My conservative friends are 100% convinced that he is innocent and she is lying. My liberal friends are 100% convinced that he is guilty and she is telling the truth. Everyone is sure they know exactly what happened or didn’t happen, and everyone’s opinion falls right in line with their political preferences. It’s all so predictable. Whatever we think will bolster our cause we call “truth”. Then we turn around and hate everyone who disagrees with us. This is how our society now operates, and this is what we are now modeling to the next generation. We don’t need to blindly continue down this path. We can choose to change course. Does anyone dare to consider the fact that things might not have happened the way our political preferences tell us they must have happened? Truth is not dictated by political preference. Truth is not determined by starting with how we want the story to end and then working backwards. As a society we have abandoned the pursuit of truth. We’ve exchanged it for a gospel of political expediency. We’ve “exchanged the truth of God for a lie”. History will remember us as the generation that told the world that truth doesn’t matter.
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“Whichever he adopts, your main task will be the same. Let him begin by treating the Patriotism or the Pacifism as a part of his religion. Then let him, under the influence of partisan spirit, come to regard it as the most important part. Then quietly and gradually nurse him on to the stage at which the religion becomes merely part of the ‘Cause,’ in which Christianity is valued chiefly because of the excellent arguments it can produce in favour of the British war effort or of pacifism.” — C.S. Lewis in Screwtape Letters
In Screwtape Letters, the fictitious account of a head demon instructing a lesser demon on how to influence Christians to become ineffective, C.S. Lewis tried to warn us about using the Gospel as a means to an end, rather than as an end in itself. Lewis wrote this for a British audience during World War II, but let’s paraphrase this quote from Lewis in a way that make sense in our present context: “Whichever he adopts, conservatism or liberalism, your main task will be the same. Let him begin by treating conservatism or liberalism as a part of his expression of Christianity. Then let him, under the influence of partisan spirit, come to regard it as the most important part. Then quietly and gradually nurse him on to the stage at which Christianity becomes merely part of the ‘Cause,’ in which Christianity is valued chiefly because of the excellent arguments it can produce in favor of American Conservatism or American Liberalism.” I have seen this happening over the course of my lifetime. A few Christians got the idea that being Christian somehow implied being politically conservative. Gradually, as more and more Christians jumped onto the bandwagon, Evangelical Christianity in America become more and more enmeshed with the political Right. Meanwhile, the more progressive side of Protestantism became more and more enmeshed with the political Left. Roman Catholics became divided, with those of more traditional religious inclination siding with the political conservatives, and those of more progressive religious orientation siding with the political liberals. It has been a gradual seduction, much like that of the proverbial frog that does not jump out of the kettle of water as it gradually heats up. Now we’re reached the boiling point, and the frog refuses to jump out of the kettle. We’ve been deceived. Both sides have been deceived by this diabolical scheme. When Christianity becomes a means to a political end, Christianity has become hijacked by a foreign power. It is no longer consistent with the teachings and lifestyle of Jesus and would not be recognizable to Jesus and to the early Christians. Now Christians on the Left and Christians on the Right are caught in a cultural and political war against each other, and, not always but all too often, the cross of Christ is no longer being preached as the centerpoint of the Christian Gospel. Our expression of Christianity has become the means toward the end of promoting our own political agenda so that we can remake society after our own image. I am not throwing stones at the conservatives or the liberals. Both sides are equally guilty. To the demons being instructed in Lewis’s account, it doesn’t matter whether the Christians are taken in by the Left or by the Right. As long as Christianity becomes a means to an end, the deception is effective. The Christian has been rendered ineffective. The Gospel has lost its credibility, its impact and its audience because it has ceased to be what God has called it to be. What is the long way back? I offer the following suggestions: 1) We need to start by repenting for making our political agendas the main thing and for pushing the cross of Christ to the outskirts. Christianity is about God who became a man, not only to teach us how to live, not only to show us who God is, not only to show us how to relate to God as our Father, but primarily to die on the cross for our sins as a substitutionary atonement so that we might be reconciled to God, to rise from the grave in victory over sin and death, to ascend into heaven where makes intercession for us, and to come back to earth some day to set up His kingdom. It’s not about who gets to control society here and now. It’s not about whether your values or my values become legislated. It’s not about political power. It’s about bending the knee to the crucified and resurrected Christ and bowing before him as Savior and Master. There are political implications to the Gospel— what we believe determines how we think and how we live and how we vote— but the Gospel is primarily about acknowledging the worth of the Lamb that was slain. And I beheld, and I heard the voice of many angels round about the throne and the beasts and the elders: and the number of them was ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of thousands; Saying with a loud voice, Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and blessing. And every creature which is in heaven, and on the earth, and under the earth, and such as are in the sea, and all that are in them, heard I saying, Blessing, and honour, and glory, and power, be unto him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb for ever and ever. (Revelation 5:11-13 KJV) 2) For conservatives: We’ve got to stop assuming that everything about the conservative agenda is right, good, true and beautiful and that everything about the liberal agenda is wrong, bad, false and ugly. A Christian should not be thinking that way, and should not be supporting the kind of politician who promotes that kind of thinking. We need to ask God to help us to evaluate the issues from what the Bible calls the “mind of Christ”, rather than from our conservative perspective. 3) For liberals: We’ve got to stop assuming that everything that the liberal agenda promotes is right, good, true and beautiful and that everything the conservative agenda promotes is wrong, bad, false and ugly. A Christian should not be thinking that way, and should not be supporting the kind of politician who promotes that kind of thinking. We need to ask God to help us to evaluate the issues from the mind of Christ, not from our liberal perspective. 4) We need to get back to the Scriptural teaching that God is interested in opposing the human structures that defy the knowledge of God, not in building them up. When we try to build up what God may be more interested in knocking down, we unwittingly oppose both the ways of God and the work of God and we run the risk of making ourselves into enemies of God Himself. At the risk of oversimplification, despite whatever element of truth they might contain, conservatism, liberalism and all other “isms” are merely human ways of building up what God may very well want to knock down. They are human ideologies that, at their core, have some agenda other than bringing glory to God as his redeemed and eternally grateful children. God isn’t into building “isms”. When we become enmeshed with either conservatism or liberalism we fail to see its errors and weaknesses and we lose our ability to speak prophetically against it. We lose our prophetic voice in society when we become uncritically enmeshed with either side. When we push the cross from the center to the outskirts, we no longer have a Gospel to preach. The Church in America is losing both its audience and its message because it has enmeshed itself uncritically into partisan politics and has played down the cross in the process. If we can’t see that there is something diabolical in the works here, then we’ve become blind to the fact that we are building what God wants to knock down rather than collaborating with God to build what He wants to build. The nations made an uproar, the kingdoms tottered; He raised His voice, the earth melted. The LORD of hosts is with us; The God of Jacob is our stronghold. Selah. Come, behold the works of the LORD, Who has wrought desolations in the earth. He makes wars to cease to the end of the earth; He breaks the bow and cuts the spear in two; He burns the chariots with fire. “Cease striving and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth.” (Psalm 46:6-10 NASB) 5) We need to stop caving into postmodern definitions of truth and power. The postmodernist says that truth is whatever we want it to be, that truth in society becomes defined by whomever happens to be currently in power, and that those in power impose their truth on those who lack power. To the postmodern conservative, truth is whatever promotes the conservative cause, and everything else is a lie. If the conservatives win, they get to impose their truth on everyone else. To the postmodern liberal, truth is whatever promotes the liberal cause, and everything else is a lie. If the liberals win, they get to impose their truth on everyone else, and everything else is a lie. Any Christian who gets caught up in this kind of thinking has been deceived by a worldview that is more postmodern than Christian. To the Christian, truth is reality as God sees it, for God sees things as they really are. Followers of Jesus don’t seek power over others; rather, we become servants of all, as Christ came to serve us and to die for us, leaving us an example as to how we should treat each other. By our lifestyle and by our words, we invite others to follow Jesus and to come to know him in a saving way. We proclaim, we declare, we exemplify, and we invite. We do not impose. We do not seek power over others. We surrender our power. We become servants. When we embrace the Gospel, we throw away the script that the postmodernists would have us adopt. They will protest against the fact that we won’t play according to their rules, but we must resist the lure to play the part they want us to play. If we really want to be Christians whose light shines brightly in the present age, then we need to learn how to not live according to the postmodern script. Otherwise we become one more “ism” trying to jockey for power, just like all the other “isms”. That’s not the Gospel. 6) In short, we’ve got to stop siding with the Enemy. We have an Enemy who wants to destroy the credibility of Christianity for generations to come. With every post and tweet and blog post that we make, we need to ask ourselves “is this making Christianity more credible and more authentic in the eyes of the watching world, or is this eroding the credibility and authenticity of Christian witness to those around us, now and for generations to come?”. Think of the institutional church (both Protestant and Catholic) that refused to stand up to Hitler during World War II, and kept silent as Hitler did his diabolical work of exterminating millions of Jews. Why didn’t they speak up against him? Why didn’t they condemn him? Why the deafening silence? They destroyed the credibility of Christianity throughout Germany and the rest of Europe, and to a certain extent even here in the United States. I don’t want that kind of Christianity. That’s not who I am and that’s not what I believe. That’s not the Jesus I follow. How do people respond in the present day when they see Christians siding with ungodly positions on both the Right and the Left, more concerned with using their religion to advance their own political agendas than to live as Christ taught us to live and to believe as Christ taught us to believe? More often than not, their response is “I don’t want that kind of Christianity”. I don’t blame them. Neither do I. That’s not the Jesus I follow. A few may notice that what people often call Christianity and what Jesus taught are sometimes not the same thing, but most throw out the baby with the bathwater. They have rejected the counterfeit, thinking it is the real thing. We have misrepresented Christ. We have become very bad ambassadors of the Gospel. We need to wake up out of our deception and to jump out of the kettle before we destroy our Christian witness for generations to come. If the world no longer takes us seriously, it’s our own fault. Jesus warned us against this: Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men. Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid. Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven. (Matthew 5:13-16 KJV) |
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