Some of the below piece is written in a "tongue in cheek" style. I mention this since I once had a friend and colleague who I didn't realise for some time was taking my British manner of expression entirely literally. It's also possible that he had out-manoeuvred me with his own apparently unvarying straight-down-the-line acceptance of whatever I said...
It seems that a good number of pastors find it important at this time to provide us with their theological analysis of what God is now doing, in the election of Donald Trump to be US president for the second time, and how Christians should respond.
In general the will to carry on comes under severe threat before completing the second paragraph, though reasons for this vary.
One principle reason is that whilst still being a youth (stop sniggering at the back, Rehoboam was called a youth in his 40s) I've now been alive sufficiently long to see the vast majority of such analyses falsified by how events turned out.... and to note that such falsifications rarely result in retractions, resignations from the self-appointed prophetic pulpit, changes of procedure in future, or the like.
I and many of my fellow non-dispensationalists and non-historicists raise a chuckle at the easy with which advocates of those theologies manage to move smoothly from "the USSR is a key part of the book of Revelation" to "the USSR doesn't appear in the book at all", and from "the EU gaining a 12th state is a significant event in the prophetic timeline of Scripture" to "actually it's not in there anywhere", etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. But unless I overlooked all the volumes of retractions and humble explanations of why one's theological antenna were so badly wrong being published somewhere, those more in my theological camp aren't at all immune from much of the same thing.
I can't help noticing too in the formulations of these theories, the habit of simply ignoring or treating as non-existent, any contrary evidence to the thesis. When I studied with a Bible college (which I've already clarified was so recently that I'm surprised I've made it out of the car park yet), I learned that if you want to make a convincing case, then you need to meet the contrary case's strongest presentation, head-on. Ignoring it entirely is the fast route to being completely unconvincing. This is unless you're confused about the difference between building a personality cult rather than a Christian church based upon the message God told pastors and preachers to faithfully transmit and neither add to nor subtract from.
I'm more interested in why it is that the subject seems so interesting, over and above many other subjects, that it requires pastors to give it so much sustained attention. "And make sure you give yourself to copious amounts of low-grade armchair punditry, especially concerning the latest shifts and moves in the realm of earthly power" wasn't one of Paul's instructions to Timothy. Paul was remarkably (and thus perhaps we could mark it?) uninterested in the political back-and-forth within the halls of Roman movers and shakers.
A good number of online American brethren appear to think that a pretty good chunk of what Paul *did* have to say about authorities is now obsolete because of the unique attributes of the American constitution and history, even if they would probably blush to say it quite so bluntly. But if this is so, it's very unfortunate: it appears that said constitution must be quite a curse, to have un-relativised the powers of this present age and brought them back, and so drastically reduced the effects of the dawning of the new age. Christ's death and resurrection had previously succeeded in cutting the cosmic importance of Caesar, the President, or whoever your country's particular Big-Cheese-Du-Jour was down to a much smaller size. In the New Testament, Caesar wasn't so much defeated in a head-on collision as completely out-moded and rendered to a significant degree irrelevant (even when he cuts apostles' heads off, since they died expecting to be sent immediately to the presence of the risen Christ and to shortly return with him in glory). Maybe consequently American Christians' major campaign ought to be abolish the constitution so that the realm of struggle for political domination using the forms and practices of the old order can be returned to its New Testament place? To get rid of said constitution since it appears to have raised the old, out-moded powers out of their graves and given them new life?
By all means, make use of your rights to represent the truth within the political realm; we'll all be affected, a lot, by what they get up to. But if you think that was what I was taking aim at, please go back to the first paragraph and I'll wait for you here.
I speak, as I say, partly tongue-in-cheek. A proper essay on the topic would have more things to say, brought out less elliptically. But I hope I have given you something to think about. It's not that politics is unimportant or uninteresting. It's not that there aren't things that do need to be said about it. But it is that, when a pastor of a Christian regularly treats it as very important and very interesting and an important part of his public output, it's concerning. It makes you wonder. We must all have our specialities to contribute to the overall health of the body. But those who feel themselves called to partake in armchair punditry about politics are with us in numbers that far outweigh either any apparent need or the brilliance of the track records they build up. I'd like to suggest we all make a close study of what really excited the apostle Paul, and get back to majoring on that. When you really see Him whom Paul preached, and grasp what he's done, it's not just in another league. It's a completely different game. Men lie, steal and kill to get their hands on political power, because they are completely ignorant of the game having changed, and that they've been left giving away their souls for the wrong one. Let's not be like them.
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