Tag: Following Jesus

A Review of Andrew DeCort’s ‘Blessed Are the Others: Jesus’ Way in a Violent World’

Recently I have been trying to read more in the area of “peacemaking” literature. I seem to be bumping up against this topic a lot in my circle of friends.

So here is my brief review of the newest book in this field of study:

A review of Andrew DeCort, Blessed are the Others: Jesus’ Way in a Violent World (Bittersweet Books, 2024, 178 pp., $19.95)

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

–Yeats, “The Second Coming”

Andrew DeCort has an amazing, horrific story to tell, and he tells it well in his new book Blessed are the Others: Jesus’ Way in a Violent World. Civil war breaks out while Andrew and his wife are living and developing Christian ministries in Ethiopia. As Christian workers committed to serving in the kingdom of God and following the nonviolent way of Jesus, the DeCorts begin bravely to advocate for peace and reconciliation in a variety of important ways among the various parties in Ethiopia’s bloody conflict.

Eventually, they are branded as traitors by those in power. They receive death threats from authority figures who could easily carry out their threats at any time. If the enemy of your enemy is your friend, then the peacemaking enemies of warfare make themselves the enemies of warmongers who will eventually seek to eliminate you.

By the time the DeCorts leave Ethiopia for their own safety, Andrew is (unsurprisingly) experiencing serious emotional and psychological upheaval. Though he never uses the term, he undoubtedly experienced full–blown attacks of PTSD, complete with the entire range of physical and psychological symptoms involved. These experiences of warfare, trauma, peacemaking and persecution become the setting for DeCort’s exposition of the Beatitudes found in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5:3–12); this is the subject matter of Blessed are the Others.

There can be no doubt that DeCort’s experiences have equipped him to provide wise, first–hand insights into the dynamics involved in the beatific states of poverty of spirit, meekness, peacemaking and being persecuted for the sake of righteousness. In circumstances where many would have abandoned Christian faith altogether, DeCort has persisted in wrestling with questions of faith all throughout his dramatic journey.

Yet, it is the power of DeCort’s storytelling that also raises several problems for this reviewer. For instance, a reader cannot help but feel deep sympathy and admiration for DeCort while reading his story. Much of this book reads like a series of journal entries kept during the author’s counseling sessions. Taking the step to risk such public transparency lends DeCort a moral authority, at least for the sensitive reader, that is easily transferred from the confessional sections of the book to the expository sections dealing with scripture. Thus, the reader is invited to embrace DeCort’s explanations of the biblical text with the same quality of sympathetic acceptance as the reader has already extended to DeCort’s dramatic storytelling.

But is this a wise step to take?

Throughout the book, DeCort reminds his readers that the Beatitudes are God’s recipe for becoming “humanely happy.” But for all their value in illustrating how and why DeCort has arrived at his theology of peacemaking and humane happiness, there is a difference between telling powerful stories to illustrate biblical teaching and telling stories to determine the intent of biblical teaching. For DeCort, his authority for explaining the specifics of humane happiness appears in the therapeutic lessons he has discovered throughout the long process of coming to grips with his trauma. The meaning of the biblical text ultimately becomes subservient to his lived experience, not the other way around (as it should be).

At the end of the day, Jesus’ experience on earth is reflected in DeCort’s; and DeCort’s life of trauma becomes the very image of Jesus’ experience. When answering the question, “How did Jesus make peace in society?” DeCort answers, “It’s clear that Jesus’ peacemaking began with himself. Having survived acute trauma (i.e., Jesus was traumatized by his parents’ flight into Egypt), there is no other way. He went out to the wilderness, wrestled with his demons . . . He took time to rest and to grieve his suffering” (129). Note that Jesus was not recovering from his suffering on the cross, but from his childhood trauma. That was Jesus’ therapeutic path to peacemaking. Thus, Jesus has been conformed to the image of DeCort, and DeCort has become the model for Jesus.

Earlier in the book, DeCort rooted our humane task as peacemakers in God’s role as Creator, rather than in God’s work as Redeemer—where I believe it belongs. Therefore, Jesus’ model of suffering is exemplary for all humanity, just as “God is actually our parent” who “calls us all beloved children” (147). The natural relationships forged within creation have priority. DeCort introduces his perspective early in the book: “Jesus of Nazareth invites us into a strange wisdom as ancient as the pillars of creation. He promises that opening ourselves to our pain is the beginning of the Beatitudinal Way. Paradoxically, this is the path of humane happiness” (11).

Note that, for DeCort, the Beatitudes describe a natural process rooted in creation. The key to learning the Beatitudes is therapy, opening ourselves to our pain. How the eschatological arrival of God’s kingdom may be subverting the natural relationships of a fallen creation is never discussed. I find this surprising given that the Beatitudes describe kingdom citizenship, not the natural order of things. The kingdom does not arise from within creation! It invades creation from without. But this oddity becomes understandable once we recognize that, for DeCort, the therapeutic has overwhelmed the exegetical.

An obvious sign of this unfortunate interpretive move appears in the way Moses and Joshua are turned into Old Testament villains. As the people of Israel emerge from their own four–hundred–year period of trauma in Egyptian bondage, Moses undermines the possibility of Israel’s healing by instituting the Sinai Covenant—a series of obligations and blessings based on the misbegotten notion of Israel’s election as God’s chosen people (24, 27, 38, 100, 108, 127, 130). This retrograde idea of chosenness then sets the stage for Moses’ (and Joshua’s) horrific calls for Israel to ethnically cleanse the land of Canaan (25). It also presents us with a wrathful, nationalistic God of vengeance who is hardly the kind of deity who calls his people to become peacemakers, opposing civil wars and working for reconciliation.

In effect, DeCort is presenting us with another form of Marcionism. Marcion was an early church father/heretic who taught that the Old and New Testaments told the stories of two different gods: an OT god of wrath and warfare, and a NT god of love and peace. For Marcion, the OT god had to go. DeCort appears to follow suit.

In making this interpretive move, DeCort follows an old, old pathway. This method is sometimes called Tendenz Kritik. In other words, the interpreter fixes upon a certain tendency or theme which takes centerstage in the interpretive process. This theme is made canonical. Any texts or theological implications that appear to diverge from this preferred theme are downgraded or excised from the Bible in one way or another. Enlightenment Rationalists eliminated the supernatural from scripture because it conflicted with their elevation of human reason. Rudolf Bultmann developed his program of demythologizing for the same purpose. As he famously said (my paraphrase), “No one who uses an electric light can possibly take the NT miracle stories literally.” DeCort is offering his readers his own form of Tendenz Kritik. Anything that does not cohere with his understanding of a peacemaking Jesus activating principles rooted in creation must be rewritten or rejected outright.

When everything else is said and done, I cannot help but conclude that Andrew DeCort is offering us another version of Walter Rauschenbusch’s rationalistic, nineteenth–century Social Gospel filtered through the lens of the Ethiopian civil war and the personal trauma it created for the author. As Rauschenbusch explained, Jesus’ exemplary life is intended to reveal the universal Fatherhood of God and the universal brotherhood of humanity. The Beatitudes lay out Jesus’ instructions for “humane happiness” in this world where divine, universal love is not taken seriously enough. DeCort is clearly reading from this script.

DeCort’s idiosyncratic version of the social gospel also reminds me of the classic work by Philip Reiff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud. In that book, Reiff details the extent to which the processes and benefits of psychotherapy have replaced the historic liturgies, traditions and authority of religious (Christian) faith in modernity. Reiff explains that:

Any religious exercise is justified only by being something men (sic) do for themselves, that is, for the enrichment of their own experience . . . What then should churchmen (sic) do? The answer returns clearly: become, avowedly, therapists, administrating a therapeutic institution—under the justificatory mandate that Jesus himself was the first therapeutic. (215)

DeCort’s “exposition” of the Beatitudes closely conforms to Reiff’s prescription for modern religious leaders. It is, indeed, the triumph of the therapeutic.

But this is nothing new; it is an old, old story.

In 1906 Albert Schweitzer published his important book, The Quest for the Historical Jesus. After surveying every scholarly effort to recover the Jesus of history from the accumulated traditions of two–thousand years of Christian development, Schweitzer concluded (I am paraphrasing): “After peering down history’s well, searching for the historical Jesus, all that researchers have discovered is their own reflection staring back at them.”

Reading about DeCort’s reflections on himself, superimposed onto the Beatitudes, is not without some interest; the human story is compelling. But the theological conclusions he draws, concerning Jesus and the Beatitudes, must be taken with a large block of salt. I’d like to see more of the incarnate Jesus who suffered on the cross in order to make peace between his heavenly Father and fallen human beings, and less about the power of therapeutic empathy to perfect human happiness through “peacemaking.”

That difference is stark.

My First Book, “Feeling Like God”, is Now Back in Print

I am happy to announce that the publisher Wipf & Stock has agreed to reprint my book, Feeling Like God: A Spiritual Journey to Emotional Wholeness.

The original publisher, a small Canadian press, went out of business years ago, so the book has been unavailable for some time.

In my humble opinion, it’s a great book well worth reading!

I tackle the ancient theological question of whether or not God has passions, emotions, feelings that are part and parcel of his sovereign plans for the world.

My answer to that question is a resounding YES, in contrast to much of the orthodox, theological tradition which said NO. I approach this answer through a brilliantly composed (LOL!) integration of biblical theology,  an examination of Greek philosophy, a look at the early Church Fathers, illustrative  stories,and personal application.

What more could you ask for?

Publisher’s Description – “An engaging blend of biblical study, historical theology, and personal testimony, Feeling like God takes the reader on a journey to understand God as revealed in Scripture. It shows that following Jesus Christ necessarily means bringing our feelings to God, rather than trying to suppress them, and shows how expressing emotion is something central to what it means to be created in the image of God.”

Wheaton College Prof, Vincent Bacote, says US Evangelicalism is Fractured Due to a Lack of Discipleship

I have been reading Tim Alberta’s new book, The Kingdom, the Power and the Glory (HarperCollins, 2023). The book analyzes the rise of Donald Trump and MAGA Christianity within American evangelicalism.

How is it that Christian devotion to such a pagan politician has succeeded in splintering American evangelicalism?

I believe that Vincent Bacote, theology professor at Wheaton College, hits the nail on the head when he accuses American evangelical leaders of failing to disciple, to catechize, their people.

I couldn’t agree more.

For instance, the so-called “Great Commission” is not a command to evangelize unbelievers. It is a command to disciple, to teach and rigorously instruct believers into faithful Christian discipleship. Evangelism is crucial, but it is only the entry point for the radical demands of true Christianity.

Jesus commands his followers, “Go and make disciples of all nations . . . teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you” (Matt. 28:19-20).

A Christian disciple is someone who puts into practice all the upside-down, crazy, counter intuitive, radical lifestyle choices that Jesus taught his disciples, and us, to embrace. That requires a lifetime of sacrificial self-denial and devotion.

Along these lines, Alberta quotes Professor Bacote:

“Jesus loved them [the 12 disciples] but he did not infantilize them. Time and again, when His disciples got something wrong — or even when they simply showed human weakness — Jesus rebuked them. He chided them for being faithless. He censure them for the vanity and biotry and prejudice. He criticized them for not grasping His instruction.”

This is what discipling loopks like And this . . . is what’s absent inside much of the American evangelical Church.

“If you ask me what’s the biggest problem with evangelicalism, I’d say it’s a catechesis problem. It’s a formation problem, a discipleship problem. These are people who are supposed to have a knowedge of the Bible, but many of them don’t . . . A lot of these people are just not going deep enough.”

By remaining shallow in the scriptures, Bacote said, too many American Christians have avoided a necessary showdown between their own base cultural proclivities and God’s perfect standard. When Christians are discipled primarily by society, inevitably they look to scripture for affirmation of their habits and behaviors and political views. But if the Bible is the word of God, then God ought to be interrogating those things.

A Review of “Jesus and the Powers” by N. T. Wright and Michael F. Bird

A Review of N. T. Wright and Michael F. Bird, Jesus and the Powers: Christian Political Witness In an Age of Totalitarian Terror and Dysfunctional Democracies (Zondervan, 2024, $22.99)

As I begin this review, I must admit that I am not a dispassionate analyst. I do have some skin in the game since this new book by Wright and Bird covers very similar ground as does my book, I Pledge Allegiance. I have some firm opinions in this area of study.

Having put my cards on the table, however, I can say that Wright and Bird have given the church a very helpful book providing biblical guidance on how followers of Jesus are to deal with the practical matters of church–state relations. Can a Christian be involved with politics? What is the proper relationship between church and state? How are disciples to conduct themselves as responsible citizens? What guidance does scripture offer for answering these types of questions?

All this and more is tackled here with the deft biblical–theological hand one has come to expect from Wright and Bird.  With numerous historical examples illustrating the strengths and weaknesses of alternative approaches to such matters.

The first three chapters lay out the church’s relationship to world empires, beginning with Rome’s domination of Jesus’ homeland, up to the church’s contemporary interactions with the Soviet Union, China and the United States. The spiritual backdrop to these interactions is helpfully cast in terms of the spiritual, cosmic powers always at work behind the temporal authorities we see in our national, international, global relations. Thus, Wright and Bird endorse Walter Wink’s important three–volume work on Christianity and the Powers.

Chapter four, “The Kingdom of God as Vision and Vocation” begins the turn to a more pragmatic description of what exactly Christian disciples ought to be doing, and how we ought to be thinking, about our place in secular society. Here they thankfully emphasize the vital unification of both gospel proclamation and social justice activism as equally vital, and ultimately indivisible, kingdom activities for the local church. Across the entire spectrum of Christian, kingdom activities we are reminded that “the whole purpose of Christian influence is not the pursuit of Christian hegemony but the giving of faithful Christian witness,” thereby endorsing James Davison Hunter’s concept of the Christian church offering a “faithful presence” in the world (93).

The book’s second half focuses on matters of church–state relations in the modern day. There is an excellent critique of Christian Nationalism,” as well as the vigorous defense of liberal democracy, pluralism and secularism as the political venues most conducive to religious freedom.

The book’s conclusion reminds its readers that “we are called to be disciples with a theo–political vision of the gospel” (174) meaning that “a kingdom perspective requires prophetic witness, priestly intercession and political discernment” (175). The church cannot build the kingdom of God, only God can construct his kingdom on earth as it is in heaven (176).

This is a fine piece of work. And I am happy to encourage my subscribers to read this book by Wright and Bird, although I encourage you to do it in tandem with my book, I Pledge Allegiance: A Believer’s Guide to Kingdom Citizenship in 21st Century America (Eerdmans, 2018).

Now I must turn to my critical analysis of the work.

Wright and Bird have written a handbook of sorts dealing with the questions of church–state relationship and Christian political involvement. Biblical references are treated as proof–texts cited in footnotes with no close reading or interpretation provided along the way. Since both of these men are fine New Testament scholars, this was obviously a deliberate decision. But this  omission leaves the reader with yet another book on politics and theology where we are simply expected to take the authors at their own authoritative word.

The problem with this decision appears most obviously in the discussion of Romans 13. Despite the fact that Paul never uses the vocabulary of “obey” or “obedience” in these verses, Wright and Bird repeat the frequent mistake of taking Paul to say that Christians are responsible “to obey” their secular, civic authorities (105, 109, 110). But this is not the case, and I explain why at some length in my book, I Pledge Allegiance (55–62). Granted, the authors redeem themselves by eventually, and quite rightly, explaining that it is “only good government can claim the mantle of a divinely appointed authority. Accordingly, God brings order through government but does not ordain every individual ruler” (112). Thus, Paul does instruct us to submit to the divine ordering of government, but we are not responsible to obey every person or directive in authority.

Again, Wright and Bird finally reach this conclusion themselves in their section discussing civil disobedience (107–121). They agree that unjust laws may be resisted or disobeyed by believers, although, while admitting that “one needs to have criteria for determining unjust laws,” no specific guidance is offered (119).

They draw a distinction between civil disobedience and uncivil disobedience, the latter being “reserved only for violent authoritarians.” In the face of authoritarianism, Christians are justified in resorting to violence in their efforts to overthrow an oppressive, unjust government. In my view, this is where their argument and methodology go off the rails. Not only is there no biblical evidence on offer, but even the biblical footnotes disappear. Instead, the authors appeal to traditional just war theory, a few notable philosophers, and the example of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s involvement in a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler.

I obviously disagree strongly with these (less than compelling) arguments justifying a Christian’s turn to violence in civil war. (Again, check out the extensive argument in my book insisting that Christians must always embrace non–violence in every circumstance.) Actually, Bonhoeffer’s own turn to violent anti–Nazi resistance is, in my opinion, the great tragedy of his otherwise exemplary life. For, when all is said and done, Bonhoeffer did not die as a martyr for Jesus Christ and the gospel. He died as a violent insurgent helping to plot a violent murder.

Here we come, perhaps, to the principal problem with Jesus and the Powers. For all the discussion of the kingdom of God and the need for Christian ethics to direct our political engagement, there is no extended discussion of the upside–down nature of Jesus’ kingdom ethics; no exposition of what numerous scholars have called the “kingdom reversal.” In my opinion, this is not only a major oversight but an inexplicable omission in a book like this. Jesus makes it clear, that living out the seemingly upside–down values of the kingdom of God — in every dimension of our public and private lives, political and apolitical — is THE means of demonstrating that the “not yet fulfilled” kingdom of God is, nevertheless, “already present” in this world. Living a non–violent life as Jesus lived a non–violent life, even in the face of the most authoritarian, bloodthirsty injustice exhibited on the cross at Calvary, is our gospel–kingdom mandate.

Similarly, a great deal of additional instruction in political directives could be added, but first we must immerse ourselves in a new way to think, a new way to view life in this world, a new way to live: an upside–down way, a contrarian way in all of life, whether the government is democratic or totalitarian. Unfortunately, Jesus and the Powers gives little attention to this crucial piece of the church and politics pie.

Read About an Excellent Book, Gay Girl, Good God, by Jackie Hill Perry

A book review of Jackie Hill Perry, Gay Girl, Good God: The Story of Who I Was and Who God Has Always Been (B & H, 2018), 193 pages; $16.99.

Author, Jackie Hill Perry

Seldom have I read a book with a more poignant story about the sovereign power of God’s amazing grace to save someone who was not looking for him. The author provides us with a beautiful memoir that should become a popular classic in the American tradition of A Faithful Narrative of a Surprising Work of God.

Growing up in East St. Louis, MO, Ms. Hill Perry had known that she was gay for as long as she could remember. She had only every been attracted to girls and young women. Except, there was one problem. Having been raised in the Christian church, she was familiar with all the biblical teaching that condemned her sexual proclivities.

She didn’t believe any of it, of course. But she remembered it. All of it.

She writes about the confusion she eventually felt over how God could possibly be unhappy about the same-sex love affair that filled her with so much joy:

“As much as I wanted to believe God grinned when He thought of my life, I knew He didn’t. My conscience spoke to me throughout the day. In the morning, it reminded me of God. A few minutes before the clock brought the noon in, it brought God to mind, again. Night was when it was the loudest. On the way to sleep, my head lay relaxed on my pillow surrounded by the natural darkness of night, I thought about God. If being intrigued by Scripture and reading it to cure boredom had done anything, it had made me aware of a truth about me and Him that I couldn’t shake even if the earth moved. I was His enemy (James 4:4). How could I, an enemy of God, have sweet dreams knowing that He sat awake throughout the night? . . . It was maddening to try and sleep with so much noise in the room” (59-60).

Eventually, she would come to understand that God was not calling her to become heterosexual. He was calling her to become holy, like Him. Again, Ms. Hill Perry writes:

“I know now what I didn’t know then. God was not calling me to be straight; He was calling me to Himself. The choice to lay aside sin and take hold of holiness was not synonymous with heterosexuality. . . (God was) after my whole heart, desperate to make it new. Committed to making it like Him. In my becoming Holy as He is, I would not be miraculously made into a woman that didn’t like women; I’d be made into a woman that loved God more than anything” (69).

But in learning this she also knew that a holy life would mean turning away from her gay lifestyle.

After surrendering herself to Jesus while laying alone in bed, her first task was to break up with her longtime girlfriend — a heartwrenching decision movingly described.

She now understood that living to please her Lord Jesus, the Savior who died to free her from all of her sin, was the most important thing she could do with her life.

After telling the rest of her story, all of which is worth reading as an exemplary instance of what it means to follow Jesus through thick and thin, the author concludes with several chapters offering solid, biblical advice to people who either struggle with “same sex attraction” themselves, or are talking with someone who does.

You can’t go wrong by reading this book by Jackie Hill Perry yourself and then passing it along to a friend, whether gay or straight.

Solving a Problem Begins with a Correct Diagnosis

Christian denominational leaders continue to fret over how to recoup the attendance losses suffered during the covid shutdowns.  Church attendance has not rebounded to its pre-covid levels, making sociologists and church-growing afficionados eager to offer their professional analysis, complete with recipes for reinvigorating local church life.

As I read such articles I am continually amazed at how many of them never bother to touch on the basic question of what a church is supposed to be. They never mention Jesus or the gospel message or worship or what it means to be the Body of Christ in a fallen world. [For one recent, woeful example, see this article in Christianity Today.]

Thankfully, today I came across the most perceptively biblical account of this issue I have yet seen. Dr. Kirsten Sanders offers an acute analysis of both the problems and the “solutions” that must be understood by anyone hoping to “restore” their local church.

Her article, addressing the question of “Why I should be a part of a local church?”, is titled “Why Church is the Wrong Question“. I highly recommend it, especially if you are asking similar questions yourself.

It is also found in Christianity Today.

Here is an excerpt:

One question I encounter regularly these days is why the local church matters. This, I think, is the wrong question.

Disaffected Christians want to know why they should attend church when it has sheltered so much harm. Pastors and leaders want to know how to communicate to others, especially young adults, what good the church has to offer.

We are in a crucible that should burn off wrong answers about the church. Two years of pandemic-related church shutdowns has led many congregations to move their worship online. Church services were livestreamed and accessed in people’s living rooms. Communion was sometimes taken at the kitchen table, or not at all. Music was streamed virtually. And Christians gathered—or didn’t—with their immediate families to worship.

It would be misguided to suggest that such arrangements are not worship. Indeed, the psalmist says, “The heavens declare the glory of God,” and the Lord himself says, “Where two or three gather in my name, there am I” (Ps. 19:1; Matt. 18:20). The instinct that God can be encountered in living rooms, in nature, and even on a TV is not wrong. The entire Christian tradition insists that God is not hindered by anything and can be near people through matter—even when conveyed by data packets to a screen. God indeed dwells with his people, gathered in homes across the world.

Yet it would be incorrect also to call such a presence “church.” The church is not God’s guiding, consoling presence in one’s heart or the very real consolation and correction that can come when a group of Christians meets to pray. Nor is it what we name the occasional gathering of Christians to sing and study in homes or around tables worldwide.

In the Bible, the concern of God in creating the church is not to form persons but to form a people. . .

. . .What God called for, however, was not a moral or powerful people, but a peculiar one. Now it is true that part of the church’s peculiarity should exhibit itself in a certain morality. But morality itself is not peculiar in this particular way. What makes the church peculiar is its knowledge of itself as called by God to be his representative on the earth, to be marked by unwieldy and inconvenient practices like forgiveness, hospitality, humility, and repentance. It is marked in such a way by its common gathering, in baptism and Communion, remembering the Lord’s death and proclaiming it until he comes.

A peculiar church is one that realizes that its existence is to witness to another world, one where the Ascension is not a sorrow alone but an invitation to live into a new moment when the Son is indeed seated at the right hand of the Father. Its witness to another kingdom, a commonwealth in heaven (Phil. 3:20–21), is what justifies its existence.

This is not to say that churches should become internally preoccupied and aloof from their communities. The church has an implicit social ethic, as Hauerwas discusses, and is guided by Jesus’ call to imitate him in love for neighbor and sacrificial concern.

But the church’s reshaped community is formed out of its worship, which witnesses to another world where the Lord is King. The authors conclude, “The church, as those called out by God, embodies a social alternative that the world cannot on its own terms know.”

You can read the entire article here.

The Challenge of Non-Conformity and Its Implications

The following excerpt is from a fascinating book titled Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism, by George L. Mosse (University of Wisconsin, 1978, 2020).

Mosse traces the various currents of cultural, social, and political European history that eventually culminated in the rise of Adolf Hitler, the Nazi party, and the Holocaust.

The most interesting element in Mosse’s analysis, to my mind anyway, is the fact that none of these factors had anything to do with Christian theology or the Christian church.

Yes, many self-professed “Christians” and church leaders participated in the rise of anti-Jewish racism throughout post-Enlightenment Europe, but their arguments for eliminating the Jews had nothing to do with religion.

However, that does not mean they were not racists; many continued to despise the Jews.

The medieval Christian, anti-Jewish tropes and accusations were nowhere to be found in the new brand of post-Enlightenment, secular racism that was forged in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries throughout Europe.

I have a lot more to say about this, but I am still doing my research. Maybe I will post more about this in the future.

In any case, here is the excerpt from Mosse followed by a few of my observations for today’s church. When Mosse refers to “racism” he is thinking about all forms of racial prejudice and discrimination. Antisemitism is only one possible example of such racism. (All emphasis is mine):

Racism had no founding father, and that was one of its strengths. It made alliance with all those virtues that the modern age praised so much. Racism picked out such qualities as cleanliness, honesty, moral earnestness, hard work, and family life – virtues which during the nineteenth century came to symbolize the ideals of the middle class. . . Racism was associated with these virtues rather than with any single philosopher or social theorist of importance. . . Racism was not merely one form of social Darwinism, but instead, a scavenger ideology, which annexed the virtues, morals, and respectability of the age to its stereotypes and attributed them to the inherent qualities of a superior race.

 If racism annexed the virtues of the age, it also condemned as degenerate all that was opposed to such respectability. Not to exemplify the ideal-type of “clean-cut American” or “right-living Englishman” was a sign of an inferior race. Though racism was often vague, it clearly embraced all the values of middle-class respectability and claimed to be their defender. To be sure, few people at first went along with such a claim; to the vast majority of Europeans, it sufficed to be a Christian gentleman. But even here racism so infected Christianity that, in the end, no real battle between racism and Christianity ever took place. Both supported the same middle-class virtues and saw the enemy in the same nonconformists – be they Bohemians, Freemasons, or Jews. The support racism gave to ideals which were opposed to a threatened degeneracy was in practice more important than any differences between racism and Christianity.

 . . . The perimeters of racial thought are as elusive and slippery as the ideology as a whole. And yet, for all that, the myth was transformed into reality, not just during the Holocaust and the camps, but whenever ordinary people made judgments upon others based upon the implications of the racial stereotype.

 The Holocaust has passed. The history of racism which we have told has helped to explain the Final Solution. But racism itself has survived. As many people as ever before think in racial categories. There is nothing provisional about the lasting world of stereotypes. That is the legacy of racism everywhere. . . Blacks on the whole remained locked into the same racial posture which never varied much from the eighteenth century to our time. Practically all blacks had been outside Hitler’s reach; consequently, there was no rude awakening from the racial dream in their regard. Moreover, nations which had fought against National Socialism continued to accept black racial inferiority for many years. . . (They) did not seem to realize that all racism, whether aimed at blacks or Jews, was cut of the same cloth. (209-211).

********

The intense, perennial pressures of cultural conformity are no more “provisional” today than are the ever-present stereotypes of racial prejudice. Yep, we got 21st century racists, too. Many of them within the Christian church.

Pressures for conformity continue to press against God’s people now just as they did in Nazi Germany and medieval Europe. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Sadly, the Christian church – but especially its more conservative membership. . . can you spell MAGA? – is always inclined to endorse the cultural, social status quo, even if our preferred status quo is defined by a sub-culture.

Today’s (sub-)cultural norms are always more popular than Jesus.

For instance, studies consistently reveal that evangelical Christians share the same political priorities, endorse the same social, cultural agendas, and vote for the same political candidates as their non-Christian, non-church going neighbors – wherever they happen to live.

Is this an accident?

The evangelical wing of the Christian church fought against racial integration and condemned the civil rights movement as loudly and vociferously as did the worst racist politicians in the deep South. Men like governors Lester Maddox and George Wallace armed themselves with long, wooden ax handles while blocking the doorways to keep black students out of white, public schools.

And, yes, the southern, conservative church applauded both Maddox and Wallace and their violent racism.

Similar instincts are at play today when Christians join in the condemnation of Critical Race Theory, while not having the slightest inkling of what CRT really is.

What other sorts of violence, racism, bigotry, and close-mindedness are evangelicals, who claim the name of Jesus, following after today?

Pay attention to how closely “acceptable” church leadership conforms itself to the standard, middle-class, cultural virtues of the friendly, well-dressed, patriotic American. How much of this social conformity is the fruit of genuine Christian discipleship, following hard after Jesus, and how much of it is merely the required uniform expected of us by the world at large?

Neither the dangers of racism, in all of its various shades, nor the moral compromises on display when the Christian church surrenders itself to cultural conformity have changed all that much over time.

The pressure to conform never goes away.

The crucial question is: to whom or to what are we conforming? Middle-class values? Or Jesus of Nazareth?

“The Presence of the Kingdom” by Jacques Ellul

I visited Grand Rapids, Michigan last month, and I did what I always do when I travel; I checked out the used bookstores!

This trip, I picked up two books by the French, Christian thinker, professor, philosopher, Jacques Ellul which were new to me.

Jacques Ellul (1912 – 1994)

If you’ve never read Ellul, you need to begin today.

You’ll find few Christian writers as thoughtful and penetrating in his deconstruction of the modern world, its technological idols, and what it means for a Christian to follow Jesus faithfully through the maze of an ever evolving and broken society.

Rather than write up two book reviews for my readers, I decided to post a few excerpts to give you the flavor of each book, both about the kingdom of God.

Naturally, I never agree with everything Ellul says. I don’t even agree with myself much of the time! But I am always challenged and stimulated, often in a surprising, back-handed way, to think about the issues more deeply.

I hope you will be challenged too.

The first book I am excerpting today is Ellul’s 1948 publication titled, The Presence of the Kingdom (all emphasis is mine):

. . . The Christian is constantly obliged to reiterate the claims of God, to re-establish this God-willed ‘order,’ in presence of an order which constantly tends towards disorder. In consequence of the claims which God is always making on the world the Christian finds himself (sic), by that very fact, involved in a state of permanent revolution. Even when the institutions, the laws, the reforms which he has advocated have been achieved, even if society be re-organized according to his suggestions, he still has to be in opposition, he still must exact more, for the claim of God is a infinite as His forgiveness. Thus, the Christian is called to question unceasingly all that man calls progress, discovery, facts, established results, reality, etc. He can never be satisfied with all this human labour, and in consequence he is always claiming that it should be transcended, or replaced by something else.

 In his judgment he is guided by the Holy Spirit – he is making an essentially revolutionary act. If the Christian is not being revolutionary, then in some way or another he has been unfaithful to his calling in the world. . .

 . . . Thus, one who knows that he has been saved by Christ is not a man jealously and timidly attached to a past, however glorious it may be. He does not cling to the past of his Church (tradition), nor even to the past life of Jesus Christ (on which, however, the certainty of his faith depends) – but he is a man of the future…of the eschaton, of the coming break with this present world…All facts acquire their value in the light of the coming Kingdom of God, in the light of the Judgment, and the victory of God. . .

 . . . This theological truth also applies to social and political facts. The actual events of our world only acquire their value in the light of the coming Kingdom of God. It is the imminent return of Christ which gives genuine seriousness to each actual event . . . Without this direction history is an outbreak of madness. Now in this matter the Christian has no right to keep this truth to himself; by his action and by his thought it is his duty to bring the ‘coming event’ into the life of this present world. . . Every Christian who has received the Holy Spirit is now a prophet of the Return of Christ, and by this very fact he has a revolutionary mission in politics. . .

 . . . To be revolutionary is to judge the world by its present state, by actual facts, in the name of a truth which does not yet exist (but which is coming) – and it is to do so because we believe this truth to be more genuine and more real than the reality which surrounds us. Consequently, it means bringing the future into the present as an explosive force. . .

What’s Wrong with Promoting “A Christian World-View?” The Answer is Everything

Let’s begin by watching this short clip from the Christian Broadcasting Network interviewing pollster George Barna who offers dire warnings about the imminent dangers let loose by American Christians’ lack of a Biblical world-view.

The CBN video clip is titled “Few Professed Christian Parents Hold a Biblical World-View.”

 

Frankly, I have never been a fan of the idea that Christian’s must hold onto a well-developed “Biblical world-view.”

For many years I taught at a college that required all incoming freshmen to take a class intended to press upon their young minds the details of a Reformed world-view. I was never a fan of that curriculum decision, either, and I spoke out against it at the time.

As a Christian educator, my basic objection – which I will elaborate below – had to do with the difference between education vs. indoctrination.

A basic principle of all good education, including a so-called Christian education, I believe, is to grasp the crucial distinction between teaching a person how to think as opposed to indoctrinating a person into what to think.

Focusing on the maintenance and preservation of a “Christian” or “Biblical” world-view places the emphasis on indoctrination rather than on learning how to think for oneself. This is why indoctrination so often fails once the pressures, expectations, and boundaries of homelife and college performance are finally lifted.

In all likelihood, that young mind will eventually decide that he/she has outgrown the days of being told what to think and believe.

Young adults have agency. They are not robots. Mr. Barna’s facile insistence that every young person who lacks an adequate Christian world-view is necessarily the derelict product of parental failure is both glib and harsh. It is also offensive.

The church is filled with a wide variety of adults with very different views on parenting. Of course, the church has always had its share of hypocrites, which is certainly noticed by the community’s young people.

I observed a great deal of hypocrisy while growing up in the church. Yet, I eventually decided to devote my life to following Jesus. Others are raised by strict, religious parents far more intent on both indoctrination and the maintenance of an indoctrinated lifestyle than mine ever were. Yet, I have watched many of them walk away from the church and abandon their youthful professions of faith.

For years I was ordained in a denomination that included an extensive Catechism (that is, an exercise in doctrinal education – a world-view – that was laid out in a question-and-answer format, typically memorized by the students) among its doctrinal statements. This Reformed version of “Sunday school” was valuable to many young people. But, trust me, I have also heard many stories over the years from others who eagerly repudiated their Catechetical confession of faith as soon as they were free to do so.

So, in my not-so-humble opinion, Mr. Barna needs to zip it when it comes to asserting simpleminded, cause-and-effect relationships between parental responsibility and the irreligious world-views of young people.

But let’s probe more deeply into the fundamental errors of such misguided insistence on the creation of a Biblical world-view.

First, I must object to the indefinite article “a.”

Barna’s discussion is typical in its assumption that there is only one, that is “A,” Biblical world-view. Just as there presumably is A Marxist world-view, or A relativistic world-view, there is supposedly A Biblical world-view.

Really?

Whose interpretation of the Bible are we talking about? The original, ancient Biblical world-view insisted that the earth was flat, and that rain fell from an ocean of water contained somewhere in the sky, to mention only a few of its “Biblical” principles. Should “faithful” parents teach these archaic, anti-scientific notions to their children?

Furthermore, who draws the boundaries distinguishing (1) a properly Biblical world-view from (2) a tendentious cultural world-view?

For the vast majority of American evangelicals such cultural artifacts as raw individualism, inalienable rights to private property, unregulated capitalism, and US style “democracy” are all self-evident, necessary ingredients of a truly Biblical world-view.

But are they? Really?

So, the many thousands, if not millions, of faithful Christians throughout western history who espoused Christian socialism (like Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer), defended the divine right of kings (like John and Charles Wesley), or insisted that true Christian faith demanded communal living where all goods are held in common (like many, early Pietists) – they were all deluded by defective world-views that sadly led their children astray?

Who exactly decides THE one legitimate Biblical world-view? Who draws its boundaries? Who makes the final, authoritative distinction between the necessary, Biblical truths and the unnecessary, peripheral cultural add-ons? And whose Biblical truths become THE Biblical truths?

Personally, I have never heard these unavoidable questions addressed adequately in any of the conversations I have listened to or read that promoted this idea of a “Biblical world-view.”

And this is a big part of the reason why I think the entire conversation about world-views is bunk.

My most radical critique, however, drilling down to the most fundamental error of world-view thinking, is the neglect of discipleship.

Yep, I know that world-view advocates will protest here. They insist that possessing a Biblical world-view IS fundamental to Christian discipleship, and a large majority of the evangelical church agrees, in principle.

But this is precisely where the American church goes astray. Because the real focal point of Christian discipleship is Jesus, the crucified, resurrected Galilean.

Disciples know Jesus personally. They follow after Jesus closely. They submit the entirety of their lives to Jesus’ Lordship, and they want to conform their lives to Jesus’ own pattern of living and instruction.

Genuine discipleship is not acquired by memorizing theological principles, nor by mastering critiques of alternative world-views, nor by learning the right way “to think” about life’s questions.

Disciples are made through submission and obedience to the crucified Savior who becomes so loved and adored by the sinners he has saved that they will do anything he asks of them, no matter how odd, counter-cultural, counter-intuitive, offensive, or difficult it may be.

Many of the most serious disciples may never be able to articulate a coherent, integrated “world-view,” at least not to Mr. Barna’s satisfaction. But they will know the living Jesus and follow Him faithfully to the bitter end.

Certainly, genuine discipleship requires Bible study. But the focus of that study turns from learning doctrinal proof-texts to focus on the absorption of stories and lessons about Jesus’ shocking lifestyle among society’s most marginalized.

The focus turns to Jesus’ ethical teachings about selfless love, radical obedience, personal sacrifice, self-denial, anti-materialism, simplicity, generosity, sharing, and absolute allegiance to the resurrected Lord, even to the point of dying for Him, if necessary.

For much of my adult life I have been convinced that one of the great failings of the American church has been its preference for teaching the theological complexities of the apostle Paul rather than exploring Jesus’ outrageous moral requirements.

A proper, Christian world-view only emerges in the hearts and minds of those who wake up every morning with a renewed commitment to follow hard after Jesus, to become more and more like Jesus, to love Jesus with all the sincerity of someone who has pledged herself to “obey all of Jesus’ commandments.”

Does my alternative to world-view thinking give us a guaranteed, uniform answer to every philosophical question? Does it keep us all on the same page about knowing how to address life’s problems? Of course not.

But it does set us on the right path.

It does clarify that the heart and soul of the Christian life is not so much about what we know as it is about who we love and the way we live.

It does make us real Christians, not fakes.

It does put us in touch with God’s voice as He speaks through His Word, both through the words of holy Scripture as well as the words of His one and only holy Son.

And oh, my goodness, what a difference it would make in this world if the church were to prioritize wholesale obedience to our suffering Savior Jesus Christ – even to the point of our own suffering and death – as its number one value. The supposed need for a Biblical world-view would vanish in an instant.

Did You Know that America was Hitler’s Main Model for The Nazis’ Nuremberg Laws?

I recently read James Q. Whitman’s eye-opening book, Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (Princeton, 2017).

No school teacher had ever explained to me that during the second half of the 19th century and first half of the 20th century the USA was THE most officially racist country in the world.

What Whitman demonstrates is not only that our Southern states had racist Jim Crow laws intended to disenfranchise anyone who was not white from exercising their constitutional rights as citizens. But beyond that, the entire country, both north and south, was governed by an elaborate system of laws, ordinances, and regulations legislating three vital arenas of citizenship: immigration law, citizenship law, and marriage law. And these laws were far more restrictive than those found in any other country.

These were “the Big Three,” the three legislative arenas that made the good ole’ US of A the most racist nation in the world.

As state legislatures around this country continue to make new laws banning the teaching of Critical Race Theory – even in places where it is not being taught! – I wish that my public education had included the historical information laid out in Whitman’s important book.

Below is an excerpt from Hitler’s American Model. I urge you to read the entire book for yourself. I will make a few comments after the excerpt:

On June 5, 1934, about a year and a half after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of the Reich, the leading lawyers of Nazi Germany gathered at a meeting to plan what would become the Nuremberg Laws, the notorious anti-Jewish legislation of the Nazi race regime…The meeting involved detailed and lengthy discussions of the law of the United States. In the opening minutes, Justice Minister Gürtner presented a memo on American race law, which had been carefully prepared by the officials of the ministry for purposes of the gathering; and the participants returned repeatedly to the American models of racist legislation in the course of their discussions. It is particularly startling to discover that the most radical Nazis present were the most ardent champions of the lessons that American approaches held for Germany…Indeed in Mein Kampf Hitler praised America as nothing less than “the one state” that had made progress toward the creation of a healthy racist order of the kind the Nuremberg Laws were intended to establish. (1-2)

This too is a part of American history.

There is only one way to teach this history: straightforwardly and honestly. Hiding it, ignoring it only perpetuates the cultural deformities that gave overt racism so much power over our society in the first place.

Yes, every student in an American classroom needs to learn about this part of our story. Yes, courses in Critical Race Theory must continue in colleges, universities, and law schools. Efforts at teaching multiculturalism and inclusion must continue unabated, from our elementary schools on up.

The fact that so many are now fighting against such educational efforts to make the full spectrum of America’s racist history known is, perhaps, the nation’s loudest bellwether proving that America is, in fact, an anti-Christian nation.

Genuine followers of Jesus want to know the truth, the truth about themselves and the truth about the world around them.

Genuine followers of Jesus are more devoted to their citizenship in the kingdom of God and the ethics of Jesus than they are to the mythologies or civic religions of any earthly nation-state, including the one they live in.

Genuine followers of Jesus willingly confess the ugly truths about themselves, their heritage, families, and societies. This is because genuine followers of Jesus are in the habit of confessing their sins and seeking forgiveness from both God and others.

Genuine followers of Jesus eagerly work to make amends to those who have been injured by the consequences of whatever evils their heritage has inflicted onto others.

Genuine followers of Jesus, inasmuch as it is possible, seek reconciliation and work for justice in their relationships with those around them.

The disturbing fact that so many ostensibly “Christian” leaders are in the forefront of this current culture war campaign to hide the story of how America triumphantly won the crown as the world’s most officially racist country, tells us a lot about how unimportant the crucified Jesus truly is to American evangelicalism.