This final installment of “When Disobedience is a Virtue” is another excerpt from my book, I Pledge Allegiance: A Believer’s Guide to Kingdom Citizenship in 21st Century America (Eerdmans, 2018), page 112.
If you know me personally or are a regular reader of this blog, then you
know that I am a non-conformist. Part of this is my personality. I have always questioned authority and wondered (often out loud) about the real evidence behind public statements of “fact.”
But the greatest influence pushing me further and further into the arms of non-conformity has been my faith in Jesus Christ. Every true disciple is a non-conformist to the ways of this world.
That includes pushing back against the various ways that this world sets up shop inside the church, selling God’s people worldly rubbish like a rogue sidewalk vender hawking enticing chili dogs without a license.
“There will never be a sufficient consensus on anything in this life—including biblical interpretation and social activism—to eliminate all of life’s uncertainties. If we act only in the absence of uncertainty, then we will never do anything but wait and invent new excuses for our inactivity. Living a biblically directed life is the only way to deconstruct the false moral universes erected by this world and replace them with the moral universe created by the kingdom of God. Of course, as long as we remain in this world, we are partially blinded and crippled by the misshapen universe we are working to leave behind, so our interpretations and conclusions must be held lightly. But they must be held. Uncertainty never justifies apathy.
“Second, there comes a time when the individual must act and act alone if necessary, while being prepared to accept the consequences of those actions, 
whatever they may be. It is no accident that Peter Haas introduces his discussion of Germany’s Christian rescuers by saying: “A common feature of any principled dissent . . . [is] that the rescuers are deviants, people who are misfits in their society. . . . [Their actions] grew out of the rescuer’s experience as social and political outcasts.” Principled individualism, what the status quo will always condemn as the deviant behavior of misfits and outcasts, is the distinguishing characteristic of Christian faithfulness in this fallen world.
“Unfortunately, there are many pious voices that want to sedate this brand of individualism by wrapping it up tightly in the maudlin, anesthetic gauze of “community life.” Christian gatherings easily become the most repressive, stultifying crowds that squash the last vestige of creative individualism from its
members: Never act alone. Never step out of line. Never speak when others are quiet. Never question authority. Never doubt what everyone else believes. Never question the way it has always been done. Never try to think outside the box. These are the conformist platitudes repeated by the crowd in its self-serving attempts to constrain passionate individuals, preventing them from acting for the sake of conscience. At times the Christian church has become the most oppressive, do-nothing herd of them all.
“So we must learn to discern the difference between a fellowship that participates in God’s kingdom and a collective that exists only to replicate carbon copies of the citizens of this world.”
