politics – Page 2

On Peace

November 5, 2018 by Dan Olinger 1 Comment

Been thinking a lot about peace lately.

I suppose you can guess why.

In the runup to tomorrow’s midterm elections—the most important election of our lifetime!—there’s not much evidence of peace. Both sides are scared of the consequences of losing the election, and they want you to be scared too—provided, of course, you’ll vote for their side. When all your friends have an interest in making you afraid, peace can be a little hard to come by.

But we all want it—or say we do.

The Jews greet each other with the simple word peace—“shalom.” So do the Arabic-speaking peoples—“salaam alaikum.” And the latter greeting makes explicit what is only implicit in the Hebrew custom—why they say the word at all.

It’s a wish. The greeter is saying he wants you to be at peace, and that his intentions toward you are peaceful: “peace to you.” And if you are familiar with the culture, you respond reflexively: “wa alaikum salaam” (“and to you, peace”). I hear that greeting, and offer it, frequently in both West and East Africa, where there’s considerable Muslim and thus Arabic influence.

Peace. We all want it.

During times of war, our desires are pretty simple and straightforward—we just want the fighting and killing to stop. We want to go home. We want to be with our families. We want to not be afraid all the time. We want a peace treaty. The Old Testament often uses the word shalom this way.

But once the fighting has stopped, we find that that’s not all we wanted. We want peace at home, too. We want the neighborhood to be safe. We want our kids to be able to play outside until the street lights come on. We want to have block parties. We want to jog along the streets and wave at our neighbors. We want the mailman not to get bitten by the neighbor’s junkyard dog.

And the circle of concern gets narrower. We want peace inside the house as well as out in the neighborhood. We want to love and enjoy the company of our spouse. We want our children to love and respect us, and love to be at home with us, and make us proud. We want quiet nights by the fireplace with hot chocolate and popcorn. We want to sing silly songs in the car on the way to Wally World. We want family.

And most of all, we want peace inside ourselves. We want to be free from worry, and hate, and fear. We want to feel like a walk in the woods, a campfire, and a night in the forest all the time.

We want peace.

The direction of our travel here has been from the outside in. We achieve peace in wartime, then in the neighborhood, then at home, and finally within ourselves.

Many of us think that’s how peace comes to us.

But it doesn’t.

It travels from the inside out.

It has to start with peace in your soul, in your spirit.

Why?

Because if your heart isn’t fundamentally at peace, you’ll bring strife and discord to your home. And your home will bring strife to your neighbors. And a country at war with itself will destabilize its national neighbors—and in this global neighborhood, all the rest of the world as well.

What causes quarrels and fights among you? Is it not that your passions are at war within you? (James 4.1).

The biblical word shalom speaks of a lot of kinds of peace—of absence of war (1K 4.25) or, less formally, of strife (Gen 26.29); of healthy, happy, harmonious relationships; of prosperity; of completeness or fullness; of fulfillment.

Of being in the place you were meant to be, one that matches you perfectly.

How does that happen?

In the Bible, it comes from being righteous (when you behave yourself and live in a way society views as orderly, your life tends to be a lot less complicated, doesn’t it? [Isa 32.17]); it comes from being in God’s presence and especially from being in a relationship with him (Gen 15.15; Ps 85.8; Isa 54.10). In short, it comes from God:

The Lord bless you and keep you;the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you;
the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.

And, importantly, shalom doesn’t come from our circumstances; it’s independent of them (Isa 54.10). It’s not going to come from winning the election—I suspect that no matter who wins, the rage is only going to deepen. But when the world is shaking—whether the whole world, or just your world—the peace is still there, because God is still there.

Do you have peace?

If you’re a believer, you should. And in a day when the world is teetering, that’s what you should be communicating to those who have no peace.

You’ll stick out like a sore thumb.

A really good and attractive sore thumb.

Salaam alaikum, my friend.

Photo by Sunyu on Unsplash

On Fighting with Better Weapons

October 22, 2018 by Dan Olinger 1 Comment

When I was a boy, my parents belonged to a politically conservative organization that included both Christians and non-Christians. I remember hearing members of this organization ridicule Christians who thought we should emphasize preaching the gospel. “You just preach the gospel,” they would say, “and when the Communists take over, you won’t be allowed to preach the gospel anymore, and then what will you do? First we need to prevent that from happening, and then you can preach the gospel all you want!”

I was reminded of that when a friend of mine posted a similar thought on social media the other day—just replace “Communists” with “Democrats.” (And yes, I have friends who would say that’s no change at all.)

That got me to thinking. And it brought to mind the Pauline observation that “though we walk in the flesh, we do not war after the flesh; for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but mighty through God to the pulling down of fortresses” (2Cor 10.3-4).

Like every biblical passage, that one has a specific historical context, to which Paul is specifically applying it; but no one would argue that the principle applies to only one historical situation, the participants in which are all long dead. The principle is timeless.

God’s people, Paul says, don’t fight like the world; they use a different, more powerful set of weapons.

What are the world’s weapons? A few come immediately to mind.

Political power. History well bears out that when the church has held political power, things didn’t go well—for the church or for anybody else.
Populism. Get a big enough crowd on your side, and you’re bound to win. But the church has never been a majority, has it? Nor will that ever change, apparently (Mt 7.13-14).
Pragmatism. If we do it this way, it’ll work, doggonit. Don’t be so, um, purist. Do you want to be ideologically perfect and puritanically untainted, or do you want to win?
Deception. This is a subcategory of pragmatism. A little head fake here, and a feint there, and we can get this done. “Republicans vote on Nov. 6; Democrats vote on Nov. 8.”

And there are many others.

By contrast—and Paul’s whole point in this passage is that there is, indeed, a contrast—what are the divinely ordained weapons, the mighty ones?

Scripture. Preach the word; take the gospel story to the ends of the earth. This book is alive (Heb 4.12).
Prayer. Call on the God who rules in the affairs of peoples and nations, who sets up kings and takes them down again. He hears, and he answers (Dan 2.21).
Evangelism. Changing hearts requires, well, changing hearts. There’s only one effective way to do that—by introducing people to the Spirit of God, who changes them from the inside out, from the bottom up (Rom 8.6-9).
Love. Jesus told us to love our enemies, to do good to those that curse us (Lk 6.27-28). Paul extended that thought by telling us to feed our enemy if he’s hungry and to give him something to drink if he’s thirsty (Rom 12.20). Frankly, I haven’t seen a whole lot of that lately. I have seen a lot of retributory execration, though—“to give them a taste of their own medicine.”

Now, I’m not suggesting that we should not be politically involved. Unlike pretty much everyone in biblical times, we don’t live under an authoritarian regime; we not only have the ability to speak up and be heard, but our system is at its best when we do. By all means, vote. And better yet, interact with your fellow citizens about how you’re voting, and why. That’s a great opportunity not merely to change somebody else’s vote, but to introduce him to the biblical worldview that informs (it does, right?) the way you vote.

But in the end, politics is temporary and—relative to the issues God has called us to attend to—trivial. All political power eventually goes away, and usually far more quickly and dramatically than anyone expected. Yet as a matter of stewardship, we should attend to those matters. And as a tool for the Prime Directive, politics can often serve to provide us some leverage.

But.

You want to change the world? Only the gospel does that. While political kingdoms have come—in great power—and gone—every one of them—the gospel has been changing the world one heart at a time ever since it was unleashed on an unsuspecting planet.

Fight to win. Use the right weapons.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

On Sexual Assault, Due Process, and Supreme Court Confirmations

September 24, 2018 by Dan Olinger 2 Comments

There’s no sense in my jumping into the Kavanaugh battle with a personal opinion; there are bazillions of those already, and I have no experience that gives me any special insight into legal issues.

But I do find something waaay back in the writings of Moses that may give us a little something to think about.

The legal difficulty of sexual assault is that it typically doesn’t happen in the city square, with lots of witnesses. The nature of sex as a private function means that abuses of the sexual function, like its legitimate uses, tend to happen in private. And in private, there are just two witnesses. If the sex is abusive, then the two witnesses are the perpetrator and the victim.

He said, she said.

That’s how it almost always is.

In biblical times it was the same way, of course. I note that in those days, unlike today, rape was a capital offense. I’ve heard it argued that today it shouldn’t get the death penalty because if the rapist knows that, he’ll just go ahead and kill the victim, since that would eliminate a witness without increasing his penalty. I recognize the logic, but I still would prefer to see the death penalty for rape, particularly in a day when DNA testing can make the identity of the perpetrator absolutely certain.

But back to my point. In biblical times, rape got the death penalty. But here’s the thing: elsewhere the biblical law restricted the death penalty to cases where you had at least two or three witnesses (Num 35.30; Dt 17.6).

Contradiction, no? Rape gets the death penalty, but there are never enough witnesses to actually get it carried out. The woman loses, every time.

Patriarchy.

Ah, not so fast.

There’s a special provision for allegations of sexual assault. In the midst of some broad-ranging regulations in Deuteronomy 22 (help an animal stuck in a ditch [4]; don’t kill a bird sitting on a clutch of eggs [6]; build your house so that visitors are safe [8]), there’s a point about sexual assault.

²³“If there is a betrothed virgin, and a man meets her in the city and lies with her, ²⁴then you shall bring them both out to the gate of that city, and you shall stone them to death with stones, the young woman because she did not cry for help though she was in the city, and the man because he violated his neighbor’s wife. So you shall purge the evil from your midst.

²⁵“But if in the open country a man meets a young woman who is betrothed, and the man seizes her and lies with her, then only the man who lay with her shall die. ²⁶But you shall do nothing to the young woman; she has committed no offense punishable by death. For this case is like that of a man attacking and murdering his neighbor, ²⁷because he met her in the open country, and though the betrothed young woman cried for help there was no one to rescue her.

Interesting.

If the attack happens near other possible witnesses, then we assume that in a nonconsensual encounter the woman would protest in ways that those nearby would hear. If she says later that it was rape, then she is judged to be lying since she didn’t scream during the assault.

Women lie sometimes too. Even about things as serious as rape. We have to take that into account.

But if the event occurs away from possible witnesses, the woman gets the benefit of the doubt. Maybe she did call for help, and there was nobody to hear her.

Now, a woman having a consensual sexual encounter in the woods might lie too. She could decide later that it was a mistake, and she could decide to get the poor guy in beaucoup trouble. That could happen.

But here, she gets the benefit of the doubt. As the only witness. In a charge that bears the death penalty.

It’s not a perfect world. God knows that. And he indicates that he expects us to do the best we can in these difficult decisions. We need to remember that women lie just as certainly as men do, for all kinds of reasons. And we also need to remember that sometimes we need to give a woman in a difficult spot the benefit of the doubt.

When do we do which? That’s a really tough call; as someone who served on a jury for a case of child sexual assault, I know exactly how difficult it is.

But if you support Kavanaugh simply because you’re a Republican, or you oppose him simply because you’re a Democrat, then you’re in no position to be heard in such a critical decision.

Which, I guess, disqualifies pretty much everybody this time around.

Photo by Claire Anderson on Unsplash

On Funerals for Politicians

September 3, 2018 by Dan Olinger 1 Comment

This past Saturday was the funeral for John McCain, a long-time US senator and, many years ago, a long-time prisoner of war in Vietnam. In our hotly divided political climate, even his funeral became big news and a source of political contention.

I’m not going to weigh in on the politics of it all. There’s no lack of voices doing that, and the question of whether his funeral was too political or not is none of my business and frankly none of yours either. On the matter of what’s done at his funeral, I think the decision is the family’s to make, and the family’s alone. But the controversy does bring to mind some implications that go far beyond the politics of any moment, implications that we ought to consider—“we” being not just those with an interest in the American political process, but anyone with an interest in any political process.

Most news outlets have noted the tributes given to McCain by political friend and foe alike. Perhaps the best example is a line from former President Obama, who said, “So much of our politics, our public life, our public discourse, can seem small and mean and petty, trafficking in bombast and insult, in phony controversies and manufactured outrage. … We never doubted the other man’s sincerity or the other man’s patriotism, or that when all was said and done, we were on the same team.”

Responses to Mr. Obama’s words, and to others like them, have typically been driven by political motives. Those on the political left have celebrated the fact that the former president, who ran against and defeated McCain in a presidential election, could speak so respectfully and generously of him. Those who voted against Obama in that election, however, accuse him, and all the other political liberals who are now lauding McCain’s “maverick spirit” and “honor” and “principles,” of being hypocrites, especially given the vitriolic language heaped on McCain by those same opponents and their campaign supporters in that election.

What interests me in all this is not Mr. Obama’s words or any of the other recent commendations. What interests me is what those words tell us about the earlier political campaign. All those excoriations, all those dire warnings during the campaign about how dangerous McCain was, or how hateful or personally flawed he was, were actually meaningless; by their own present words, McCain’s political foes actually respected him and saw him as virtuous—on the same team, as Mr. Obama put it. But they reviled him back then, because politics, you know. Have to win the election. Say whatever it takes.

And let’s not pretend that only the political left does that. Those on the right are just as inclined—aren’t they?—to say things that aren’t true just to get their guy elected, or to get votes for this or that piece of legislation.

John McCain died of cancer, a particular type of cancer—glioblastoma—that crouches in my mind as well. It killed my brother, and it killed my pastor, the man whose signature is on the paperwork that forms the legal basis for the decades of life my wife and I have shared. A friend of mine, a neurosurgeon, once told me that glioblastoma is a just a nasty piece of work, and he said he hopes he’s seen the last of it he’ll ever see. It’s the worst.

But I’m not sure it is. There’s another cancer, one that infests our national brain and is killing our ability to govern ourselves as surely as glioblastoma killed John McCain. With the size of our federal government, and consequently the power at stake in every national election, the desperation to win leads us to savage ourselves with lies, to say whatever it takes to get our way. And our leaders acknowledge that, whenever they say that this or that vitriolic conflict is “just politics.”

How healthy, how healthful, can a system be that is based on lies?

It’s a mark of strength when we can speak respectfully of the dead, with whom we disagreed in life. But it’s a mark of great sickness when in doing so we put the lie to how we lived.

Photo by Scott Rodgerson on Unsplash

On Threats from a Hostile Culture

January 25, 2018 by Dan Olinger 2 Comments

Last week Carl Trueman published a thoughtful piece, entitled “Preparing for Winter,” on the future of Christian colleges. His premise is that they’re threatened, existentially threatened, by the hostile secular culture, particularly as it is expressed by the US government, and particularly in the matter of sexual discrimination, and particularly on the question of transgenderism. If Christian colleges stick to their beliefs, they will run afoul of anti-discrimination laws, thereby losing their accreditation and possibly—probably—even their tax exemption. An existential threat.

I don’t find anything he said directly wrong, but I’d like to balance his thoughts just a little bit.

First, a key piece of his argument is the Bob Jones Supreme Court case, in which my college lost its tax exemption because it violated “public policy” by prohibiting interracial marriage among its students. Something he doesn’t seem to consider, though, is that public-policy decisions arise more out of politics than out of law. It was easy for most Americans to agree with the court’s decision in the Bob Jones case because BJU was, well, wrong. It seems to me that if the government were to seriously consider denying tax exemption to all Christian schools that do not accommodate the policy du jour on transgenderism, the breadth of public outcry, and the consequent threat of political backlash, would render such an incursion politically impossible. There are a lot of people in this country who don’t see current transgender policy as in the same category as the civil rights movement.

There’s a reason that Social Security is the third rail of politics, even though the math underlying it is confessedly bogus. Politics works that way.

But times change, and majority public opinion changes with it. Suppose that, over time, clear biblical teaching on sexual morality is seen by most Americans as the enemy of the people? What then?

Well, several observations.

First, colleges can survive without tax exemption. Bob Jones did (and yes, it got the exemption back after several decades). It’s difficult, and with the passage of time a college will need to change significantly in the way it does things and perhaps even in its basic structure, methods, and size. But people are in the image of God, and that fact makes them creative, among other things. Just as businesses adjust to changes in tax law and all sorts of other elements in their legal environment—and do that every year, routinely—so people who want to run an educational institution can come up with ways to make it work. (And toward the end of his piece, Trueman essentially says that.)

But suppose the environment gets so oppressive that the college model can’t work at all? Well, for most of human existence—and this is true for young-earth creationists as well as old-earth creationists—people have been educating their offspring and preparing them for useful lives without any colleges whatsoever. You think businessmen are creative? Just watch parents trying to ensure their children’s success. There are no limits.

And it’s not just about the motivation and determined action of the parents.

For decades the People’s Republic of China was one of the most oppressive societies on the planet. It was completely cut off from the West; everybody had to dress just like Chairman Mao, and they had to quote his Little Red Book; and Mao had unfettered power to annihilate the scourge of Christianity from his land.

Several years ago I was teaching Christian theology. After class one of the students, who had grown up in China, said to me, “You are telling the [Bible] stories.” “Yes,” I replied. “I know the stories,” she said. “How do you know?” “My grandmother taught me.”

Mao had all the power imaginable, and he used all of it. Millions of his own people died under his orders just because they were Christians. But today Mao is dead—I’ve seen his corpse—and his great effort was foiled by a bunch of wizened 4’10” Chinese grandmothers, who told their grandchildren the stories. And today, by most estimates, there are more Christians in China than there are in the US.

Christian parents of whatever nation, however hostile, will tell those same stories, and Christian sons and daughters will go out as ambassadors for Christ, to spread the Good News, to die if necessary, but they will go out, and they will be faithful.

Christ, whose power well exceeds that of Mao and of any future American autocrat, will build his church, and the very gates of hell will have nothing at hand to stop it.

Fear not.

Photo by Cole Keister on Unsplash

The Great Sin of the Evangelical Right

September 4, 2017 by Dan Olinger 15 Comments

A few posts back I mused about one of the church’s great purposes: to be a place where God’s people use their gifts to serve one another, to love their neighbors as themselves.

There’s an even greater purpose, to which that one contributes. The church is to be, as the theologians say, doxological; it is to bring glory to God, to incite praise.

How does it do this? Well, when the church gathers, we praise God in worship, and that’s certainly part of it. And as we use our gifts to nurture growth in others and help them become more like Christ, that’s part of it too. But there’s another way; it’s described in Ephesians 3.

The church is God’s creation, not ours. He is the one who envisioned and then brought into being an organization—an organism—that is not limited by bloodline or geographical boundary, like OT Israel. It consists of Jews and Gentiles (Eph 3.6), from all over the globe, who are brought together in unified worship of God.

And what is his purpose in doing that? Take a look at verse 10:

To the intent that now unto the principalities and powers in heavenly places might be known by the church the manifold wisdom of God.

That is, that the heavenly beings (“principalities and powers”) might look at what God has done in the church and recognize the rich wisdom of the God who did it.

What does it take to impress someone who goes to work in heaven every day?

And why would the unity of God’s diverse peoples be so impressive? Because Jews and Gentiles are supposed to be enemies, not friends. If natural enemies are gathered together, united in worship to God and in loving care for one another, there’s no earthly reason for it. Only God could do that.

And now to explain this post’s title.

Since the days of Jerry Falwell Sr.’s Moral Majority—and long before that—some Christians have listened to the siren song of political influence. They have chosen to position themselves publicly as the political enemies of the very people God has called them to reach, to draw into this inexplicably unified body. And for any number of reasons—fear of loss of earthly freedom or comforts, discomfort with or even disdain for people who are radically different from them, even perhaps the desire for power—they have devoted their energies to increasing the divide rather than tapping into the divine power that brings people together in one body, in Christ, despite those differences.

But those other people are so different! They’re so wrong about so many things!

Yes. Precisely. Only God could bring us together, by changing us—all of us—from the inside out. But he can and will do that. So why add to the momentum in the other direction? Why oppose his cause?

Why tweak the political opposition for the lapses in logic of their political positions, when the cause—the real cause, the eternal one—is so much greater and so much more worthy of your limited effort? Do you really think that if you zing that leftist, he’ll be inclined to come to you for guidance to the grace that is truly greater than all his sin? Or do you not care whether he does at all?

To whom have you shown such grace today? You know, the kind of grace God has shown you?

There is a woman in my church who recommitted herself to Christ late in life. She comes whenever she can, despite significant physical obstacles. She asks me questions if something I’ve taught hasn’t been clear. And when she gets home, she downloads the Sunday school and sermon notes from the church website and pores over them, line by line, with her Bible open on her lap, filling her mind and her heart with the promises and commands of God.

And she voted for Obama.

Twice.

And though I didn’t (even once!), I’m OK with that. Because she’s a reminder that the grace of God that has brought us together is greater than the forces that appear to be great enough to drive us apart—even to drive this great country to the brink of civil war.

May her tribe increase. May our churches be filled with people who disagree with me and you about really important things—politics, lifestyles, culture, food and drink, medical approaches, whatever—and who are drawn together as one body by the far more powerful grace of the God we are all determined to love more than anyone or anything else.

May people in our community who are angry, embittered, frustrated, frightened, hopeless see in our church clear evidence that there is a power that unites us that is infinitely greater than the nonsense around us—that our hope for today and tomorrow, as well as for eternity, is not in a president or a Congress or a Supreme Court, or even in violent confrontation in the streets, but in the one in whom we live and move and have our being—in the one whose will is done just as certainly on earth as it is in heaven.

When we mock political opponents, when we add to the national polarization, when we speak passionately about this world more than the next, we make the mighty grace of God look weak and even inconsequential. And then we wonder why our countrymen mock him.

God reigns. Why do so many of his people behave as though he doesn’t?

Dan Olinger

Subscribe via Email