See the Kingdom

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Technical note: As of yesterday I have finished transferring the domain seethekingdom.net to a new webhost which gives me more features for less money than my previous provider, where the site has lived for several years. In honor of that change, I’ve tried out a new theme for this blog, which is now just a portion of the site. Besides a number of utilities that will be useful to me for other things, I have another wordpress installation established which I have several ideas for using, and a lot more that will be rolled out as time and energy permits.

Meanwhile the mail accounts are now up and working again, after a day or so of silence, and I’m ready to launch at least one mailing list. There may be a few more hiccups along the way (and for a while I thought I’d lost this database, because I’d misconfigured something in the move) but overall I’m pleased.

If you want to comment on any of the posts or pages here, or write posts of your own,  you can register as a user and ask me about gaining posting privileges. I’m looking at forum (bulletin board) software also—all open source, not costing me another nickel.

So, there you have it. Welcome seethekingdom.net to its new home.

The Underside of History

One thing that hinders the modern reader from properly understanding the Bible and the nature of biblical religion is the predominance of Christianity, or at least some form of it, on the world stage. Because much of Western culture is regarded as being based on a Christian foundation, the authentic biblical message has become a victim of its own apparent success. Here is what I mean.
Critics of Christianity in today’s world see a cultural hegemony that uses the authority of Christianity (or the Judeo-Christian tradition) as a way of preserving or enhancing the power of those who appeal to that authority. Christianity is seen by these critics as the majority religion whose adherents have a vested interest in keeping control of society, culture, politics, and law. Indeed it would be hard to deny that there are now, and historically have been, Christian leaders who share this view of Christianity’s role in society; in fact the prevailing view for centuries has assumed a positive and complementary relationship between church and state. In our own time there are plenty of voices which lament the extent to which the controlling elements in government and society are no longer explicitly in the hands of Christian powers or institutions.
Since these critics see themselves as oppressed by a Christian majority, they fear the very increase in the power of Christian viewpoints and institutions which some prominent Christian leaders see as necessary for the well-being of civilization as we know it. These conflicting sets of fears lead to arguments about the relationship between religion and government, disagreements over the issue of separation of church and state, and ultimately what has come to be called the culture wars.
I believe that both the proponents and critics of cultural Christianity would do well to take a long and serious look at the ancient documents which lie at the root of the judeo-Christian tradition: the collection of books we call the Bible.
It is a commonplace maxim that history is written by the winners. Most often, that is true. Most of ancient literature, certainly, was written by and for the ruling classes or the winners of military campaigns, from the Gilgamesh epic of ancient Babylon, to the musings on good poltical order by Confucius and Plato, to the histories and travelogues of Herodotus and Thucydides. But in this respect the Bible is a curious exception. It is consistently a history written from the underside, the viewpoint of some of historys losers.
From the wanderings of Abraham in a land far from his birth, to the imprisonment of his great-grandson Joseph, to the enslavement of his whole family in Egypt, to the story of a nation of slaves being led to a freedom in which they only lukewarmly believed, to the story of David who was a youngest son and a fugitive outlaw long before he became king, to the prophecies of Isaiah who saw his capital city under siege and Jeremiah who saw it overthrown, to the many prophets whose messages were not welcome in the courts of the powerful, to Esther who risked her life for her people, to John the Baptist who came as a voice in the wilderness and was beheaded, to Jesus whose birth tells of homelessness and whose death was that of a criminal, to Peter and Paul and all the apostles who were arrested, imprisoned and killed by the authorities of government, to John the Revelator whose visions of God’s sovereign victories came as he languished in exile on a small island — the stories of the Bible all tell of men and women whose hope in God did not rise or fall on their position in the world or its institutions. To such as these was often given the vision of a God who rules over all the nations, who sets up kings and lays them low — but it is significant that such visions of power were not given to comfort those who ruled, but to give hope to the poor and the oppressed.
Few prophets of the Old Testament wielded political power. None of the writers or principal actors in the New Testament did so, and there is no reason to think that they ever sought to. Jesus refused to be made king by force, and when asked to arbitrate even a family dispute, refused.
Thus those who look to the Bible, or at least to the New Testament, for a blueprint on how to run a national government on Christian principles are bound to be disappointed. The reason is simple: Christian principles are not about institutions or laws, but are about human beings and relationships. The good news of the Kingdom is that God rules from the vantage point of the powerless, from the underside of history.

Note: This essay was first posted in December of 2001.

Let’s Keep Moving!

Dear brothers and sisters and saints of God:

A hundred and more years ago, the pioneers of the Church of God movement were fiery evangelists who went from place to place preaching a twofold message. They really saw it as a single message, inseparable sides of the same coin: holiness and unity. They also preached, as they thought, the gospel of salvation and also of “full salvation” which meant that no one need settle for anything less than being fully rid of all sin. Now that was rather radical stuff, and they were often hounded out of the very places they had been invited to preach. Sometimes they would be invited to speak in a meeting house belonging to a particular denomination, and immediately preach a hard message which included all of the above, but which also had to touch on the necessary path to salvation and sanctification and unity, as they saw it. This was to “come out from among them, and touch not the unclean thing” etc.; and that specifically meant forsaking the sin of division in the form of loyalty to a particular denomination, hierarchy, sect, or creed.

Now in many ways, these years later, much of the purpose of those pioneers has been accomplished, at least as it relates to denominations. Broadly speaking, you don’t routinely see most Presbyterians assuming that you can’t get to heaven unless you are a Presbyterian, nor do you see Methodists refusing fellowship with Baptists. You get the idea. And here we are, once the forefront of that successful movement toward more general unity in the church, and the very success that we have seen in denominational walls coming down has made us feel kind of useless, because the church and the world has moved, has changed, and it has been God’s doing and only partly ours. The whole church has moved, and we, focused on our own memories of those heady days, see only dimly the truths our pioneers proclaimed with such fire. Thus we are at a standstill or a crossroads, as Gil Stafford puts it, wondering what we are supposed to be doing by now. Some are even asking if we should forget about all this heritage stuff and just dissolve organizationally, becoming “a loose association of vaguely evangelical congregations.”

But though denominationalism is not so much of a burning issue anymore, because more of God’s people are grappling with that sin and overcoming it, we have, as I see it, much more work ahead. There are many sins of division that were noticed by our pioneers. Some of these received less emphasis so that they could get to what seemed to them like the most immediate problem, something they could address directly, namely “sectism” and “creeds”. But these other issues they saw included such things as sexism, racism, and political partisanship. We’ve carried the banner, with very limited success, on fighting the first of these three; and have from time to time, especially recently, struggled with frustration on the second. Much more needs to be done on both, but for the moment I want to focus on the last one.

TOWARD A CHRISTIAN VIEW OF POLITICS

by John K. Stoner

Christians and politics–a puzzle, to be sure.
Like the eagle on their dollar bill, which holds olive branches in one set of talons and arrows in the other, Americans, and American Christians in particular, are of two minds in their thought about politics. That is, Americans believe that their democracy has achieved far more cultural transformation than it actually has, but simultaneously, they believe that due to the drag of sin, true cultural transformation is impossible. What we need is a political attitude which transcends this contradiction.
Here is the problem. Americans ask you to look, on the one hand, at what their experiment in democracy has done: it has ended King George’s British tyranny over the Colonies, produced the Declaration of Independence, written the world’s greatest document of governance, the Constitution, freed the slaves, fed the world, made space for God and religion, melted the pot, developed the West, invented the light bulb, given women the vote, birthed Henry Ford, produced the car, gone to the moon, built the mall, televised the NFL, won two world wars, isolated Castro, and woven the world wide web. All of this is affirmed periodically by going to the polls and voting. Democracy works, isn’t it wonderful!?
But next they describe all of the elements of culture which are fixed in stone and can never be changed: Indians are lazy, war is inevitable, education costs too much, more prisons are needed, public transportation doesn’t work, the car is sacred, old growth forests must be cut, homosexuals must be isolated, rain forests are an outdated luxury, acid rain can’t be helped, blacks are lazy, arms sales strengthen the economy, land mines create jobs, nuclear weapons keep us free, global warming is a myth, advertising fills a need, fetuses are good, immigrants are bad, and poverty can’t be helped. Humans are born in sin, and culture is trapped where it is.
Sin, Americans believe, guarantees the permanence of cultural depravity. The triumphs of democracy, on the other hand, are proven and perpetuated by right and practice of voting. In this view, voting is the ultimate political involvement, the elixir of society’s ills, the perfect tribute to democracy’s success in the past and the guarantor of its achievements in the future. To vote, and only to vote, is to be a responsible member of society. The meaning of politics, and the essence of political action is reduced, for all practical purposes, to the single act of voting.
But politics is vastly more than voting. Politics is the challenge of achieving human community. The root word is “polis,” or city, which is the essential symbol of human community. Of course narrower definitions are possible, such as the art or science of winning and holding control over a government, or activities characterized by artful and often dishonest practices. A moderate definition would be “the art or science of governing.” This may be useful, if we think of governing as guiding the process of achieving human community.
As the challenge of achieving human community, politics deserves the attention and energies of Peace Church and all Christian people, because God, by all indications, has an interest in the development of human community. There will, of course, be people who make a specialty of governing, and that should not be surprising. However, it is not to be expected that those specialists should be left alone to, by themselves, define the meaning or content of governance. Every person has an interest in defining the shape of the human community, and narrow definitions of governing should not be permitted to obscure the fundamental goal of serving the needs of humanity as a whole.
For Christians it is worth remembering that the central message of Christ Jesus, whose name we bear, was that the kingdom of God has appeared in the midst of human affairs. I shall proceed to argue, in fact, that this kingdom memory must be decisive for our political thought. Christians are bound to ask what Jesus Christ can teach them about politics, or else maintain a discreet silence about BOTH Jesus AND politics. This is an argument, I fear, which will not find easy acceptance with my readers, whose indulgence for some moments I nevertheless beg. If this seems like strange politics, I respond that any discussion which includes Jesus is, by definition, strange in a way, and anyone who brings up Jesus has brought up a voice which is, in profound ways, quite alien. This really can’t be avoided. Jesus taught us to pray, “Thy kingship come, they will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” That crosses over some planets, and if we pray the prayer we are committed to making the leap. (Or we could, of course, abandon the prayer….)
Kingdom denotes reign, or governance. The message of Jesus was that God is present and taking charge. The will of God is being done on earth as it is in heaven. This is thoroughly political, and only centuries of compromise with earthly kingdoms, growing out of a fear to challenge kings as directly as Jesus challenged them, has made it seem otherwise to most Christians.

Jesus and John the Baptist

A sermon delivered on October 20, 1996 at Marbury Church of God

Text: Luke 7:17-35

• The evidence of Jesus’ authenticity was his healing ministry.
• Jesus reassured John’s faith by pointing out the effects of His ministry.
• Of others Jesus had said, “you will know them by their fruits.” He applies no less a standard to himself.

Contrast between style approach of these two men:

How can two such different men and ministries be serving the same God? Yet that is what this passage teaches us. Though different in so many ways, and even though some of John’s disciples left him to follow Jesus, we never hear of one criticizing the other. In fact, Jesus makes it clear that both were bringing the same message to “this generation”.

• Reaction of the crowds, and of the Pharisees and lawyers, to Jesus’ words was similar to that of John’s ministry, despite all the differences. Why?

It is the word of God that changes hearts, that brings the honest sinner to repentance, that effects the benefits of forgiveness in their lives. The style of the messenger can be harsh or kind, spectacular or understated, flamboyant or soft-spoken, but until we hear God speak to us personally, we will be unmoved. Those who saw their need for repentance heard John’s word of judgment and responded; likewise they were ready to hear Jesus’ words of grace. But those religious leaders and Bible teachers who “rejected God’s purpose for themselves” rejected the message both of judgment and of mercy

• Do not honor the messenger, or the style of delivery, more than the message itself!

God will find ways to speak to you, including ways you do not expect. John Newton wrote, “’twas grace that taught my heart to fear, and grace my fears relieved.” Each of us, at whatever point we are in life, may need to hear a different bit of God’s voice – and God will provide that to us. But as John the Baptist said, “He must increase, and I must decrease,” so the voice of joy and mercy and eternal life must increase over the voice of woe and judgment and wrath. He that is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than John, though John is greatest among the prophets. But both are agents of God’s grace.