How much easier just to re-configure Christian ministry as primarily an attempt to fill sanctuaries with listeners, run an efficient system of small groups, sell books, increase the numbers of podcast listeners,  appear at conferences, etcetera and etcetera. All the messiness of the lives of actual human beings recedes comfortably back into the distance. It remains at arm's length, and does not bother us with its messiness beyond the theoretical level of dispensing with wise ideas for others to look into implementing. Christian ministry then, instead of being impossible, becomes possible. We can do it, we can measure it, we can compare ourselves with others, and we can come out of it feeling pretty good (about ourselves).

It's a lot more comfortable to remain in the zone where we're doing things that we're capable of. But in actual Christian ministry, John 15:5, without the presence of Jesus, we can do nothing. And what is the point of Christian ministry which is not actual Christian ministry? Let us embrace the fact that our work is impossible, and throw ourselves out in faith into where we can only see blessing if the God of the impossible meets us there.

Threats to the church

Seen on the Internet....

The four greatest current threats to the church: 

(1) Wokeness and the continued secularization of culture. 
(2) A far-right, anti-Semitic counter movement that resorts to the flesh not the Scriptures. 
(3) The advance of Islam in the West. 
(4) Pragmatism within the church.

It's not necessary to critique everything mistaken you find on the Internet. :-)

However, the above reflects a mindset. It's not a list that I think actually tells us anything about the greatest threats that the Western (or perhaps just American) church (which is equated with "the church") really faces. It does tell us something about how the author sees the Christian faith, politics, culture - and, I'd guess in a high number of cases where people say things like this, his own inner fear as he sees what he thought was a reasonably comfortable life in "The (so-called) Christian West" slipping away from him.

According to such lists, the church mainly is threatened by the winds of culture and politics. To that, I can only say "I suggest you read the New Testament carefully. Try to understand the mindset of the apostles, and note carefully all the things that they saw as threats to the church, and then rank all those things in terms of stated or implied importance. And then at the end, note where things that resemble your own list of fears ranked, and ask why there's a difference."

Just a moment's thought along these lines will show us that the sort of mind-set that can write a list like the above is far, far, from the mind of God revealed in Scripture. Is the main requirement for shepherding a church in the West today skill in reading and navigating the external political/cultural winds in society? No, whatever importance that does or doesn't have, there are many things that are much higher priorities.

And if the church's health *did* depend upon successfully ranking what could be gleaned from cultural and political analysis in such a fashion, then we'd be doomed, because we're not omniscient. This list is an implied claim to know far, far more than we do. 

Or in short: "four contemporary cultural/political challenges for the Western church" and "the four greatest threats the church faces" are two very different claims. Someone who thinks that they're the same claim is mainly communicating something about his thinking, not about external reality. Ironically, the sort of worldly mindset that can confuse these two claims is itself one of the significant challenges the church, in every age, faces.