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Post by Admin on Oct 30, 2024 15:47:14 GMT -5
These articles appeared in Christianity Today
A liberal acquaintance told me recently that while he generally dislikes evangelicals, he doesn’t find me to be as bad as the rest: “At least you don’t rant about wanting to establish a theocracy!” I decided to accept what he said as a compliment, even though I regretted not coming clean with him about theocracy.
Truth be told, my wife and I do belong to a pro-theocracy organization. Indeed, we attend its meetings every week. In those gatherings, we learn about what it means to support a theocracy, and we sing songs that are meant to strengthen our theocratic commitments. The organization I am referring to, of course, is our local church.
Theocracy literally means “the rule of God,” and Christians believe that while our churches do have human leaders, those leaders know that they are directly accountable to God for what they think and do. They keep reminding us that we Christians belong to “the kingdom of God,” which means that our ultimate allegiance is to Jesus, whom we often refer to as “ruling” over us.
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The idea of the church as a theocracy, however, is part of a much larger theocratic picture. The universe itself in all its complex glory is a theocracy. The Jewish community’s shabbat prayer captures well the Bible’s theocratic perspective when it begins with “Blessed are you, Lord our God, King of the universe.”
Everything that exists is under God’s rule. It is this theocratic arrangement—defining the very nature of reality—that gives believers meaning and hope in our lives. But does that mean that believers like me should try to turn the United States into a theocracy? I think not. God does not want me to force my theocratic understanding of reality on others. What God wants from people is that they freely offer their obedience to his will.
I do not serve God’s purposes in the world by trying to impose “Christian” laws on people against their own values and convictions. I should not want everything that I consider to be sinful to be made illegal. For example, although I don’t like the blasphemous language that I hear all too frequently while watching Netflix these days, I am not inclined to call for laws banning these expressions.
That does not mean that I should withdraw into a live-and-let-live posture, content to wait for Jesus to return. The Bible makes it clear that God wants me to be active in the society where he has placed me.
The apostle Peter puts the mandate this way: “Live such good lives among the pagans that … they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us” (1 Pet. 2:12).
Peter is echoing the admonition God gave through Jeremiah when the people of Israel were exiled in the pagan city of Babylon: “Seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper” (Jer. 29:7). In addition to witnessing to others about the power of the gospel, we can join them in working for God-glorifying social goals.
I am grateful for the opportunity to live in a pluralistic society where I can learn from people with whom I seriously disagree about religious beliefs, public policy, and moral lifestyles. For one thing, I can learn about the mistakes and misdeeds that Christians like me have made in the past—and still make today—about important matters. In genuinely engaging others on these matters, I often find effective ways to partner with them for the common good.
How (Not) to Talk About ‘Christian Nationalism’
Brad East
Historically, American evangelicals have gone back and forth between two ways of relating to the larger culture. In my youth during the 1950s, we evangelicals had a reputation for being “apolitical.” We liked to sing patriotic songs, and preachers regularly reminded us that we had a Christian obligation to show up as voters on election days. But we typically did not actively engage in political advocacy.
To be an evangelical citizen was to mostly cast our votes for Republican candidates and pray for God’s blessing on the likes of Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. In all of this, we were passive about politics—grateful that we enjoyed the freedoms of a nation that was “under God.”
Things changed around 1980 with the emergence of the New Christian Right, led by Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. Evangelicals became aggressively political, working for candidates who promoted what we saw as godly causes, often explicitly guided by the theocratic project of returning to the vision of a “Christian America.”
Thus, we have either distanced ourselves from active involvement in the political system or worked to take it over. Either we were a cognitive minority content to sing, as we did in my youth, “This world is not my home, I’m just a-passing through”—or we proclaimed ourselves to be a “moral majority,” boldly belting out “Shine, Jesus, shine / Fill this land with the Father’s glory.”
There is, of course, a third option, one desperately needed today in our increasingly polarized society: an evangelical willingness to labor patiently alongside others—persons of other faiths and of no faiths at all—in seeking workable solutions to the complex challenges we face as a nation.
In our weekly theocratic gatherings, we evangelicals tell God—in our prayers, hymns, and sermons—about our spiritual weakness as vulnerable human creatures. When we walk into church, we also bring with us the hopes and fears that we experience in our political lives.
The self-righteousness that we so often exhibit in the public square does not fit well with what we know about ourselves in our deep places. It is time for us to display a kinder and gentler evangelicalism, promoting a cooperative political quest for new ways of flourishing together in our shared humanity.
One of my heroes in the faith, the great Dutch statesman Abraham Kuyper, proclaimed in his inaugural address at the university he founded, “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine!’”
I find that inspiring manifesto to be a motivation for how I am to live as a theocrat in contemporary life. There is always a temptation, of course, for us to answer that rallying cry in an arrogant and imperialistic manner—as if all we have to do is go out there and grab hold of all those square inches in the name of Jesus.
Properly understood, theocracy requires a humble spirit. The apostle Peter tells us that when we are challenged “to give the reason for the hope” we have in Christ, we must take care to “do this with gentleness and respect” (1 Pet. 3:15). Since Jesus claims every square inch of creation as his own, wherever we go in our lives, we are standing on sacred ground.
In my evangelical youth, I was taught Hudson Taylor’s famous saying “Christ is either Lord of all, or is not Lord at all.” I keep learning more about what it means to represent the cause of the gospel in a gentle and respectful manner.
The God whose majesty we theocrats worship in church not only sends us out into the world over which he rules but also assures us that, wherever we go, he will be with us.
He invites us to join him on those square inches that are occupied by precious human beings who suffer from the pain of abuse, grief, loneliness and the hopelessness that comes from unbelief.
We live in times when our fellow human beings desperately need to encounter evangelicals for whom being theocratic means actively serving the cause of a loving Savior.
Richard Mouw is a senior research fellow at the Henry Institute for the Study of Christianity and Politics at Calvin University and former president of Fuller Theological Seminary.
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Post by Admin on Oct 30, 2024 19:35:38 GMT -5
I Don’t Want to Be a Universalist
Richard Mouw
Richard Mouw says the best forms of the doctrine still disappoint those counting on God to do the right thing.
Christianity Today
March, 2023 issue
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Illustration by Sarah Gordon / Source Images: Getty / Wikimedia
I am not a universalist. There is nothing surprising about my saying that. Having spent my career in evangelical institutions, I have signed many theological statements affirming the realities of heaven and hell, and I have always done so in good faith.
But here is something that would surprise many of my fellow evangelicals: I don’t even want to be a universalist. I have often heard the opposite from evangelical friends: “I would like to be a universalist, but I really see no biblical basis for the view that everyone will be saved in the end.” It is reassuring that those who express this sentiment usually acknowledge that the Bible is clear on the subject. I do worry, though, about their wishing that it were not so clear.
I am convinced that the idea of universal salvation fails to capture some important elements in the Bible’s teachings about the requirements of divine justice. The Scriptures make it clear that God heeds the cries of the oppressed and that on the Day of Judgment all evildoers will be dealt with according to their deeds (Rev. 20:12). Universalism tries to get around the unspeakable harm that people do to each other, evading the need for repentance, while detracting from the Cross and a real joy in God’s justice.
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There are certainly some aspects of evangelicals’ traditional teachings about hell that do trouble me. I don’t want to hear repeats of the fire-and-brimstone sermons of my youth. These are similar to the infuriating message of folks who carry signs at funeral gatherings declaring that the deceased person will burn for all eternity.
To be sure, the hellfire images are there in the Bible, as in Matthew 25:41, when Jesus tells those on his left, “Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.”
But those biblical images have become so much the stuff of caricature that unbelievers can make fun of the imagery while ignoring the clear biblical message that persistent unbelief has eternal consequences. Such frivolity works in the same direction—away from the joy and the seriousness of salvation—as does unloving glee. We evangelicals have gained a reputation for being mean-spirited people, and I am glad when my friends look for ways to tone down the rhetoric while not compromising the essential message.
I hold out for a wideness in God’s saving mercies. I take my cue on this from Charles Spurgeon, who observed in one of his wonderful sermons, “Heavenly Worship,” that while the Bible tells us “there is to be a multitude that no man can number in heaven,” he has not found anything in the Bible that says “that there is to be a multitude that no man can number in hell.”
Suppose an evangelical said, “I would really like to believe that Jesus was not divine, but just one of the great ethical teachers, but the Bible does not allow that.” How could we trust such a person’s faith?
But the case of universalism is different. A desire to believe in universalism is usually born out of concern for loved ones. We rightly don’t feel betrayed by those wishing for the eternal joy of Heather or Bradley, loved ones they pray for fervently. Or perhaps they are thinking about their wonderful non-Christian neighbors. We can empathize with those concerns.
Nevertheless, the biblical depiction of a state of eternal separation from God is real. As N. T. Wright puts it in Surprised by Hope, when we study “the New Testament on the one hand and the newspaper on the other,” we cannot avoid the conclusion that divine justice requires a decisive end-time accounting for the grave injustices that occur in our world. For example, a man who sells 13-year-old girls into sexual slavery and enjoys living off the profits will face ultimate condemnation. So will murderers, blackmailers, and hypocrites of all kinds.
This does not mean that we can give up on any human being in our witness to God’s amazing grace. When we sing, “To God Be the Glory,” we affirm that wonderful promise that “the vilest offender who truly believes that moment from Jesus a pardon receives.” In our hope that vile offenders will come to true faith, we must also find ways of assuring their victims that the Lord will not ignore the demands that justice be done. God’s forgiveness is still just.
Wright says that individuals who persistently rebel against God eventually become so dehumanized that they irreparably damage the image of God in which they were created. When they pass on from this life, he says, after having “inhabited God’s good world, in which the flickering flame of goodness had not been completely snuffed out,” they enter into “an ex-human state, no longer reflecting their maker in any meaningful sense.”
As the psalmist observes, sinners become like the idols whom they worship (115:8). And as Wright points out, this dehumanizing pattern turns us into creatures who are “not only beyond hope but also beyond pity.” Wright reinforces his point by citing C. S. Lewis’s observation in The Great Divorce that the Lord will eventually proclaim to unrepentant sinners, “Thy will be done.”
In order to keep myself honest on this subject, I do keep up on defenses of universalism. Although many who argue for universalism make no effort to reconcile the Bible with their disbelief in hell, there are some arguments that stay within the pale of Christianity and are worth paying attention to.
The most recent and significant argument is set forth by David Bentley Hart in his book That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation, which has received much attention. A couple of my evangelical friends have recommended it to me as “fascinating” and “challenging.”
Hart discusses the topic on a number of fronts, but I could not get past his refusal to pay attention to biblical specifics. All that the Bible provides, he tells us, “are a number of fragmentary and fantastic images that can be taken in any number of ways, arranged according to our prejudices and expectations, and declared literal or figural or hyperbolic as our desires dictate.” In other words, hell might not be hell. And if it isn’t, no one goes there, of course. Nor could God be taken as serious at all about avenging evil.
But what if we can get to universalism by proving that each person will eventually want Jesus as Lord—that no one chooses hell when they see him? This is a much stronger argument than simply that the God we love wouldn’t (despite what he said) condemn people. This is also what Hart argues. He says we have to ask whether a proper understanding of human nature allows us to believe that “this defiant rejection of God for all eternity is really logically possible for any rational being.”
This argument for universalism relies on people being reasonable, sooner or later, leading to their saving faith. But there is no evidence that each person will finally be repentant, as well as enlightened.
Adolf Hitler looms large as an example of persistent defiant rejection. Haven’t the monstrous deeds for which Hitler is responsible put him beyond any claim to God’s mercy? Hart directly addresses this question, using Hitler as his case in point. No human being could ever willfully choose, he says, to “fulfill the criteria necessary justly to damn himself or herself to perpetual misery.”
The fact is that “the character of even the very worst among us is in part the product of external contingencies.” To follow Hart’s argument, we would have to assume that “somewhere in the history of every soul there are moments when a better way was missed by mischance, or by malign interventions from without, or by disorders of the mind within,” as he put it.
And then, to underscore the point he is making, he observes that “rather than any intentional perversity on the soul’s own part,” these are precisely the kinds of factors at work in a case like Hitler’s.
The horrible deeds of a Hitler, which are surely “infinitely evil in every objective sense,” are still “prompted into action by a hunger for the Good, [and] could never in perfect clarity of mind match the sheer nihilistic scope of the evil it perpetrates.” By this logic, a Hitler could not rationally “resist the love of God willfully for eternity.” Hart tells us that he is drawing upon insights here from Byzantine orthodoxy. His argument clearly accepts the Byzantine fondness for Plato’s philosophy.
Plato taught that since evil is the absence of the Good, no one willingly chooses that which is evil. This perspective allows Hart to argue that what we might want to label in the Hitler case as “intentional perversity” is in reality a state of ignorance—due to the “external contingencies” that Hart has listed.
Hart includes the influence of “disorders of the mind within” as one of the factors that could have kept Hitler from clearly grasping the Good. What Hart likely has in mind—in line with his Platonism—is the ways in which some of Hitler’s past experiences or brain chemistry might have kept him from seeing facts clearly. Or maybe Hart thinks that Hitler could not grasp the truth because he relied on unreliable sources for his information.
For those of us who do not want to set the Bible aside in thinking about these matters, we cannot ignore Jesus’ extensive teachings, such as those in Matthew 25 on how some will be welcomed and some shut out, followed by his warning that those who despise the gifts of God will not only be thrown out into the outer darkness but also lose what they were given.
Nor can we forget what the apostle Paul says about willful disobedience to the Good: “The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them … . [They] are without excuse” (Rom. 1:18–20).
I have taught many courses on Plato’s dialogues, and I have pointed my students to this Pauline teaching that people who deny God are without excuse. In light of it, we must reject the Byzantine insistence that it is not possible for a human being to knowingly choose that which is evil.
An Open-Handed Gospel
Richard J. Mouw
However, the Bible does describe a (non-Platonistic) process of rejecting the Good without what we would normally call willfulness. We can fail to follow the truth we see in what seem like minor ways, leading us to wander further from the path of wisdom. Our spiritual lives have a fundamentally directional character. We are each on a trajectory toward God or away from him. The Westminster Shorter Catechism highlights this factor in its first question and answer, in telling us that our “chief end” as human beings is “to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.”
Redeeming grace restores our ability to pursue that end once again. We Christians are in a process of moving toward the end for which God creates and redeems us. This reality is captured beautifully in 1 John 3:2: “Now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.”
In classic theological terms, this is about sanctification as a process and glorification as the goal. When the Spirit plants new life in the deep places of a person’s being, the person begins a process of becoming sanctified, moving toward the eschatological goal of being glorified. That end product is what we will be when Christ appears. In the present preglorification stage of our journeys, we live with the mystery of what we will be like when our chief end is reached.
In his “Weight of Glory” essay, Lewis captures the mystery of how—as the KJV puts it—“it doth not yet appear what we shall be”in the Christian journey. Lewis observes that while we have little problem thinking much about our own future glory, we are in no danger of reflecting too much on the future glory of others. It would be spiritually healthy, Lewis says, for us to reverse this pattern: “The load, weight, or burden of my neighbour’s glory should be laid daily on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken.”
It is a good spiritual exercise for us to “remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship.” This is a compelling observation, and understandably it is frequently cited.
But there is a brief clause that concludes Lewis’s observation that is less frequently quoted. He immediately adds that, in addition to those who will be marvelously glorified, there are some human beings who, if we could catch a glimpse of them in their final state, we would witness “a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare.” For those who are heading in a direction opposite to that of glorification, it is also true that “it doth not yet appear” what their destination will be like. The ultimate lost-ness of hell is real.
I don’t mean to be harsh with my evangelical friends who wish they could be universalists. They are often motivated by a concern for the souls of loved ones who have not accepted Christ. I am concerned, though, about theological slippage in our evangelical community. To tell our younger generation that we wish the Bible were not so clear about the reality of hell could encourage them simply to take the step that we resist taking.
How Universalism, ‘the Opiate of the Theologians,’ Went Mainstream
Interview by Paul Copan
Embracing universalism means theological and spiritual loss. We miss out on the glory of redeemed people and the fullness of the divine glory. In a universalist future, God brushes off the degradation of his creatures. The wedding supper is not filled with guests dressed in the clothes of righteousness but with people trying to pass off their sins as inevitable, and therefore able to be dismissed. And God lets them. I find such a present (and such a hypothetical future) to be disheartening. I find it to be something far short of the joyful and triumphant repudiation of wrong the Bible promises.
While I don’t want to be a universalist, I do pray for unbelievers whom I love, even as I pray for justice for victims of oppression. And I do so in hope, as Abraham said in Genesis 18:25: “Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?”
Richard Mouw served as president of Fuller Theological Seminary for 20 years.
From the Archives: Views on Universalism
The Editors
This article appeared in the March, 2023 issue of Christianity Today as "Heaven, Cheap".
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Post by Admin on Oct 30, 2024 19:36:32 GMT -5
The Unlikely Crackup of Evangelicalism
Richard Mouw
The problems are real—but exaggerated.
Christianity Today
January 3, 2018
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As a supplement to the ongoing series on evangelical distinctives, we’re including other voices in the conversation on what it means to be an evangelical Christian today. This contribution comes from Richard Mouw, former president of Fuller Theological Seminary.
New York Times columnist Ross Douthat has written recently about what he sees as a possible “crackup” that may be coming in the evangelical community. He sees a quiet version of that split already happening among the younger generation, many of whom seem to be moving in other directions: mainline Protestantism, Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy.
The more dramatic gap, as Douthat sees it, is between, on the one hand, the elites—“evangelical intellectuals and writers, and their friends in other Christian traditions,”—and those millions of folks, on the other hand, who worship in evangelical churches. It may be, he says, that these elites “have overestimated how much a serious theology has ever mattered to evangelicalism’s sociological success.” It could be that the views and attitudes on display in the recent support for rightist causes have really been there all along, without much of an interest in the kinds of intellectual-theological matters that have preoccupied the elites. If so, then the elites will eventually go off on their own, leaving behind an evangelicalism that is “less intellectual, more partisan, more racially segregated”—a movement that is in reality “not all that greatly changed” from what it has actually been in the past.
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Douthat hopes he is wrong about this, and I think that he is. But his scenario has some support by increasing voices in the evangelical academy who are saying that they can no longer identify with a grassroots evangelicalism that has become regrettably “politicized” these days.
One problem with the Douthat scenario is that it suggests that there is a significant gap between the vast majority of “ordinary” evangelicals and a much smaller band of “evangelical intellectuals.” To see whether that picture is really accurate, we have to fill in some specific detail.
There is, in fact, a rather significant network of evangelical academic institutions in North America. The Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU) has a membership of 140 evangelical schools, with a total enrollment of over 300,000 students. In addition, the Association of Theological Schools (ATS) reports that of the 270 member institutions that it accredits in North America, 40 percent of these seminaries identify themselves as evangelical, and their student bodies account for 60 percent—about 40,000 students—of those enrolled in graduate theological education. If we add to those numbers the many Bible institutes, colleges, and seminaries who are not members of either the CCCU or the ATS, it is fair to say that “evangelical intellectuals” are presently teaching almost a half-million students who have chosen to attend self-identified evangelical schools.
The majority of those students come from evangelical churches. And they will take what they learned from “evangelical intellectuals” into professional life when they graduate. This is not exactly a picture of ivory tower elites who live in a very different world than grassroots evangelicalism.
As one who has spent over a half-century in the evangelical academy, the picture I have just sketched poses some important questions for my own reflection. Given the tens of thousands of evangelical students whom I and my colleagues have taught, to what degree are we responsible for current attitudes and viewpoints in the evangelical movement at large? And if we were to decide to take our leave from evangelicalism, do we have an obligation to all of those former students, to give them counsel about what they should now do with what we have taught them about being “evangelical”?
I also have a different sort of concern, relating to the many evangelical academic conferences and seminars I have attended over the years. When we academic types gathered together—and by communicating to each other on the pages of, say, Books and Culture and Christianity Today—to explore what our evangelical identity has meant for our intellectual quests, we experienced a healthy sense of an academic community united by a deep commitment to the gospel. We have been inspired to work at producing the kind of scholarship that we would not have otherwise pursued if we were not part of the evangelical network.
If we go our own individual ways now spiritually and theologically, what happens to all of that? Is the need for that kind of bonding in the academy no longer needed? Will younger scholars continue to nurture those bonds if they no longer have a sense of serving a broader movement?
A well-known scholar—himself a secular Jew—once spent some time working on a project at Fuller Seminary. He was a good friend, and he made a point of sharing with me his impressions of what he experienced at Fuller. “This is a unique place, Richard,” he said. “Right now your faculty is holding two things together in an impressive manner. You have top-notch scholarship and you have strong connections to the grassroots.” Then he went on: “But you can’t keep that up. Eventually you will either dumb down your scholarship or you will lose touch with the grassroots. Holding the two in tension is great while it lasts, but it will inevitably come apart.”
I responded by telling him that Fuller was only one of many evangelical campuses where the successful holding-together was happening. And I said that I was confident we could all keep doing it well. Indeed, I said, if the day comes when we go in one or the other directions he described, I would consider it a major defeat for evangelicalism as such.
Ross Douthat’s “crackup” scenario is, in effect, a prediction that the defeat is coming. It does not have to happen that way, though. Nor does being successful at the holding-together require necessarily keeping the “evangelical” label. But it does mean intentionally developing a clear strategy for preserving what has been the best of the evangelical legacy that has nurtured us in the past. I plead with those intellectual leaders who have been talking about simply “resigning” from the evangelical movement to stay around to work on that strategy.
Richard Mouw is former president of Fuller Theological Seminary and author of Adventures in Evangelical Civility: A Lifelong Quest for Common Ground (Brazos).
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Post by Admin on Oct 30, 2024 19:37:39 GMT -5
Getting to the Crux of Calvary
Richard Mouw
Each atonement theory highlights a truth about the Cross—but none more so than Christ’s substitutionary death.
Christianity Today
May, 2012 issue
Illustration by Doug Fleener
During a coffee break at a conference, I passed by some young pastors who were discussing the Atonement, a topic covered by the speaker at the session we had just attended. One of them said rather forcefully that he seldom mentions the substitutionary work of Christ anymore in his sermons. Instead, he said, he talks about how Christ encountered “the powers” of consumerism, militarism, racism, super-patriotism, and the like.
I fought the temptation to join their chat. But I was troubled by what I had heard. A few hours later, searching for something to listen to on my rental car’s radio, I came upon a Christian station airing a recording of a man who was telling the story of his spiritual journey to a group of fellow business folks.
The man recounted a time when he was increasingly successful in his business dealings, while increasingly dissolute in his personal lifestyle: drinking heavily, unfaithful to his wife, distant from his children, his marriage headed toward divorce. His wife and daughters were active in church life, but he never attended.
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One Saturday evening, after he had downed several martinis, his 10-year-old daughter pleaded with him to come to church the next morning. Her singing group was going to participate in the service, and she wanted her father there. He reluctantly agreed, something he greatly regretted the next morning when he woke up with a hangover. But he kept his promise.
In that service, he said, he heard for the first time in his life that he was a guilty sinner who needed salvation, and that Jesus had taken his sin and guilt upon himself on the Cross of Calvary. The man wept as he heard the sermon, and he pleaded with God to take away his burden of shame. From that point on, his life took a new direction.
I would have loved to have asked the young pastor at the conference what he thought about that testimony. Suppose, for example, the man whose story I heard had gone instead to that young pastor’s church that morning, and heard a sermon about how Christ has on Calvary encountered “the powers” of consumerism, militarism, racism, super-patriotism, and so on. I don’t think that such a message would have effected the life-transforming change that took place.
This is not to say that every sermon preached has to be an invitation to bring our guilt to the Cross of Calvary. Nor is it to deny that Christ’s redemptive work has real implications for our lives as consumers and citizens. The fact is that the Bible presents the work of the Cross as a many-faceted event, setting forth a variety of images for the Atonement: self-giving love, the forgiveness of enemies, payment of a debt, the ransom of captives, victory over the demonic principalities and powers, and so on.
Theologian Scot McKnight gives us an excellent image for how to see this diversity of atonement images. In his fine book A Community Called Atonement: Living Theology, he says that together these images serve like a bag of golf clubs: Different clubs are needed for different situations. A skilled golfer will know when it is appropriate to use the driver or the wedge or the putter.
I would not have worried about the comment that I overheard from the young pastor if he were simply celebrating having a golf bag full of theological clubs, and resolving to use the victory-over-the-powers club more effectively in appropriate situations. Instead, he said he “seldom” talked anymore about substitutionary atonement. To me, that sounded like a basic mistake in theological golfing.
Whatever the pastor’s intention, his remark expresses a mood increasingly prevalent among younger evangelicals. They often show a genuine discomfort with substitutionary themes, favoring a Christus Victor approach.
‘Liberating’ the Cross
Atonement theories are our theological responses to the question of what happened on Calvary. What important transaction, or transactions, occurred during the hours that Jesus hung on the cross?
Much of traditional Christianity has strongly emphasized how the work of the Cross was a kind of intra-Trinitarian transaction. Jesus offered himself “up” to the Father; he paid a debt that we humans could not pay on our own; he hung in our place, offering himself as a sacrifice for sin.
We must think carefully about how we reach specific individuals and groups with the gospel. We should not assume that we have to present the whole theological picture all at once to unbelievers.
This way of viewing the Atonement came under sustained attack by Protestant liberalism in the early 20th century. Harry Emerson Fosdick was fond of referring to traditional atonement theory as advocating a “slaughterhouse religion.” In his famous 1922 sermon “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” he argued that such a perspective was a case of “pre-civilized barbarity,” requiring that Jesus “placates an alienated deity” in order to save us.
Harsh verdicts along these lines have been reissued in recent years by some radical feminist theologians, who see the idea of a father punishing his son as promoting intra-family violence. An extreme version comes from Joanne Carlson Brown, who argues that the deity of traditional atonement theology is a “bloodthirsty God” who rules over a pervasively patriarchal system. “We do not need to be saved by Jesus’ death from some original sin,” she argues. “We need to be liberated from this abusive patriarchy.”
In their efforts to “liberate” the Cross from traditional views, theological liberators typically move toward a view of the mission of Jesus that relies heavily on “moral example” motifs. The Cross is a revelation of something that is understood in predominantly moral terms. Jesus’ “Father, forgive them” shows us what it is like to love our enemies. The suffering of Jesus is a depiction of God’s unconditional acceptance of human beings—a display of divine benevolence that should inspire us to properly embrace both friends and enemies. The Christus Victor perspective, like the older liberal “moral influence” view, typically places a strong emphasis on imitating Jesus. But, while the liberal view tends to reduce the meaning of the Atonement to moral imitation, the Christus Victor view has a strong “supernatural” tone. The Cross is not just about a more loving humanness, but is also a decisive encounter with evil. The human authorities who collectively crucified Jesus represented the political, economic, military, and religious forces of the day. They were in fact acting in the service of spiritual “principalities and powers,” who did all they could to destroy the Son of God. But Jesus “accepted powerlessness” (here I am using the highly influential formulation of Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder) and refused to employ the coercive-violent means by which we, in our fallenness, want to “make things happen.” The Resurrection, on this understanding, is God’s display of the victory of Jesus over the powers and what they represent.
Initial Attraction
There is no denying that the Scriptures clearly set forth the idea of Christ’s victory over demonic powers. The apostle Paul highlights this aspect of Christ’s mission in Colossians 2, which says that we no longer must remain captive to “the elemental spiritual forces of this world,” because the Son of God has “disarmed the powers and authorities, [making] a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross” (Col. 2:8, 15).
And there are certainly times when this depiction of the work of Calvary can be an effective initial presentation of the Good News. Young Life workers have testified to seeing teenagers turn to Christ from a fascination with witchcraft, vampires, and the like by hearing the wonderful message that the Cross sets us free from the forces of evil. Similar testimonies come to us from believers worldwide who proclaim the gospel in animistic cultures.
It is always important to think carefully about how we reach out to specific individuals and groups with the gospel. We should not assume that we have to present the whole theological picture all at once to unbelievers. People come to Christ for many reasons. This is not unlike human love relationships. Ask a person long married what first attracted them to the person who was to become his or her spouse. Most of us would be embarrassed to give the details. That does not make those initial attraction factors bad. They are what bring people together. But once we are together, other factors need to take over if the relationship is to be sustainable for the long haul.
It is the same with coming to Christ. While any aspect of atonement theory is fair game in witnessing to others, we must also think about what is necessary for a more mature, biblically faithful understanding of the nature of our salvation. This is why we cannot rely completely on the Christus Victor motif. While it is an important biblical message, and one that is often the most appropriate way of introducing people to the gospel, by itself it is not enough to capture the full meaning of Christ’s atonement.
That we need more is made clear by the very same passage in Colossians. Paul prefaces that strong portrayal of Christ’s “disarming” of the forces of evil with this equally bold assurance: As people who “were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your flesh, God [has] made you alive with Christ.” The Savior has “canceled the charge of our legal indebtedness, which stood against us and condemned us; he has taken it away, nailing it to the cross” (Col. 2:13-14).
Our burdens of shame and guilt have been nailed to the cross. Evangelicals have always insisted on that message as central to proclaiming the gospel. Again, a variety of images capture this emphasis—debt-repaying, ransom, sacrifice, enduring divine wrath against sin. But all these images have this in common: They point us to the fact that on the cross of Calvary, Jesus did something for us that we could never do for ourselves as sinners. He engaged in a transaction that has eternal consequences for our standing before a righteous God. N. T. Wright is well known for prodding evangelicals to think new thoughts about Pauline theology, but he is very clear on the need to preserve the classic evangelical emphasis on the meaning of the Atonement for individual sinners. At Calvary, Wright says in The Crown and the Fire: Meditations on the Cross and the Life of the Spirit, “Jesus, the innocent one, was drawing on to himself the holy wrath of God against human sin in general, so that human sinners like you and me can find, as we look at the cross, that the load of sin and guilt we have been carrying is taken away from us.”
Diluting Our Guilt
Theologian Geerhardus Vos captured a central concern of atonement theology in a sermon on Jesus’ announcement, in Luke 19:10, that “the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.” We cannot properly grasp the Savior’s redemptive mission, said Vos, unless we understand what he came to save us from. If you dilute lostness, he argued, then you dilute the seeking and the saving. If we have a reduced understanding of our sinful condition, then we also have a reduced Savior.
This is precisely the problem with limiting the nature of the Atonement to a moral example. It sees Jesus primarily as presenting us with a moral lesson, one that he taught by embodying forgiving love. Here our lostness is something like our wandering without an accurate map. Our fundamental problem is ignorance. Our sinfulness—willful rebellion against our Creator—is not acknowledged.
The Cross is indeed a display of violence toward Jesus. No atonement theory can avoid that fact.
Christus Victor also runs the risk of downplaying our sinfulness. It is easy to depict “enslavement” to rebellious spiritual powers in terms of victimhood, rather than to acknowledge our own guilt.
While our sinful condition can contain elements of ignorance and victimhood, those factors cannot fully account for our guilty state before God. Adam and Eve were not merely clueless or victims. The older theological term for their posture was “ethical rebellion”: disobedience, initiated by the deliberate turning of their wills against the designs of the Creator. And, to cite another formulation: “In Adam’s Fall we sinned all.” If we are held captive to principalities and powers, it is because of choices for which God holds us responsible. Only Christ’s atoning work can deliver us from the consequences of those choices. And that deliverance required taking upon himself the burden of our sin and guilt.
But what of the charge that the intra-Trinitarian transaction—Jesus “satisfying” the Father on our behalf—glorifies violent abuse? Of course, the Cross is indeed a display of violence toward Jesus, and no atonement theory can avoid that fact. The Christus Victor perspective explains that the violence inflicted upon Jesus was caused by the demonic principalities and powers, and that God allowed this in order to demonstrate that the powers were unable to destroy the Son. The “moral influence” theory, on the other hand, emphasizes the ways in which Jesus suffered violence at human hands—with the redemptive significance of that suffering showing forth in the way that Jesus selflessly forgave his enemies. Thus, while the divine satisfaction theory may be unique in seeing Jesus as directly experiencing the wrath of the Father, all of the views see Jesus as taking suffering upon himself in order to fulfill a divinely ordained redemptive mission.
But those of us who want to retain the notion of the Savior experiencing the divine wrath against sin have to be very careful in how we depict the punishment inflicted on the cross. Here, the late John Stott speaks wisely. In his great work The Cross of Christ, he warns us against adopting any picture of the Atonement where God the Father is seen as “a pitiless ogre whose wrath has to be assuaged.” The Father and the Son were united together “in the same holy love which made atonement necessary.” While the words satisfaction and substitution must never “in any circumstances be given up,” Stott argues, we must also be clear that “[t]he biblical gospel of atonement is of God satisfying himself by substituting himself for us.”
Charles Wesley had it exactly right:
Amazing love! How can it be
That Thou, my God, shouldst die for me?
Richard Mouw is president of Fuller Theological Seminary.
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Post by Admin on Oct 30, 2024 20:02:39 GMT -5
What ‘Jesus Wept’ Means for Manhood
Richard Mouw
Jesus’ tears counter the narrative that “men don’t cry.”
Christianity Today
August 23, 2021
Illustration by Mallory Rentsch / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons / The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Conversations in the public square of late have ranged from biblical masculinity to gender roles in the church. We need these debates, and I am a willing participant in those arguments. But for me, the topics have a personal connection to memories about tears—both my own and the tears of Jesus.
I was 12 years old when my paternal grandfather died, and when I stood in front of his coffin, I received a memorable—but as I now see it, toxic—lesson in what it means to be a “masculine” Christian. Our extended family was gathered at the funeral home the evening before the day of the memorial service, and my parents encouraged me to approach the coffin to “say your goodbyes to Grandpa.”
When I did so, I started to sob. Then I felt a hand on my shoulder, the strong grip of a favorite uncle who was a construction worker. He leaned over and said softly in my ear, “Chin up, soldier. Men don’t cry!”
That image of the Christian man as a warrior facing the challenges of life bravely and without tears stayed with me. It was reinforced by many elements in my early spiritual journey relating to being a “strong man”: singing “Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war” and “Sound the battle cry, See, the foe is nigh.” Evangelical youth rallies urged us to see our public high school biology classes and the lifestyle of “the fast crowd” as battlefields where we must hold our ground in the causes of truth and purity.
I say that my uncle’s counsel stayed with me, reinforced by “battle” language in my spiritual upbringing, but the image of masculinity that he pressed on me was also countered in many ways in my evangelical upbringing.
By the time I was in my 30s, I had learned through many experiences that it was okay—even good—for me as a Christian man to cry, to let other people see my tears. I had sobbed when I first saw my newborn son, and I had cried at key moments in marriage counseling. I had also shed tears when standing in front of many other coffins. And in doing so, particularly in funeral home settings, I had frequently acknowledged that I felt no need to live up to my uncle’s standard of manliness.
But while reading my Bible one morning, it all came together for me in a dramatic way while reading chapter 11 of John’s gospel, detailing Jesus’ visit to the sisters of Lazarus after their brother had died. Jesus at one point asks to be taken to the burial place, and then in the shortest verse in the English Bible: “Jesus wept.”
I had come upon that short verse many times. On this occasion, though, in reading about the grief of Jesus when he approached the tomb of Lazarus, I believe that the Holy Spirit confronted me with the stark contrast between my uncle’s counsel and the stark declaration of the gospel account. I heard again my uncle’s voice: “Men don’t cry.”
And at the same time, I heard the Spirit whispering to me: “Jesus wept!”
I got the message: the Lord wanted me to hear that “the man” cried. The eternal Second Person of the divine Trinity, incarnate as a Galilean man whose divine mission was to understand in his own being all the ways that we men and women suffer—that man wept.
Those issues have come to mind for me frequently in recent times as I have followed the important—and often hostile—discussions about evangelical understandings of masculinity. I am convinced that the picture of the Savior weeping in a public setting has profound importance for our discussions of masculinity. But over the years, one other thing has given me theological reasons to question my uncle’s counsel: the hymns of the evangelical community.
In her classic study of 19th-century gospel hymns, Sandra Sizer points to a profound shift away from some of the harsh depictions of the unregenerate sinner in 18th-century hymnody, with Isaac Watts’s “such a worm as I” image as one of her key examples. Sinners were characterized in sermons and songs as despicable creatures, criminals, willful rebels against the ways of godliness.
But, says Sizer, all of this “softened” in the 19th century, when variations on the theme of “these poor sinners” began to take hold in how Christians sang—and thought—about unbelievers. Unregenerate people were now viewed as wandering souls who had lost their way. They needed to be called “home.” Unbelievers were “weary,” bowed down under the burdens of guilt and despair.
Much of the hymnody of my youth, then, pointed us to a compassionate Savior. When preachers shed tears over the plight of “the lost,” they were clearly implying that Jesus understood those tears. And when it came time for us to sing an “invitation” hymn, it was often these words that we chose: “Softly and tenderly Jesus is calling, calling ‘O sinners, come home!’” Jesus was a nurturing, loving shepherd who showed “gentle care” to each of us in the “pleasant pastures” where he fed us. When, as the sovereign Lord of creation, he confronted angry waves, he revealed to us that “as a mother stills her child” he could “hush the oceans wild.”
All of that worked in subtle but very real ways in my life. It was spiritual formation that knew the embrace of a compassionate Savior. I nurture no delusions about reviving the hymnody of the past. But we do need to find ways of hearing Jesus speak “softly and tenderly” to each of our hearts.
Some might push back: Yes, it is OK for men to cry. But there are elements of the call for men to be “masculine” that we need to preserve. There are times when it is crucial for the health of the Christian community when men need to show some spine in their leadership. It’s not all about “gentle Jesus.”
My response is that to the degree that men need to show that firmness, so do women. Gentleness and boldness are not gendered callings. Of course, the Savior modeled courage and strength well. He reprimanded people. But in discussing these aspects of his ministry, we should look at the context.
Very often, the tough talk of Jesus was against male religious leaders who were committed to abusive forms of leadership. It is hard for me to imagine, for example, Jesus not being upset if he heard his male disciples talk about “those women” in the manner that is so common today when men talk off the record about women that they know.
Back to my uncle. He did not live his adult life as a person of faith. In the final months, though, a cousin visited him. He was now a weak and lonely man. In that visit, my cousin asked him if he would like to pray and ask Jesus to embrace him in love. My uncle said that he would, and they prayed together. When my cousin told me that story, I wept tears of joy.
Richard Mouw served as president of Fuller Theological Seminary for 20 years. He is the author, most recently, of All That God Cares About: Common Grace and Divine Delight.
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Post by Admin on Oct 31, 2024 11:41:13 GMT -5
Richard Mouw Wrestles with Evangelicalism, Past and Present
Tish Harrison Warren
Reading his book is like enjoying a cup of tea with a wise elder statesman.
Christianity Today
March, 2019 issue
Among my favorite books is Catholic activist Dorothy Day’s The Long Loneliness. When asked why, I often reply, “Because it’s like enjoying a cup of tea with a wise older woman who lived an astoundingly courageous life and led some of the most important movements of her generation.” Day’s book is conversational in tone and might mention names or historical events I don’t recognize. But I tolerate these quirks—in fact, I find them delightful—because I know she has something to teach me.
Richard Mouw’s Restless Faith: Holding Evangelical Beliefs in a World of Contested Labels has a similar appeal. The book wrestles with questions of identity: What is this ever-changing movement called “evangelicalism?” How do we deal with conflict over the meaning of this term and over the direction of the movement itself? And should we even use the “E-word” anymore? As an elder statesman of Reformed evangelicalism, Mouw engages these questions (and others) through stories and reflections from a lifetime of ministry.
He discusses topics as wide-ranging as contextualization and the doctrine of sin, church unity (and disunity), and the importance of mystery, even including a whole chapter on hymnody. But, like tea with an older saint, moments that at first seem like digressions are often where treasure is found, and they all wind back to the book’s main theme: why Mouw remains an evangelical, by name and belief—and why he is “restless” about it.
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Though not a memoir, the book walks through Mouw’s own story. As a brainy kid, Mouw found in evangelicalism a nourishing tradition of Christian scholarship that rescued him from fundamentalist anti-intellectualism. In the book’s most touching moment, he relates how an intimate, personal sense of the love of Jesus carried him through alcohol addiction. But he also voices frustration with parts of evangelicalism, chastising the evangelical tendency to be anti-institutional and anti-ecclesial. He remarks on his brief exit from evangelicalism—and how his “restlessness eventually led him back” to fellowship with a group of like-minded younger evangelicals who, in 1973, drafted “The Chicago Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern.” He writes about his frustrations with the “Religious Right” and the theological left (though most of these latter critiques focus on mainline churches rather than the younger cohort of “exvangelical” exiles).
Mouw espouses an ethic of “convicted civility,” and the book models his resolute charity—his insistence on framing disagreements in the fairest possible terms. Instead of lobbing arguments at ideological enemies online, he cultivates embodied relationships and stakes out thoughtful positions without a trace of snark or smugness. I found myself wondering if anyone formed (in the slightest) by Twitter and social media would be capable of writing this sort of book (or living this sort of life).
Even as someone who strives to practice the same virtues, I caught myself hoping he’d take the gloves off to pummel my most hated heresies. But, no, Mouw remains kind to the end, calling certain beliefs false yet always engaging them with curiosity, humility, and good cheer. He calls us away from a knee-jerk “prophetic” posture of incendiary rhetoric to a warmer approach that “pay careful attention to how best to bring people to see things our way.”
Those wanting a hard-hitting critique of evangelicalism may be disappointed. And some may feel that Mouw underemphasizes the frustrations of exvangelicals or people of color (though he does urge us to confront racism both systemically and relationally). But though his book is not a takedown, it is not a blind defense either. Mouw remains among the vanguard of evangelicals calling the movement back to both theological depth and a passion for social justice.
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Post by Admin on Oct 31, 2024 11:45:18 GMT -5
Uncommon Decency Christian Civility in an Uncivil World
By Richard J Mouw
A rousing exploration of civility by a seasoned evangelical Christian.
Book Review by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat
"We were created for kind and gentle living," writes Richard Mouw, who served as president of Fuller Theological Seminary for twenty years. "It is not enough merely to reclaim civility. We need to cultivate a civility that does not play fast and loose with the truth." This savvy evangelical Christian knows what he is talking about. He is a leader in interfaith conversations, particularly with Mormons, Jewish groups, and Reformed Catholics.
Mouw is the author of over 20 books on topics of social ethics, philosophy of culture, and the Christian faith. In our review of Praying at Burger King, we saluted him for standing out as a reasonable believer who always has something edifying and imaginative to say about popular culture and the Christian path. We loved this gem: "There is no place in all creation that is outside the scope of God's mercies — not even a Burger King." Here in this fast food haven Mouw discovers and rejoices in his view of every human as a divine work of art, even when they have greasy hands, talk too loudly, or throw their trash out the windows of their cars.
In Uncommon Decency, he challenges us "to reflect the kindness and gentleness of God" and to respect the dignity of strangers whose beliefs and actions may be quite different from ours. How do we achieve these two objectives as we engage in political or ethical conversations with those outside our family or community circle? We can practice civility through deep listening, empathy, curiosity, and teachability.
We were elated to read Mouw's affirmation and delight in pluralism and diversity:
"Immersion in a world of seemingly infinite options — this is the pluralistic consciousness… . Whenever we Christians celebrate our freedom to worship God as we please and live our lives in the light of our deepest convictions, we are actually rejoicing over our uniquely pluralistic consciousness."
After following this with knotty probes of being civil about sex, ways to deal with other religions, and the nature of Christian religious leadership, Mouw explores the difficulties of understanding how to act when civility is not enough. Here he discusses the might of grace and the belief in hell. Next, Mouw praises the Mennonite practice of living "in the time of God's patience."
The book ends with this fine affirmation of civility, patience, and surprise:
"This is what civility comes to, finally: an openness to God's surprises. When that openness marks our lives, we have learned patience — along with the flexibility and tentativeness and humility and awe and modesty that will inevitably come to the patient heart. And since none of this is possible without a clear sense of who we are, and to whom we belong, the patient heart will also be a place where convictedness has found its home."
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Post by Admin on Oct 31, 2024 11:48:15 GMT -5
Richard Mouw on Disagreeing with Convicted Civility
By Richard Mouw
In this address, Dr. Richard Mouw encourages a posture of “convicted civility,” navigating conflicts with both conviction and civility. Dr. Mouw originally delivered these remarks to the 2017 General Synod of the Reformed Church in America, an annual gathering where the denomination makes decisions about how to do ministry together. At times, he speaks specifically to conflicts facing those in the room. But his message is applicable to navigating a variety of conflicts and disagreements. The speech was slightly modified for a written format.
In my career as a scholar, teacher, writer, speaker, I have spent most of the last three decades thinking a lot about the topic of “civility.” How do we engage in civil relationships with people with whom we have deep and profound disagreements? And I found a very stimulating way of thinking about this from reading a book by Dr. Martin Marty. He says, “It is a fact of public life and when it comes to religion and politics, the committed lack civility and the civil often lack conviction. And what we need is convicted civility.” I reflected on that historically, theologically, philosophically, and pastorally, and practically. And it seems to me that’s precisely the point that is regularly made in the New Testament. It isn’t that the Bible gives us convictions and then we somehow add civility to that; we need to have civility as one of the convictions.
Standing for truth with gentleness and reverence
This comes through very clearly in 1 Peter 3:15. And this is a verse I was raised on in the more evangelical part of the Reformed Church in America. As a teenager, I heard this over and over again. “Always be ready to give to anyone who asks of you a reason for the hope that lies within you.” Stand up for the truth. (They were usually thinking of our public high school biology teachers with stand up for the truth.) Don’t compromise. Don’t be afraid. Be courageous. Oppose false teachings and oppose immoral behavior. But they seldom went on to the next part. “Yet do it with gentleness and reverence.”
And we really need to be working these days on the gentleness and the reverence. And that is not easy. The writer to the Hebrews says that we have to strive to live at peace with all human beings. It is not an easy thing. It is especially not an easy thing within the Christian community.
The most difficult kind of disagreement
I’ve been involved for the last 17 years in convening with a dear friend from Brigham Young University an evangelical Mormon dialogue. I’ve been very involved with the American Jewish Committee and getting engaged in evangelical-Jewish dialogue. And I have done quite a bit in recent years with evangelical and Muslim dialogue. And a reporter asked me recently, “What’s the most difficult kind of dialogue that you have experienced?” And I said, “With my fellow Reformed Christians!”
In many ways that should not be surprising. When I meet for two-and-a-half days as I will next month with my Mormon friends, we are not going to have to come up with a consensus statement on anything afterward. We are not going to vote on anything when it is all done. But within our own communities, there is certainly a lot at stake.
All of us have taken vows to be faithful to the supreme authority of Scripture and to preserve the unity of the church, but also to be faithful to our confessional traditions. There is a lot of pressure on us to stand up for the truth and make distinctions and the like.
And so it should not surprise us that our own discussions with each other can be quite heated. My responsibility in interfaith conversations is to simply learn and work at clearing up misconceptions. But things are different within my own part of the Christian community where we expect regenerated hearts and minds to be clear about the truth.
So how do we handle this kind of conflict? I believe there are significant guidelines within the Christian community for engaging in serious disagreements in a spirit of gentleness and respect for each other. Let me talk about a couple of guidelines.
Understanding and being truthful about what others believe
One obvious guideline: we must make sure that we are being truthful about the other person’s views. This means asking them what they believe, rather than telling them what they believe. It is always important in serious theological debate to say things of this sort: “So is this a good way to describe your view?” or “help me understand you better on this.” It is about really attempting to speak the truth and to represent the views of people with whom we disagree truthfully.
G.K. Chesterton put it very nicely when he said, “Idolatry is committed not merely by setting up false gods, but also by setting up false devils.” There is a lot of demonization that goes on in the intra-Christian discussions and debates about matters on which we disagree. So one of our goals as Christians when we are arguing with each other is not to win by making rhetorical points, but to seek to clarify what the real issues are in the hope of finding out where and whether we really disagree.
I mention that I have been deeply engaged for 17 years now in dialogue with representatives of the LDS community. I saw an advertisement that a counter-cult speaker was going to be giving a talk to an evangelical group on the truth about Mormonism. And so I went to hear and he actually said some helpful things. But he also said some things that I know my Mormon friends simply would reject.
My good friend Robert Millet from Brigham Young University had recently written a wonderful little book published by a Mormon press entitled, So What Happened to the Cross? (in Mormonism). He talks about the need to spend more emphasis in Mormonism on the finished work of Jesus Christ on the cross of Calvary, which is a theme that has actually been presented in some addresses to 14 million Mormons around the world by a couple of the general authorities in Salt Lake City.
The speaker at the talk I attended said that Mormons hate the cross of Jesus Christ. I went up to him afterwards and said to him, “You made some good points tonight but you really ought to read some stuff by Mormons and listen to some of the talks that are being given to Mormon audiences. Because Mormons do not hate the cross of Jesus Christ. More and more they have been emphasizing the finished work of Christ on the cross of Calvary.” And he said, “that is the problem with you intellectuals, you want to make all these nice distinctions. We don’t have time for that. We are in a battle for the truth, and we’ve got to win.”
There is something ironic about saying that, in a battle for the truth, we have to utter falsehoods and to speak less than truthful things. We have an obligation not to bear false witness against our neighbor and that applies very much to the kinds of arguments that we have with each other.
Spiritual preparation for conflict
I actually want to draw wisdom with you from folks in our own Reformed tradition, especially John Calvin. And I am going to begin by pointing to a wonderful passage in Calvin’s Institutes where John Calvin is talking about just war theory. He is saying that sometimes nations need to go to war against each other. But when a leader of a nation is thinking about going to war, there has to be a kind of preparation that takes place. And this is what he says:
“It is the duty of all magistrates here to guard particularly against giving vent to their passions, even in the slightest degree. Rather if they have to punish, let them not be carried away with headlong anger or be seized with hatred or burn with implacable severity. Let them also as Augustine says, have pity on the common nature in the one whose special fault they are punishing. But if they must arm themselves against the enemy, that is the armed robber, let them not lightly seek occasion to do so. Indeed let them not accept the occasion when offered unless they are driven to it by extreme necessity. And let them not allow themselves to be swayed by any private affection, but be led by concern for the people alone. Otherwise they very wickedly abuse their power which has been given them not for their own advantage but for the benefit and service of others.”
Now John Calvin was a good Calvinist. He understands that there is within each of us a deep sinful tendency to put the best possible interpretation on our own motives and the worst possible interpretation on the people with whom we disagree. What Calvin is saying here is, as an act of spiritual preparation and discernment, reverse that process. Look into yourself and ask yourself questions like this: do I just want to win? Am I trying to think up clever rhetorical points in order to win the argument? Am I guided by implacable severity? Am I guided by desire to put the person down with whom I disagree?
This is really the Psalm 139 exercise. The Psalmist says, “Lord, you understand all thoughts and your thoughts are above our thoughts.” But there comes a point where the Psalmist actually sounds kind of arrogant. He says, “Lord, I hate your enemies with a perfect hatred.” Then it is as if he stops and he says, wait a minute. And the very next thing the Psalmist says is: “Search me and know my heart. Try me, test me, and know my thoughts. And see if there is any wicked way in me. And lead me in the way everlasting.”
Look into yourself, John Calvin is saying, and make sure that you are not being guided by sinful motives, sinful passions, sinful desires, sinful projects. And then he says, “And then reflect on the common nature that you share with the person with whom you disagree.” Think about the other person, and reflect on how God views them rather than the way you currently view them.
Seeing people through God’s eyes
One of my favorite spiritual writers is Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. As a 15-year-old girl, she wanted to become a Carmelite nun and go to a Carmelite cloister. She was too young to be allowed to do that. But she came from a wealthy family in France and pestered the bishop. So the bishop finally sent her to Rome. She pestered the Pope, and the Pope finally allowed her go into a Carmelite cloister. She died before she was thirty, but she kept a regular journal in that cloister.
Saint Thérèse of Lisieux was passionately in love with Jesus, and she talked a lot about Jesus. She wanted to see things the way Jesus sees them. She wanted to feel about things the way Jesus feels about them.
And at one point she says this:
“One of the nuns managed to irritate me, whatever she did or said, the devil was mixed up in it. For it was certainly the devil who made me see so many disagreeable traits in her. Because I did want to give way to my natural dislike of her, I told myself that charity should not only be a matter of feeling but should show itself in deeds. So I set myself to do for this sister just what I should have done for someone I loved most dearly. Every time I met her, I prayed for her and offered God all her virtues and her merits. And I was sure that this would greatly delight Jesus.” And then this wonderful line: “For every artist likes to have his works praised, and the Divine Artist of souls is pleased when we do not halt outside the exterior of the sanctuary where he has chosen to dwell. We go inside and admire its beauty.”
Acting civilly toward other persons is something like art appreciation. My wife is an art historian. Our son says that means his father has sat on the steps of some of the great art museums of the world. I have to work a lot harder than my wife does at art appreciation, but I do work at it. Art appreciation does not come easily for many of us. And what Saint Thérèse of Lisieux is saying is that the kind of art appreciation that goes into engaging fellow creatures of God, fellow followers of Jesus Christ, is not just to talk about the unity of the church in some abstract way, but it is to talk about a very real effort to understand and to appreciate each other as works of the Divine Artist.
While I went to Western Seminary, I worked the night shift at the Donnelly Mirror Company. I was a prism inspector; every hour, I had to inspect at least 50 or 60 prisms for rearview mirrors, which they produced for General Motors. It was tough on the eyes, and so at the end of every hour, you had to stop and just relax a bit. I had Hebrew vocabulary cards and church history books that I would bring with me because I really wanted to take that time studying. But there was a night watchman who came around, and I really did not like him very much. He didn’t seem to me a very interesting conversationalist, and he always wanted to talk. I did not find him very interesting. I resented the way he wanted to talk to me all the time.
One evening, I was studying for a church history test the next morning, and Jeb came up and he said, “You really like books, don’t you?” And I said, “Yes, Jeb, I really do like books, and I really have to read them as well.” And he said, “Yeah, Ernie liked books, too.” “Ernie, who?” “Ernie Hemingway.” I said, “What do you know about Ernest Hemingway?” “Well,” he says, “I was his hunting and fishing guide for a whole summer. We would be out there fishing all day and come back to his little pup tent. Ernie had this flashlight and he had a book. I would go to sleep and wake up, and there was Ernie, still reading that book. That Ernie, he really loved books.”
All of a sudden, I saw Jeb very differently. I’d been an English major as an undergraduate, and this was a guy who actually slept in a tent with Ernest Hemingway. I wanted to talk to him because he was a friend of Ernie.
Sisters and brothers, we need to see the people with whom we are gathered here as friends of Jesus, as the works of art of the Divine Artist. And that has to transform not only the ways in which we see each other, which is a very important part of the process, but then the ways in which we engage each other: with gentleness and reverence as friends of Jesus who have been created and shaped and restored by the sovereign grace of God.
The importance of humility
Talking about the love of neighbor, John Calvin says, the neighbor whom we are commanded to love includes even the most remote person, extending beyond the ties of kinship or acquaintanceship or of neighborhood. “It is a love,” he says, “that should embrace the whole human race without exception in a single feeling of love with no distinction between barbarian and Greek, worthy and unworthy, friend and enemy, since all should be contemplated in God and not in themselves.” And then he quotes Augustine approvingly, “I was always exceedingly delighted with that saying of Chrysostom, ‘The foundation of our philosophy is humility;’ and yet more pleased with that of Augustine: ‘As the orator, when asked, What is the first precept in eloquence? answered, Delivery: What is the second? Delivery: What is the third? Delivery: so if you ask me concerning the precepts of the Christian religion, I will answer, first, second, and third, Humility.’”
The importance of humility goes back to the posture of Psalm 139: looking into ourselves with willingness to engage in self-critique and self-examination. But here we are focusing on debates within the Christian community where what we share in common with folks we disagree with is more than simply the fact of our humanness: we share a unity in Jesus Christ. And the Lord has made it very clear that he wants us to make real efforts to give visible expression of that unity–in the current arguments about sexuality, for example.
For the record, I take my place on the conservative side of the spectrum and have articulated the traditional viewpoint regarding same-sex relations and practices and different contexts. But I have discovered the importance of not grouping all the folks I disagree with on these matters in the same theological category.
About ten years ago I got into an argument with a Presbyterian minister who accused me of being a homophobe, and I wanted to get through the right kinds of questions. At a certain point I said to him, “well how do you interpret Romans 1?”And he said, “I don’t interpret Romans 1. I don’t like Romans 1. I don’t like Paul. I never read Paul. I never preach from Paul. I just don’t pay any attention to that at all.” I have to say, it is pretty hard to go on in a discussion within a Reformed framework when a person starts with that position.
But my good friend Barbara Wheeler and I have gone around the Presbyterian world trying to model how you can disagree on questions of same-sexuality and still engage each other and hang in there together. If I say to Barbara Wheeler, “how do you interpret Romans 1?” she will say, “Richard, let’s open the Word and let’s read Romans 1.” And we will go through it. She and I don’t agree on the interpretation but it is an argument that takes place under the authority of God’s Word. And I want to say that it is not only a good thing to have arguments that take place over difficult questions under the authority of God’s Word, but we desperately need those arguments today. I need to be in dialogue with Barbara Wheeler and others with whom I disagree, especially if they are people who are willing to engage the text and to discuss together what it means for us to be obedient to what God has revealed about God’s self in the Scriptures.
As followers of Jesus Christ we should be pointing our neighbors to a better way of managing conflict, but unfortunately it is often more of the same within the Christian community.
To make that observation is not to downplay the importance of serious theological debate. Being clear about the reason for our hope is an obligation that requires as much theological clarity as we can muster as finite human beings. That means that we need to keep engaging each other, while avoiding the theological mean-spiritedness that comes all too naturally to those of us who talk much about defending the truth of God’s Word.
We need these arguments. We need to be engaging each other for the sake of pastoral outreach to people who are wrestling with these issues, many of them in our own congregations.
The human impact of church conflict
I got a phone call last year from a friend of mine who is an elder in a very conservative congregation in the Reformed Presbyterian world. “Richard, I’ve just got to talk to you,” he said. “We had the worst elders meeting you could imagine last evening, and it went from 7:00 to midnight. We took a tentative vote at the end, and I voted against everybody else on this and I just need to check it out with you.”
“Here’s the situation,” he said. “Several months ago a married lesbian couple with two children started attending our worship services. And a month or so ago, they came to the pastor and they said, ‘We have decided to follow Christ. We have become Christians and we would like to join the church and we’d like our children baptized.’ Our elders meeting last night was all about what we should do. The final recommendation that everyone but me voted on in favor of was this: that they can only join our church if they get separated and get divorced.”
He said to me, “I just have a question. I just need you to answer this question: Am I crazy for not wanting to vote in favor of that?”
I don’t have all the answers on this. But I want to make three observations about that conversation and what it implies for all of us, dealing pastorally in the Christian world in contemporary life.
The first observation is this. I told him he was not crazy. I told him that I admired his sanity. There is something very strange to my Reformed ears about saying that this is the only way that this couple and their children can join the church. It is very strange to my Reformed ears, as someone brought up in this denomination hearing the witnesses of missionaries to Africa and the Middle East about polygamy and the like.
Secondly, as we think about a case like that, we should also make sure that we are thinking about those two children. You know we as Reformed Christians in our confessions and in our liturgical forms believe that to apply the waters of baptism to a child is an occasion on which God does something. We are not just making parental vows to bring them up right. And we are not just holding up the baby, that’s ok to do this, holding them up and saying this is the newest member of our congregation, be sure to support our church education program. But God has done something.
God has signed and sealed the promises of his covenant with the child to whom we have administered the water of baptism. And I think it is a very important question. In that situation, that concrete situation, we really mean to say that God refuses to sign and seal God’s covenant promises to those children unless the two people who are the most important people in the world to them right now separate and get divorced. I’m just not prepared to say that theologically. And I think we need to think about our theology of the covenant, the theology of baptism, the theology of the sacraments, and even our theology of church membership as we wrestle with these challenges.
And then the third thing I want to say to you is, don’t consider this story to be a weird case that somebody else had. We are all going to face situations like that. In fact, people in your congregations, wherever your congregation is across the theological spectrum, are facing those issues. They may not talk about it but they are facing it.
Here’s an example: I spoke at a very strong evangelical Presbyterian congregation. And afterward, I was sitting at a table with a couple from that congregation. They commended me for standing up for the traditional view and influencing things for the good, saying, we need people like you who are really willing to follow the Word of God.
I started to get nervous about their commendations, and I thought I had better inject a somewhat different tone into the conversation. So I said, “Yes, thank you, but we really need to think new pastoral thoughts on this in the lives of our congregations. It is a simple fact that we evangelicals have in the past and in the present been inexcusably cruel to persons who experience same-sex attraction.”
They looked at each other, and there was something that happened in the look that happened between them. And it was as if the husband said to his wife, “Yes, tell him.”
She said, “Thank you for saying that. Our son is gay and he is in a committed relationship. When they came home, when they came out, and they told us that they were going to move in together and they wanted us to know, my husband and I talked about it and prayed about it. And we said to them, ‘Give us about 15 minutes and we feel like we’ve just got to explain to you where we disagree with you on this. And after that explanation, we will never talk about this again because we love you; we love both of you. We want to love you not on any condition that you have to agree with us on this. We want you to know that we want you to come home any time you want because we love you and we want to be with you.’”
And then she said, “Dr. Mouw, they came home for Christmas and they agreed to go with us to a church service on Christmas Eve.” She started to weep, and he did too. And she said, “As we were walking out of the church on Christmas Eve, my son put his arm around me and said, ‘Mom, I am so glad we came to church this evening.’” And she said, “We just want them to be a part of the church.”
As somebody who works within the tradition on this, I have an obligation to their son and his partner. I have an obligation to them to be sure that I am not being glib in my views, that I am not simply relying on arguments that I have felt compelling in the past, that I have to wrestle with these questions and I need to be in conversation with people who are willing to engage these issues even when they disagree with me under the authority of God’s Word. We need that kind of thing.
Finding new ways to serve Christ in the present day
So my prayer for the RCA, the denomination that has nurtured me, the church where I received the waters of baptism and where I made my public profession of faith in Jesus Christ, is that this denomination will find new ways together to serve the Savior in our present-day culture with its racism, its sexual trafficking, its demeaning of creation, its mean-spiritedness, its neglect of the poor, the marginalized, the stranger in the land, and its promiscuity across the spectrum of orientations and attractions in our present cultural context. And that as Reformed Christians we will receive a new passion for the proclamation of the gospel.
I’ve got to quote the Canons of Dort here. The second head of doctrine, article five (you folks have a new translation of it, but I love the old translation). It goes like this: “The gospel must be proclaimed promiscuously and without distinction to all peoples.” This is the only example you will ever find of Calvinist promiscuity being commended. We have a special call today together to proclaim promiscuously and without distinction the call of the gospel to come to the cross of Calvary where we receive the kind of power, the kind of renewal, the kind of transformation, the kind of confidence that allows to say: “That our only comfort in life and in death is that we are not our own, but we belong body and soul to our faithful Savior Jesus Christ who has fully paid for all – all of our sins with his precious blood and calls us hereafter to serve Him in the cause of the gospel and the kingdom of Jesus Christ.”
Richard Mouw
Richard Mouw is president emeritus and professor of faith and public life at Fuller Theological Seminary.
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Post by Admin on Oct 31, 2024 11:51:46 GMT -5
Richard Mouw Speaks about Convicted Civility
June 10, 2017
In the evening on Friday, June 9, Richard Mouw spoke to the synod about civil disagreement—why Reformed Christians struggle with it and why we really need to improve.
He began with a quote from Martin Marty: “It is a fact of public life that when it comes to religion and politics, ‘the committed lack civility’ and the ‘civil often lack conviction.’ What we need is convicted civility.”
“It seems to me,” said Mouw, “that that is precisely the point made in the New Testament.”
Mouw said that Christians should stand for truth “with gentleness and reverence” (1 Peter 3:16), acknowledging that to do so is hard for Christians because “all of us have taken vows to be faithful to Scripture, to the unity of the church, and to our confessions.”
However, he believes that it is important for Reformed Christians to engage in conversation about our disagreements, and he offered suggestions for having such conversations.
“First, we must make sure we’re being truthful about other person’s beliefs,” Mouw said. “This means asking people what they believe rather than telling them what they believe. It’s saying, ‘Is this a good way to describe your view? Can you help me understand what you believe?’”
Mouw’s second suggestion was to prepare for disagreements by evaluating your own spirit.
“As Reformed people, we understand that we all have motives to think the best of ourselves,” he said. “So as an act of spiritual preparation and discernment, reverse the process. Look into yourself and ask questions like, ‘Do I just want to win? Am I guided by implacable severity? Am I guided by a desire to put the person down with whom I disagree?’”
Mouw advised trying to see those with whom you disagree through God’s eyes, as “friends of Jesus.” He also emphasized the importance of grounding conversations about subjects upon which we disagree in the Bible.
“Within the Christian community, we share more in common than just our humanness,” he said. “We share our faith in Jesus Christ. And the Lord has made it very clear that he wants us to make a visible expression of unity.”
As his speech drew to a close, Mouw offered a prayer: “My prayer for the RCA, is that this denomination will find ways together to serve the savior in our present-day culture, through racism, sexual trafficking, mean-spiritedness, endless promiscuity—promiscuity across the spectrum of sexual attraction—to proclaim the gospel.”
After Mouw spoke, delegates engaged in table discussions about what serving the savior together should look like for the RCA. These discussions are a starting point for the larger discussion proposed by general secretary Tom De Vries in his report.
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Post by Admin on Oct 31, 2024 11:53:00 GMT -5
Dr. Richard Mouw – 2017 RCA General Synod address
June 9, 2017
[Introduction by Daniel Gillett] Dr. Mouw is President Emeritus and Professor of Faith and Public Life at Fuller Theological Seminary. He was raised in the RCA, attended Northwestern College and also Western Seminary. Dr. Mouw tells us that he is a Calvinist because he not only believes in sovereign grace but because he has received a lot of it. So please, General Synod, let’s welcome Dr. Mouw to address us.
Thank you. I am not only honored to be here but it’s really a great personal privilege as a product of this denomination having spent my entire youth in a pastor’s home in the RCA, and it has shaped me in profound and deep ways in my own journey of faith.
When I was in my late teens, my dad and I drove from our home in New Jersey to Buck Hill Falls, Pennsylvania for visiting a day at the General Synod in that year. And it was for me an awesome experience. And the person who presided over the synodical sessions that year was Dr. Howard Hageman, who was one of the heroes of my youth. I think I heard Dr. Hageman preach when I was, for the first time when I was thirteen years old and I can still quote the text and tell you the points that he covered in that sermon. And he became a good friend in my adult life. But he had a very unique way of presiding over synod, and the one thing I remember is that whenever he was introducing a new stage in the proceedings, he would begin by saying in a very stern voice, “Fathers and brethren.” And I am just so grateful to the Lord, that I could begin this evening saying, “Sisters and brothers in the Lord Jesus Christ.”
You folks have already been facing the last couple of years and continue to face some difficult issues, controversial issues. But we need the kinds of discussions that we are having. And we need to carry them on in a certain spirit. I am just going to have eight slides tonight, nothing fancy. One of my good friends, Barbara Wheeler, the retired president of Auburn Seminary in New York City, says, “Power corrupts and Powerpoint corrupts absolutely.” I consider that to be a very Anabaptist view and I have a Reformed version of it.
For those of you who know Richard Niebuhr’s five types of ”Christ and Culture” relationships, we can superimpose them on Powerpoint:
Christ against Powerpoint,
The Christ of Powerpoint,
Christ above Powerpoint,
Christ and Powerpoint in tension
And Christ transforming Powerpoint.
And I hold to the fifth view. But at this stage in Christ’s transforming work over Powerpoint, I think modesty is a good way to approach the issues.
But in my career as a scholar, teacher, writer, speaker, I have spent most of the last three decades thinking a lot about the topic of “civility.” How do we engage in civil relationships with people with whom we have deep and profound disagreements? And he actually got into for me a very stimulating way of thinking about this from reading a book by Dr. Martin Marty. A wonderful little observation about civility, he says, “It is a fact of public life and when it comes to religion and politics, the committed lack civility and the civil often lack conviction. And what we need is convicted civility.” And as I reflected on that historically, theologically, philosophically, and pastorally, practically, it seems to me that was precisely the point that is regularly made in the New Testament. That it isn’t that somehow the Bible gives us convictions and then we somehow add civility to that, but the need to have civility as one of the convictions.
This comes through very clearly in 1 Peter 3:15. And this is a verse I was raised on in our world, the more evangelical part of the Reformed Church in America, where we also reach out to broader evangelicals in a lot of ways. And as a teenager, I heard this over and over again. “Always be ready to give to anyone who asks of you a reason for the hope that lies within you.” Stand up for the truth. (They were usually thinking of our public high school biology teachers with stand up for the truth.) Don’t compromise. Don’t be afraid. Be courageous. Oppose false teachings and oppose immoral behavior. But they seldom went on to the next part. “Yet do it with gentleness and reverence.”
And we really need to be working these days on the gentleness and the reverence. And that is not easy. The writer to the Hebrews says that we have to strive to live at peace with all human beings. It is not an easy thing. And I want to say especially not an easy thing within the Christian community.
I’ve been involved for the last seventeen years in convening with a dear friend from Brigham Young University, an evangelical Mormon dialogue. I’ve been very involved with the American Jewish committee and getting engaged in evangelical Jewish dialogue. And have done quite a bit in recent years with evangelical and Muslim dialogue. And a reporter asked me recently, “What’s the most difficult kind of dialogue that you have experienced?” And I said, “With my fellow Reformed Christians!” And in many ways that should not be surprising because when I meet for two and a half days as I will next month with my Mormon friends, we are not going to have to come up with a consensus statement on anything afterward. We are not going to vote on anything when it is all done. But within our own communities, there is certainly a lot at stake. Because all of us have taken vows to be faithful to the supreme authority of Scripture. And to preserve the unity of the Church. But also to be faithful to our confessional traditions. And so there is a lot of pressure on us to stand up for the truth and make distinctions and the like.
And so it should not surprise us that our own discussions with each other can be quite heated. And my responsibility in those other conversations is to simply learn the lessons and to work at clearing up misconceptions. But things are different within my own part of the Christian community where we expect regenerated hearts and minds to be clear about the truth.
So how do we handle this kind of conflict? And I believe there are also significant guidelines within the Christian community for engaging in serious disagreements in a spirit of gentleness and respect for each other. Let me talk about a couple of guidelines.
One obvious guideline is this: that we must make sure that we are being truthful about the other person’s views. And this means asking them what they believe, rather than telling them what they believe. It is always important in serious theological debate to say things of this sort: So is this a good way to describe your view? Or help me understand you better on this. Let me try this out, really attempting to speak the truth and to represent the views of people with whom we disagree truthfully.
G.K. Chesterton put it very nicely when he said, “Idolatry is committed not merely by setting up false gods, but also by setting up false devils.” There is a lot of demonization that goes on in the intra-Christian discussions and debates about matters on which we disagree. So one of our goals as Christians when we are arguing with each other is not to win by making rhetorical points, but to seek to clarify what the real issues are in the hope of finding out where and whether we really disagree.
I mention that I have been deeply engaged for seventeen years now in dialogue with representatives of the LDS community. I saw an advertisement that a counter-cult speaker was going to be giving a talk to an evangelical group on the truth about Mormonism. And so I went to hear and he actually said some helpful things. But he also said some things that I know my Mormon friends simply would reject. My good friend Robert Millet from Brigham Young University had recently written a wonderful little book published by a Mormon press entitled, “So What Happened to the Cross?” (in Mormonism). And he talks about the need to spend more emphasis in Mormonism on the finished work of Jesus Christ on the cross of Calvary, which is a theme that has actually been presented in some of the addresses to 14 million Mormons around the world by a couple of the general authorities in Salt Lake City.
So this person said that evening that Mormons hate the cross of Jesus Christ. I went up to him afterwards and made the mistake of introducing myself so that did not go well after that. But I said to him, you made some good points tonight but you really ought to read some stuff by Mormons and listen to some of the talks that are being given to Mormon audiences. Because Mormons do not hate the cross of Jesus Christ. More and more they have been emphasizing the finished work of Christ on the cross of Calvary. And he said, “that is the problem with you intellectuals, you want to make all these nice distinctions. We don’t have time for that. We are in a battle for the truth and we’ve got to win.”
There is something ironic about saying that in a battle for the truth, we have to utter falsehoods and to speak less than truthful things. We have an obligation not to bear false witness against our neighbor and that applies very much to the kinds of arguments that we have with each other.
And so I actually want to draw wisdom with you this evening from folks in our own Reformed tradition, and especially John Calvin. And I am going to begin by pointing to a wonderful passage in Calvin’s Institutes where John Calvin is talking about just war theory. That is he is saying that sometimes, and he was not a pacifist, sometimes nations need to go to war against each other. But when a leader of a nation is thinking about going to war, there has to be a kind of preparation that takes place. And this is what he says: “It is the duty of all magistrates here to guard particularly against giving vent to their passions, even in the slightest degree. Rather if they have to punish, let them not be carried away with headlong anger or be seized with hatred or burn with implacable severity. Let them also as Augustine says, have pity on the common nature in the one whose special fault they are punishing. But if they must arm themselves against the enemy, that is the armed robber, let them not lightly seek occasion to do so. Indeed let them not accept the occasion when offered unless they are driven to it by extreme necessity. And let them not allow themselves to be swayed by any private affection, but be led by concern for the people alone. Otherwise they very wickedly abuse their power which has been given them not for their own advantage but for the benefit and service of others.”
Now John Calvin was a good Calvinist! And he understands that there is within each of us a deep sinful tendency to put the best possible interpretation on our own motives. And the worst possible interpretation on the people with whom we disagree. And really what Calvin is saying here is, and it applies to intellectual warfare and spiritual warfare as well, he is saying, as an act of spiritual preparation and discernment, reverse that process. And first of all, look into yourself and ask yourself questions like this: do I just want to win? Am I trying to think up clever rhetorical points in order to win the argument? Am I guided by implacable severity? Am I guided by desire to put the person down with whom I disagree?
This is really the Psalm 139 exercise. The Psalmist and incidentally, it is a very good airplane Psalm, especially if you fly in the morning: “If I take the wings of the morning and fly to the uttermost parts of the sea, thou art there. If I ascend above or descend beneath, you are always there, Lord.” Then he gets into “Lord, you understand all thoughts and your thoughts are above our thoughts.” But there comes a point where the Psalmist actually sounds kind of arrogant. He says, “Lord, I hate your enemies with a perfect hatred.” Then it is as if he stops and he says, wait a minute. And the very next thing the Psalmist says is: “Search me and know my heart. Try me, test me, and know my thoughts. And see if there is any wicked way in me. And lead me in the way everlasting.”
Look into yourself, John Calvin is saying, and make sure that you are not being guided by sinful motives, sinful passions, sinful desires, sinful projects. And then he says, “And then reflect on the common nature that you share with the person with whom you disagree.” Think about the other person, and reflect on how God views them rather than the way you currently view them.
One of my favorite spiritual writers is Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. Many of you know, a 15-year-old girl who wanted to become a Carmelite nun, go to a Carmelite cloister. She was too young to be allowed to do that. She came from a wealthy family in France. Pestered the bishop, the bishop finally sent her to Rome. She pestered the Pope and the Pope finally allowed her go into a Carmelite cloister. She died before she was thirty, but she kept a regular journal in that cloister. And Saint Thérèse of Lisieux was passionately in love with Jesus and she talked a lot about Jesus. She wanted to see things the way Jesus sees them, she wanted to feel about things the way Jesus feels about them. And at one point she says this, “One of the nuns managed to irritate me, whatever she did or said, the devil was mixed up in it. For it was certainly the devil who made me see so many disagreeable traits in her. Because I did want to give way to my natural dislike of her, I told myself that charity should not only be a matter of feeling but should show itself in deeds. So I set myself to do for this sister just what I should have done for someone I loved most dearly. Every time I met her, I prayed for her and offered God all her virtues and her merits. And I was sure that this would greatly delight Jesus.” And then this wonderful line: “For every artist likes to have his works praised, and the Divine Artist of souls is pleased when we do not halt outside the exterior of the sanctuary where he has chosen to dwell. We go inside and admire its beauty.”
Acting civilly toward other persons is something like art appreciation. My wife is an art historian and our son says that means his father has sat on the steps of some of the great art museums of the world. But I do work at it. I have to work a lot harder than my wife does at it. Art appreciation does not come easily for many of us. And what Saint Thérèse of Lisieux is saying is that the kind of art appreciation that goes into engaging fellow creatures of God, fellow followers of Jesus Christ, that there is a certain way of seeing the other and I think it is very important as we gather here that it is not just something to talk about the unity of the church in some abstract way, but it is to talk about a very real effort to understand and to appreciate each other as works of the Divine Artist.
Driving around Holland today and when I went to Western Seminary, I worked at the Donnelly Mirror Company. I had the night shift. I would go into work at 11 o’clock and get done at 7:00 in the morning. And then go to seminary classes all morning and try to get some sleep in the afternoon. And I was a prism inspector and so every hour, I had to inspect at least 50 or 60 prisms which were rear view mirrors. The Donnelly Mirror Company had a contract with General Motors and they produced the rear view mirrors for General Motors. And it was tough on the eyes and so at the end of the last ten minutes of every hour you had to stop and just relax a bit. And I had Hebrew vocabulary cards and I had church history books that I would bring, and I really wanted to take that time studying. But there was a night watchman who came around, and I really did not like him very much. He didn’t seem to me a very interesting conversationalist, and he always wanted to talk and I just did not find him very interesting. And I resented the way he wanted to talk to me all the time.
And one evening I was studying for a church history test the next morning, and Jeb came up and he said, “You really like books don’t you?” And I said, “Yes, Jeb, I really do like books and I really have to read them as well.” And he said, “Yeah, Ernie liked books too.” “Ernie who?” “Ernie Hemingway.” I said, “What do you know about Ernest Hemingway?” “Well,” he says, “I was his hunting and fishing guide for a whole summer. Yeah, we would be out there fishing all day, and come back to his little pup tent, and Ernie had this flashlight and he had a book. And I would go to sleep and wake up and there was Ernie still reading that book. That Ernie he really loved books.”
And all of a sudden, I saw Jeb very differently. This is a guy, (I’d been an English major as an undergraduate), and this is a guy who actually slept in a tent with Ernest Hemingway. I wanted to talk to him because he was a friend of Ernie.
And I want to say, sisters and brothers, we need to see the people with whom we are gathered here as friends of Jesus, as the works of art of the Divine Artist. And that has to transform not only the ways in which we see each other, which is a very important part of the process, but then the ways in which we engage each other with gentleness and reverence as friends of Jesus who have been created and shaped and restored by the sovereign grace of God. Friends of Jesus – works of art – an important part of who we are as Christians.
A little more from John Calvin. John Calvin says: “Talking about the love of neighbor, he says, the neighbor whom we are commanded to love includes even the most remote person, extending beyond the ties of kinship or acquaintanceship or of neighborhood. It is a love,” he says, “that should embrace to the whole human race without exception in a single feeling of love with no distinction between barbarian and Greek, worthy and unworthy, friend and enemy, since all – and this goes back to seeing each other – since all should be contemplated in God and not in themselves.” And then he says, “I’ve always been excitingly delighted with the words of Chrysostom, the foundation of our philosophy is humility and still more with those of Augustine. And so he quotes Saint Augustine approvingly: “As the order when asked what is the first precept in eloquence, answered delivery, what is the second, delivery, what is the third, delivery. So if you ask me in regard to the precepts of the Christian religion, I will ask first, second, and third, humility.” That is great stuff coming from John Calvin.
The importance of humility and again that goes back to the posture of Psalm 139, looking into ourselves, willingness to engage in self-critique, self-examination, but here we are focusing on debates within the Christian community where what we share in common with folks we disagree with is more than simply the fact of our humanness, we share a unity in Jesus Christ. And the Lord has made it very clear that in the current arguments, that the Lord has made it very clear that he wants us to make real efforts to give visible expression of that unity in the current arguments about sexuality, for example.
Let me just say, for the record, that I take my place on the conservative side of the spectrum and have articulated the traditional viewpoint regarding same-sex relations and practices and different contexts. But I have discovered the importance of not grouping all the folks I disagree with on these matters in the same theological category.
About ten years ago I got into an argument with a member of the PCUSA and I got into an argument with a Presbyterian minister who accused me of being a homophobe and I wanted to get through the right kinds of questions. And at a certain point I said to him, well how do you interpret Romans 1. And he said, “I don’t interpret Romans 1. I don’t like Romans 1. I don’t like Paul. I never read Paul. I never preach from Paul. I just don’t pay any attention to that at all.” I have to say it is pretty hard to go on in a discussion within a Reformed framework when a person starts with that position.
But my good friend Barbara Wheeler and I have gone around to the Presbyterian world trying to model how you can disagree on questions of same-sexuality and still engage each other and still stay together, hang in there together. I want to say this that if I say to Barbara Wheeler, how do you interpret Romans 1, she will say, “Richard, let’s open the Word and let’s read Romans 1.” And we will go through it and she and I don’t agree on the interpretation but it is an argument that takes place under the authority of God’s Word. And I want to say that it is not only a good thing to have arguments that take place over difficult questions under the authority of God’s Word, but we desperately need those arguments today. I need to be in dialogue with Barbara Wheeler and others with whom I disagree on especially if they are people who are willing to engage the text and to discuss together what it means for us to be obedient to what God has revealed God’s self in the Scriptures.
And so as followers of Jesus Christ we should be pointing our neighbors to a better way of managing conflict, but unfortunately it is often more of the same within the Christian community. To make that observation is not to downplay the importance of serious theological debate, argumentation. Being clear about the reason for our hope is an obligation that requires as much theological clarity as we can muster as finite human beings, and that means that we need to keep engaging each other, avoiding a spirit of theological mean spiritedness that comes all too naturally to those of us who talk much about defending the truth of God’s Word.
We need these arguments, we need to be engaging each other for the sake of pastoral fidelity, of pastoral outreach to people who are wrestling with these issues, many of them in our own congregations.
So I got a phone call last year from a friend of mine who is an elder in a very conservative congregation in the Reformed Presbyterian world, not the RCA. And he says, “Richard, I’ve just got to talk to you,” he said. “We had the worst elders meeting you could imagine last evening and it went from 7:00 to midnight.” And he said, “We took a tentative vote at the end and I voted against everybody else on this and I just need to check it out with you. “Here’s the situation,” he said. “Several months ago a married lesbian couple with two children started attending our worship services. And a month or so ago, they came to the pastor and they said, ‘We have decided to follow Christ. We have become Christians and we would like to join the church and we’d like our children baptized.’ And our elders meeting last night was all about what we should do.” And he said, “The final recommendation that everyone but me voted on in favor of was this: that they can only join our church if they get separated and get divorced.” And he said to me: “I just have a question. I just need you to answer this question. Am I crazy for not wanting to vote in favor of that?” I’m not going to give you my analysis of the situation because I don’t have all the answers on this. But I want to make three observations about that conversation and what it implies for all of us, dealing pastorally in the Christian world in contemporary life.
The first observation is this. I told him he was not crazy. I told him that I admired his sanity. That there is something very strange to my Reformed ears in saying that the only way that they can join the church. It is very strange to my Reformed ears as a kid brought in this denomination hearing the witnesses of missionaries to Africa and the Middle East about polygamy and the like. It is very strange. It falls strange on my Reformed ears.
Secondly, as we think about a case like that, we should also make sure that we are thinking about those two children. You know we as Reformed Christians in our confessions and in our liturgical forms, believe that to apply the waters of baptism to a child is an occasion on which God does something. We are not just making parental vows to bring them up right. And we are not just holding up the baby, that’s ok to do this, holding them up and saying this is the newest member of our congregation, be sure to support our church education program.
But God has done something. God has signed and sealed the promises of His covenant that the child to whom we have administered the water of baptism. And I think it is a very important question. In that situation, that concrete situation, we really mean to say that God refuses to sign and seal God’s covenant promises to those children unless the two people who are the most important people in the world to them right now separate and get divorced. I’m just not prepared to say that theologically. And I think we need to think about our theology of the covenant, the theology of baptism, the theology of the sacraments, and even our theology of church membership as we wrestle with these challenges.
And then the third thing I want to say to you is don’t consider that to be a weird case that somebody else had because we are all going to face situations like that. In fact, people in your congregations, wherever your congregation is across the theological spectrum, are facing those issues. They may not talk about it but they are facing it.
I spoke in a very strong evangelical Presbyterian congregation and had a great time there. At one point we are sitting around a table and I was sitting with a couple in that congregation and they commended me for standing up for the traditional view and influencing things for the good and you know we need people like you who are really willing to follow the Word of God. And I started to get nervous about their commendations, and so I thought I had better inject a somewhat different tone into the conversation. And I said, “Yes, thank you, but we really need to think new pastoral thoughts on this in the lives of our congregations.” I said it is a simple fact that we evangelicals have in the past and in the present have been inexcusably cruel to persons who experience same-sex attraction. And they looked at each other and there was something that happened in the look that happened between them. And it was as if he said to his wife, “Yes, tell him.” And she said, “Thank you for saying that. Our son is gay and he is in a committed relationship. When they came home, when they came out, and they told us that they were going to move in together and they wanted us to know. My husband and I talked about it and prayed about it. And we said to them, ‘Give us about 15 minutes and we feel like we’ve just got to explain to you where we disagree with you on this. And after that explanation, we will never talk about this again because we love you, we love both of you. We want to love you not on any condition that you have to agree with us on this. We want you to know that we want you to come home any time you want because we love you and we want to be with you.’” And then she said, “Dr. Mouw, they came home for Christmas and they agreed to go with us to a church service on Christmas Eve.” She started to weep, and he did too. She said, “As we were walking out of the church on Christmas Eve, my son put his arm around me and said, ‘Mom, I am so glad we came to church this evening.’” And she said, “We just want them to be a part of the church.”
And I want to say as somebody who works within the tradition on this, I have an obligation to their son and his partner, I have an obligation to them to be sure that I am not being glib in my views, that I am not simply relying on arguments that I have felt compelling in the past, that I have to wrestle with these questions and I need to be in conversation with people who are willing to engage these issues even when they disagree with me under the authority of God’s Word. We need that kind of thing.
So my prayer for the RCA, the denomination that has nurtured me, the church where I received the waters of baptism and where I made my public profession of faith in Jesus Christ is that this denomination will find new ways together to serve the Savior in our present day culture with its racism, its sexual trafficking, its demeaning of creation, its mean-spiritedness, its neglect of the poor, the marginalized, the stranger in the land, and its promiscuity across the spectrum of orientations and attractions in our present cultural context. And that as Reformed Christians we will receive a new passion for the proclamation of the gospel.
You know the Canons of Dort. I’ve got to quote the Canons of Dort here. The second head of doctrine, article five, you folks have a new translation of it, but I love the old translation. It goes like this: “The gospel must be proclaimed promiscuously and without distinction to all peoples.” This is the only example you will ever find of Calvinist promiscuity being commended. And I want to say we have a special call today together to proclaim promiscuously and without distinction the call of the gospel to come to the cross of Calvary where we receive the kind of power, the kind of renewal, the kind of transformation, the kind of confidence that allows to say: “That our only comfort in life and in death is that we are not our own, but we belong body and soul to our faithful Savior Jesus Christ who has fully paid for all – all of our sins with his precious blood and calls us hereafter to serve Him in the cause of the gospel and the kingdom of Jesus Christ.”
Thank you all and God bless you.
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Post by Admin on Oct 31, 2024 11:56:37 GMT -5
Kindness and gentleness should be especially characteristic of those of us who are Christians. We were created for kind and gentle living. Indeed, kindness and gentleness are two of the fruit-of-the-Spirit characteristics that the apostle Paul mentions in Galatians 5. When Christians fail to measure up to the standards of kindness and gentleness, we are not the people God meant us to be.
Not Civility Alone
Not that civility is the be-all and end-all of life. We will not solve all our problems simply by becoming more civil people. There are times when it is appropriate to manifest some very uncivil feelings. “Passionate intensity” is not always out of place. If I am going to be a more civil person, it cannot be because I have learned to ignore my convictions. As Martin Marty has observed, one of the real problems in modern life is that the people who are good at being civil often lack strong convictions, and people who have strong convictions often lack civility. I like that way of stating the issue. We need to find a way of combining a civil outlook with a “passionate intensity” about our convictions. The real challenge is to come up with a convicted civility.
“Inner” Civility
Civility is public politeness. It means that we display tact, moderation, refinement and good manners toward people who are different from us. It isn’t enough, though, to make an outward show of politeness. Being civil has an “inner” side as well. To be sure, for some people civility is only a form of playacting. Many people today think of civility as nothing more than an outward, often hypocritical shell. But this cynical understanding of civility is yet another sign of the decline of real civility. In the past civility was understood in much richer terms. To be civil was to genuinely care about the larger society. It required a heartfelt commitment to your fellow citizens. It was a willingness to promote the well-being of people who were very different, including people who seriously disagreed with you on important matters. Civility wasn’t merely an external show of politeness. It included an inner politeness as well.
Flourishing in Humanness
To be good citizens, we must learn to move beyond relationships that are based exclusively on familiarity and intimacy. We must learn how to behave among strangers, to treat people with courtesy not because we know them, but simply because we see them as human beings like ourselves. When we learn the skills of citizenship, Aristotle taught, we have begun to flourish in our humanness. Acorns do not realize their innate possibilities until they grow branches and sprout leaves. And people do not attain their full potential until they learn how to behave in the public square.
The Struggle for Civility
But how can we hold onto strongly felt convictions while still nurturing a spirit that is authentically kind and gentle? Is it possible to keep these things together? The answer is that it is not impossible — but it isn’t easy. Convicted civility is something we have to work at. We have to work at it, because both sides of the equation are very important. Civility is important. And so is conviction.
The Bible itself recognizes the difficulty of maintaining convicted civility. The writer of the epistle to the Hebrews lays the struggle out very clearly: we must “pursue peace with everyone,” he tells us, while we work at the same time to cultivate that “holiness without which no one will see the Lord” (Hebrews 12:14).
For some of us, “pursuit” is a very appropriate image. Civility is an elusive goal. We have to chase after it, and the chasing seems never to end. We think we have finally caught it — and then civility slips from our grasp again. Just when we think we have figured out how we’re going to live with the latest cult or how to tolerate the most recent public display of sexual “freedom,” someone seems to up the ante; and the limits of our patience are tested all over again. So the pursuit goes on and on.
Promoting the Cause
There are two obvious ways to produce more people who combine strong convictions with a civil spirit: either we will have to help some civil people to become more convicted, or we will have to work at getting some convicted people to become more civil. Or both, since each of these strategies is important.
The first requires a kind of evangelism. We need to work at inviting the “nice” people in our society to ground their lives in robust convictions about the meaning of the gospel. But in order to do that, we have to be sure that we are doing our best to present discipleship as an attractive pattern of life.
This means that we must also devote our energies to the second strategy: learning as Christians to be a gentler and more respectful people. I admit that trying to make believers gentler and more “tolerant” will strike some Christians as wrong-headed. What about the devout, passionate people who picket abortion clinics and organize boycotts against offensive television programs?
They might worry that becoming civil will mean a weakening of their faith. I am convinced that this is not necessarily so. Developing a convicted civility can help us become more mature Christians. Cultivating civility can make strong Christian convictions even stronger.
Richard Mouw writes wisely and helpfully about what Christians can appreciate about pluralism, the theological basis for civility and how we can communicate with people who disagree with us on the issues that matter most. This excerpt from “Uncommon Decency” © 2010 by Richard J. Mouw is used with permission of InterVarsity Press. Order at IVPress.com.
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Post by Admin on Oct 31, 2024 12:06:00 GMT -5
Actively cultivating civility in our relationships with those with whom we disagree is itself a crucial way of anticipating the kind of people we want to be when the end time appears.
Richard Mouw
The Timeless Truths series was inspired by a passage from C. S. Lewis’s 1954 inaugural lecture from the Chair of Mediaeval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge. “One thing I know,” he reflects, “I would give a great deal to hear any ancient Athenian . . . talking about Greek tragedy. He would know in his bones so much that we seek in vain.” As Lewis observed, we all stand between two social worlds: our own, and those of our intellectual predecessors who can offer a perspective on culture, art, literature, and philosophy that can help us sharpen and refine our own cultural consciousness.
In this series, respected intellectuals across disciplines will share an observation from their lives and careers that can and should inform us as we seek to flourish in our own.
In explaining why I decided several decades ago to help organize an ongoing dialogue between evangelicals and Mormons, I have told a story about something I experienced as a teenager. I will repeat the story here to explain why that experience also had something to do with my becoming a philosopher.
In my large public high school in New Jersey, there was a small group of us who met regularly to encourage each other’s faith commitments. Several of the group belonged to the nearby Riverdale Baptist Church. At one point, that congregation sponsored a series of Sunday evening lectures on “the cults.” My friends encouraged me to attend, and I did.
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The speaker was Walter Martin, who would become a major evangelical star with the 1965 publication of his bestselling book, Kingdom of the Cults. At Riverdale, he focused in each of his four successive Sunday night talks on a specific “cult.”
The sessions were widely advertised, and the small church was packed for each of the evenings. Martin was a dynamic speaker who could stir up an evangelical audience with his engaging, sharp-witted critiques of Mormonism, Christian Science, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the Seventh-Day Adventists. (This last group he would later remove from his list of dangerous cults when he decided they were just confused evangelicals.) Martin was an effective rhetorician, and I was captivated by the way he made his case against non-Christian groups. He had a fine one-liner, for example, about Christian Science: just as Grape-Nuts are neither grapes nor nuts, he said, Mary Baker Eddy’s system of thought is neither Christian nor science.
On the evening of his talk about Mormonism, the atmosphere was electric. A dozen or so Mormons were in attendance and they sat as a group near the front of the auditorium. We had seen them walking in, carrying their copies of The Book of Mormon. It was clear that they had come armed for debate, and Martin was eager to mix it up with them. He was in top form for his lecture.
A young Mormon man was especially articulate as he argued in the Q and A part of the evening that Martin misunderstood the Mormon teachings on atonement and salvation. Martin was not willing to yield an inch, though, and what began as a reasoned exchange ended in a shouting match. The young Mormon finally blurted out with deep emotion: “You can come up with all of the clever arguments you want, Dr. Martin. But I know in the depths of my heart that Jesus is my Savior, and it is only through his blood that I can go to heaven!” Martin dismissed him with a knowing smile as he turned to his evangelical audience: “See how they love to distort the meanings of words?” I am paraphrasing from a memory reaching back over about six decades, but I can still hear in my mind what the young Mormon said next, with an anguished tone: “You are not even trying to understand!”
I came away from that encounter convinced by Martin’s theological critique of Mormonism. But I also left the church that night with a nagging sense that there was more to be said; and the way to let it be said was captured in the young Mormon’s complaint: both sides had to try to understand each other. I hoped that the day would come when I could do something to make that possible.
I have often thought of my witnessing the exchange between Walter Martin and the young Mormon as influencing my later decision to study philosophy. The Mormon’s poignant complaint to Walter Martin—“You are not even trying to understand!”—had a lasting influence on the way I have approached disagreements about the basic issues of life. I have tried hard to understand people with whom I disagree about important issues, listening carefully and not resorting to cheap rhetorical tricks. I have not always lived up to that commitment, but it has regularly guided me in my philosophical and theological endeavors.
Both sides had to try to understand each other. I hoped that the day would come when I could do something to make that possible.
In my Ph.D. studies at the University of Chicago, a Jewish friend and I met regularly to discuss what we hoped to accomplish teaching philosophy courses to undergraduates. While he and I shared the goal of clarifying the nature of deep human disagreements, we speculated about different understandings among our fellow students. Some, who were especially inclined toward formal logic, seemed to take a kind of aesthetic delight in contemplating refined processes of reasoning. Others had moral motivations: they looked to philosophy for ways to advocate for justice concerns. Still others—one of our peers, a Catholic priest, stood out in this regard—had apologetic motivations; philosophy was for them an important tool in religious apologetics. Then there were those who were fascinated by the historical development of ideas.
Those are not exclusive options. The discussion can be about which is most basic in one’s attraction to philosophy. But my own choice has had much to do with how philosophical interests have frequently taken me beyond what I have taught in my classrooms.
In addition to specifically scholarly topics that I have pursued—social contract theory, divine command ethics, Abraham Kuyper’s doctrine of “common grace”—I have devoted much attention in my writing and speeches to making the case for civility in public life. My interest in this topic began in my scholarly studies in Rousseau and the Federalist Papers, but it took on a broader scope when I read John Murray Cuddihy’s two books: No Offense: Civil Religion and Protestant Taste (1978) and The Ordeal of Civility (1987). I also took inspiration from a wonderful comment by Martin Marty: that many people these days who are civil do not have very strong convictions, and many who have strong convictions are not very civil. What the world needs, Marty said, is people with convicted civility.
In exploring the challenges of civility, I have made use of Cuddihy’s “ordeal” image. Cuddihy, a Catholic thinker, proposes a Christian strategy for coping with this ordeal that requires what he calls an “ethic for the interim,” cultivating patience as we await God’s future victory over the forces of unrighteousness. Christian discipleship, Cuddihy suggests, “puts a ban on all ostentation and triumphalism for the time being, before the Parousiatic return, at which time alone triumphalism becomes appropriate and fitting.” Cuddihy endorses Glenn Tinder’s recommendation in a 1976 Yale Review article entitled “Community: The Tragic Idea” that Christians look at the present age with a sense of “resignation.” This is a posture that, Tinder notes, is outwardly indistinguishable from a “Machiavellian” attitude, but is, for Christians, “provisional,” for it is subordinated to a limitless hope.
While in the past I have given a straightforward endorsement of Cuddihy’s “ethic for the interim” proposal, I have since come to have serious misgivings about that approach. While I have learned much from what Cuddihy has written about civility, I don’t see “resignation” as the right way to sustain our present efforts at being civil. For one thing, I don’t want to give the impression that civility is something we cloak ourselves in because we have nothing better to do while we are waiting for the future consummation, when we can declare ourselves to have been on the side of Truth all along. Engaging in civil discourse should not be seen as confined to an “interim” period. Rather, actively cultivating civility in our relationships with those with whom we disagree is itself a crucial way of anticipating the kind of people we want to be when the end time appears.
In 1983, Leonard Swidler, a Catholic theologian who had been engaged extensively in interfaith dialogues, published “The Dialogue Decalogue,” a set of guiding principles for effective interfaith engagement. While Swidler’s “Decalogue” has become a classic text for people engaged in interreligious exchanges, I find his principles applicable to the public arena as well.
Actively cultivating civility in our relationships with those with whom we disagree is itself a crucial way of anticipating the kind of people we want to be when the end time appears.
Fundamental to Swidler’s approach is his insistence on engaging other perspectives with a desire to learn, as well as on the need to cultivate the humility that allows one to engage in self-critique. Swidler stresses, for example, the need for each group to define its own perspective. In order for a dialogue partner to grasp properly the other person’s belief, it is necessary to formulate that belief in a way that the person himself would endorse. Swidler rightly urges that people enter dialogues willing to set aside preconceived notions about what the other party believes.
The learning posture that Swidler commends is connected to character development. Learning from those with whom we disagree requires humility, empathy, and patience. In talking to pastors and educators about this, I regularly quote the late Harvard theologian Ronald Thiemann, who proposed that local congregations should function as “‘schools of public virtue,’ communities that seek to form the kind of character necessary for public life.” The same can be said for our campuses.
While all of that is good, it is not easy to implement. What does this mean for our present polarization? It is not obvious how to apply Swidler’s insights to our current practical realities. His guidelines can be seen as providing a kind of phenomenology of actual dialogues that have gone well. He learned from structured interfaith conversations where the participants were committed to being guided in exchanges where they wanted to promote mutual understanding.
It isn’t obvious how to apply these directives to a conversation on a flight with a seatmate, or in dealing with a loudmouth at a bar, or when the proverbial Uncle Harry makes a political speech at the Thanksgiving dinner table. But it is not that Swidler’s insights are simply irrelevant to those situations. Even there, we can hope to introduce something of a learning posture with the supporting traits of humility, empathy, and patience.
My concern is that many of us who could be working on more effective strategies for dealing with polarization are not inclined to be charitable toward those with whom we disagree. I address myself here in this regard. I not only disagree with many of my fellow evangelicals on political matters, but I consider many of their views to be dangerous. I have to work hard—and not always with success—to look beyond surfaces. I need to remind myself that the fellow Christian who espouses views bordering on “white nationalism” is a human being who nurtures hopes and fears in his or her deep places, and I should try to learn about them.
A conversation with a writer for The Economist helped me with this. He called me for some background on a topic he was researching: LDS political views. He wanted to be clear about the relevant theological factors. Specifically, he was interested in comparing Mormon and evangelical political attitudes. He posed a blunt question: “Am I right in thinking that Mormons are typically nicer than evangelicals in the political arena?”
I had not thought about the subject but I agreed that his impression made sense. In our conversation, we talked about the respective histories of the two movements. I mentioned that the historian George Marsden once remarked that for American evangelicals, moving from the nineteenth century to the twentieth was like an immigrant experience. The 1800s had been a time when evangelicals felt at home in the country, but the new century seemed to be a hostile, strange land. For example, the rise of Darwinian thought brought about a serious threat to evangelicals’ understanding of their place in the culture.
The Mormon community, on the other hand, went through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a marginalized religious group. As an American sect that had entered the twenty-first century as a global religious movement, the LDS had gained a significant political role in the nation with Mitt Romney as the Republican candidate for president in 2008.
To put it simply, while evangelicals felt that they had been removed from their position of cultural influence, Mormons were sensing that they had arrived. Evangelical political anger these days has to be understood in the light of a deeper background of grieving over loss: “They have taken away our country and we do not know where they have laid it!” Not so for Mormons. To put it even more simply: Mormons are finally finding a place at the table, while evangelicals grieve the loss of a table that they are convinced they once “owned.”
None of that, of course, gives us a course of action for dealing directly with Uncle Harry at family gatherings. But it does point to deeper dynamics that have shaped him as an evangelical. That awareness does not tell me much of what specifically to do with Uncle Harry. But it may help for us to chart out courses of action for the character formation of his nieces and nephews.
I have spent considerable time with many of those offspring in recent decades, both on the seminary campus where I have taught and at evangelical colleges and universities where I have served as a visiting lecturer. I have been impressed by young Christians who care deeply about justice and who think globally about the issues of life. It is important for them to know the history of the political pain and confusion experienced by their evangelical forebears. But that history does not have to determine their engagement with present challenges. They can enter the public arena with a new vision that inspires them to approach controversies with humility and empathy. And they are doing just that. I was encouraged in this regard by the story of a student at Calvin University who was recently elected to a polarized local library board so that she could work for reconciliation. Such encounters give me hope that in a faith community that has been contributing much to our present civic crisis the cause of convicted civility is still alive and well.
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