Or, How God Works Through History to Suppress Bad Theology.

The history of the Church over the past few centuries may be surprising to many who consider the world to be in a perpetual state of moral decline. The 18th and 19th Centuries were particularly dark times for Protestantism and Evangelicalism worldwide. Having fully accepted the anthropocentric philosophy of the 18th century and positivism of the 19th century - first that man is the measure of all things and second that only what is experienced can be certainly known (Schleiermacher, often called the Father of Liberal Theology, was a particular proponent of this last point) - theology became less of the study of God and His relation to man, and more of a purely academic discipline, steeped in the historical-critical tradition. Many would claim to be simply following the Protestant Principle - that is, searching out historic Christianity by removing accretions (such as, many of the time would say, the divinity of Christ or the election of God) - but stripped of any meaningful distinction from generic morality, people began to, as Piper would say, “follow the Protestant Principle right out the door of the church”.

There seemed to be no turning back from Liberal Theology - the idea that simple, general and universal religious truths were the primary aim of the specific stories and letters of the Bible - by the early 20th century. And leaving little to commend Christianity over any other religion, the future of the Church looked quite grim. Fast forward to the 1960s. Evangelicalism was back on the rise with the Baptist denomination (which would quickly become the fastest growing denomination in America and eventually the largest in total number), mainline Liberal denominations were beginning to split off into evangelical segments, and Liberal Theology was virtually dead. What happened in the interim? Quite simply, two world wars happened.

The death of Liberal Theology and the rise of Evangelicalism was directly and immediately thanks to Kaiser Wilhelm and Adolf Hitler. During the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries, Germany was the center of the Western philosophical renaissance, with eminent philosophers from Kant and Hegel to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Incidentally Liberal Theology of that era was built upon defending the Christian faith upon a foundation of the popular philosophy of the day. Thus, Germany was also the theological center of the Western world. There was hardly a theologian of that day, Karl Barth notes in The Humanity of God, that did not also consider himself a professional philosopher.

The problem with Liberal Theology in Germany in the early 20th Century was, however, as Barth also notes in the same book, “He who in 1933 may have still been spellbound by the theology of the 19th century was hopelessly condemned … to bet on the wrong horse with regard to National Socialism”. Liberal theology was built upon the same philosophical tradition as the Nazi Party, and thus was prone to endorse it. Barth even describes the day he became disenchanted with Liberal Theology at large - when in 1914, 93 German intellectuals, including nearly all of the theologians he most revered, endorsed Kaiser Wilhelm’s war policy. Without a firm Christological foundation, Liberal Theology could do no other than be swept away in Europe’s brief mass enchantment with Fascism.

In the aftermath of World War II and following the discovery of the concentration camps, Hitler and the Nazi party came to and continue to carry such a strong stigma that even failing to display proper moral revulsion at their idea was sufficient to pick up the stigma. This was even more pronounced in Christian circles, in which the deeds of Hitler and the Nazis stood in even starker contrast to ideal Biblical morality. How could the greatest theologians of our time have stood by the greatest evil of our time?

Thus the Nazi stigma stuck to Liberal Theology, and it is now widely discredited. Germany never since has returned to the philosophical and theological prominence it once enjoyed. In this instance, we can see the hand of God working in history to stamp out the theology that had castrated the Christian faith for over a century.

So what does this have to do with George Bush and American Constantinianism? Far be it from me to compare Bush directly to Hitler (though it is a popular, if dramatic, comparison among those who oppose his policies) - my point is rather the stigma associated with them. George Bush is by far the most unpopular president in recent memory, and he is even more despised worldwide than at home. And with the national debt as it is, even if we manage to pull out of Iraq soon, his legacy is likely to be even more strongly negative in the future, both in America and abroad.

But even though his stigma is still significantly less than that of Hitler’s, his connection to the group we will focus on is much stronger. Though the Liberal theologians of the early 20th century gave Hitler moral support, there is one group that was singlehandedly instrumental in Bush’s rise to power: The Christian Right.

I have written much before about the danger of Christian Right theology to the Church at large, from engendering materialism to engendering undue disrespect from the World (not that we should actively seek its respect, but we are to appear blameless and shine our lights that the gentiles may “see your good works and glorify your Father in Heaven” (Matthew 5:16)), so I will not argue its harm here. But it seems to me that American Constantinianism - the Christian Right, which seeks to bring the Church into government - may soon face a similar decline to Liberal Theology of the mid 20th century. If Bush’s stigma continues to grow (which is likely) and the Christian Right makes no major move to distance itself from him (which wouldn’t likely matter much, even if it were likely to happen), then mainstream American Evangelicalism could likely move quickly and sharply away from its current state of political activism.

Even now we are beginning to see this happening. I recently ran across a book mirroring many of my own ideas in Books A Million called Jesus For President, that besides the alarming title and artsy layout choices, makes a compelling case for the abandonment of Constantinianism. Though the book does not rail against any particular politicians, it is clearly inspired by a disillusionment with the political fruit of the Christian Right. These ideas, though widely looked upon with scorn by the Evangelical establishment not so long ago, are now gaining steam from the bottom up as more and more Christians recognize the failure of Constantinianism to bring about the good of the Church, or more severely, the glory of God.

Picture from Newsweek’s cover story Bush & God

With the postmodern movement in full swing, it almost seems as if new religions are springing up faster than new followers can be made. Especially hot on the market is custom religion - tailored from an eclectic mix to fit your own needs and desires; something deep enough to make you look sophisticated (”spiritual but not religious”), but not enough to affect your life in any meaningful way.

Let’s look at this trend a little deeper. The first problem is that adhering to a custom religion is a sign that the adherent does not grasp the severity of religious choice. Religion encompasses many categories of belief, not the least of which is the existence and nature (or lack thereof) of the divine or supernatural, and any sort of afterlife. Whether or not one arrives at any particular religious conclusion, it is not a consideration to be taken lightly. Custom religion, for the reasons we will soon see, is not a serious answer to what is possibly the most important question in life. In fact, there are only three feasible religious models:

1) Agnosticism is the only purely epistemological conclusion, and inevitably so: with no starting point or frame of reference, we can reach no endpoint, and thus all we can truly know is that we can know nothing.

2) Atheism or Deism. Custom religion is laughable simply because the probability that an individual could hit truth dead on without divine revelation is ridiculous. There are infinite possible religious permutations, but the plausibility of atheism and deism rests in statistical probability: of all possible natures of the divine that could be arrived at without revelation, the two most likely are that it does not exist, and that it does not intervene. To assume any further intervention beyond deism would require…

3) Divine Revelation. If we are to assume that the divine or supernatural exists and affects our world (the only remaining possibility), it would not make sense to make any further assumptions about its nature except what has been revealed by that same divine. In the absence of a logically consistent revealed word, custom religion under scrutiny can only devolve into agnosticism.

Yet though some custom religion is indeed sourceless except for the whims and tastes of the adherent, some comes from pseudo-legitimate sources. What then cannot be trusted as a source of religious truth?

1) Personal Experience without external corroboration is useless. Dreams and visions and experiences happen to everyone, and unless it adheres to an external revealed word (atheism, deism, and agnosticism preclude religious experience), there is nothing to make one experience more valid than another that conflicts with it.

2) Tradition is custom, not truth: it has no divine authority behind it, and basing a religion thereupon is just following someone else’s custom religion. Sadly, the “for America and for Jesus!” crowd - not only them, but the majority of self-identifying Christians, even - is just as guilty of this as the most ardent Odinist, though perhaps not as intentionally so. Christianity has become so ingrained in the West that it has come to play second fiddle to and merge with cultural traditions, giving patriotism and other such trivialities an undeservedly religious bent.

This last list is by no means exhaustive; these are simply the most widespread: banana pudding cannot be trusted as a source of religious truth either, but it would not be worthwhile to include. In conclusion, I would implore anyone reading this to at least take the religious question more seriously. Know what you believe, why you believe it, and be sure it’s logically consistent.

I was out driving the other day with the radio turned to a Christian radio station, when a song lyric jumped out at me: Because you would rather die / Than to ever live without me. Lines like this have never sat well with me, but I always attributed my discomfort to a question of perspective - a focus on God versus a focus on man, for example. It was only that day it dawned on me that there is a fundamental error in this song lyric - the same that thousands of Christian self-esteem messages spring from; the same that tickles our ears with popular notions of self-worth and esteem. The difference between a haughty spirit and a humble spirit before God ultimately lies in how you answer the question, why does God love us?

The explanation for why God created the human race that I always heard growing up hinges on choice. First the question is posed, would you want a spouse to love you because she had to - a robot, if you will - or because she wanted to? The argument then goes on to contrast our worship with that of the angels: the angels are simply programmed to worship God and can do no other, the reasoning goes, while we can choose to love God - therefore our praise is preferable to that of the angels because ours is voluntary.

So God loves us because we have choice? This runs into several problems (we’ll even ignore the fact that Lucifer and a third of the angels didn’t adhere to their “programming”). First, our choice is constrained by sin. In the flesh - in our own effort - we cannot choose God (Romans 8:7-8). We have no capability in ourselves to love God. He enables us to love Him by the Holy Spirit for the very reason that we cannot by ourselves do so.

Second, this reasoning would imply that God loves us because of some innate good within us, namely, choice. There is nothing good within us that would commend us to God (Isaiah 64:6, Jeremiah 17:9), and we are certainly not in an inherently better position before Him than the angels. The belief that God loves us because we are made in His image - because we have some “spark of the divine” - even so far as to say that God loves us because we (can) choose Him, is to say that at some level we deserve God’s love, and this is fundamentally no different from the pride of Lucifer.

But God obviously loves us, as we see throughout the Bible (John 3:16). Why then, if we have nothing to commend ourselves to God, does He still pursue us? The answer is not within us, but in God. God does not love us because of who we are, but because of who He is. One thing I am indebted to John Piper for is the proof and justification of a selfish God (Deuteronomy 6:15): If God, being at the same time omniscient and the highest good in the universe, had as His ultimate aim anything other than the highest good in the universe, He would no longer be a good or perfect God. Therefore God’s ultimate goal can only be His own glory. His duty is not to us, but to Himself.

So how does mankind factor into God’s glory? God’s love of and offer of salvation to mankind is not so He can enjoy the pleasure of our company, but in order to demonstrate His power to redeem that which had nothing good of its own to boast. Paul tells us that salvation is entirely the work of God for this very purpose: “Not of works, lest any man should boast” (Ephesians 2:9). The glory is entirely God’s.

With this in mind, our focus shifts away from ourselves and towards God. Prayer becomes less of our will and more “Your will be done”, in faith that God makes all things to work together for the good of those that love Him (Romans 8:28). Father, forgive me, not because I’m coming to You, but because You have brought me to Yourself. This is a humble spirit before God: unpretentious gratitude that while we were yet sinners, while we were enemies of God with nothing worthy of love about us, Christ still died for us.

In America and throughout the world, it is not at all uncommon to find that nation’s flag flown prominently in the churches. In certain “conservative” circles especially in America, faith and patriotism have become virtually synonymous, to the point that entire “Patriotic” sections can be found in many hymnals. The Church has, with only minimal prompting from the state, given over its heart in devotion thereto.

How did this come to be in a nation founded on the principles of keeping its churches and state mutually unencumbered by one another? As much as it would like to deny so, American Protestantism has inherited a long legacy of church-state entwinement from the Catholic Church through the foundation of the Anglican Church, which obliterated any claim to intrinsic moral superiority that the Reformation may for a time have enjoyed. Furthermore, it is no less the nature of the Christian than anyone else to form political opinions. The problem is that religious and moral traditionalism become linked with patriotic and nationalistic traditionalism, when in reality such a link is purely imaginary and entirely unnecessary.

There are significant repercussions in both the political and religious realms for the overlap in these demographics. Those that are apprehensive about Obama because of his Muslim upbringing are the same that fault him for allegedly not saluting the flag. These are the same who see the War on Terror as a religious war against Islam (and see that as a good thing), and the same who claim America as a Christian nation and thus perpetuate the association of Christianity with American exports in the eyes of the Muslims on the other side who also see it as a religious war.

One of the fundamental characteristics of the Church is universality - that the body of Christ transcends geopolitical borders. Conflation of faith and patriotism seriously undermines this universality. Is a Mexican or Arab Christian any less of a Christian for being Mexican or Arab? Not many would say “yes” out loud simply because it’s become culturally unacceptable to do so (though I might be surprised), but the mindset is nevertheless there, and becomes the impetus for subconscious racial or cultural discrimination.

Secondly, the aims of the Church and of individual states are often at odds. Jesus said “No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to one and despise the other”, but through some sort of doublethink many have placed their love for country on par with, or even above, their love for God. The ultimate aim of any state is self-preservation at any cost, while the aim of the Church is glorification of God. Much of the time these are not in conflict as the Christian is called to submit to the state so far as this does not run counter to the law of God, but this is not always the case. There is of course the obvious instance where a government outlaws Christian practice (in which case it is unlikely that Christians would feel strongly patriotic), but more often the conflict of more subtle. Following the first point, in wartime when a nation floods the airwaves with nationalistic propaganda, how will you feel towards the people of the enemy state? Will you hate them as the state insists, or will you love them as God commands? When the country enters an economic slump and sends you a refund check to encourage you to spend more, will you run out and spend it as Congress desires, or be content in this and every situation (Phillipians 4:10)?

The American Church has an easy enough remedy: there is nothing external to prevent the abolition of patriotism in the Church. Unfortunately this is not so simple elsewhere: churches such as the Anglican Church as well as churches in most of Europe and even parts of Asia now which are fundamentally tied to their governments, are faced with a more systemic problem. The problem may be more apparent somewhere like China, where the ties were established forcefully by the state with the ultimate goal of emasculating the Church, than in Europe where often the question of whether the Church or the State came first becomes fuzzy. But the problem is nevertheless intrinsic, and not one of specific instances of conflicts of interest. Without a deliberate structural break from the state which may or may not be possible depending on the government, individual movement from state churches to independent churches is the only sure and permanent way to release the Church from the shackles of loyalty to earthly government.

Freedom requires religion, just as religion requires freedom. Freedom opens the windows of the soul so that man can discover his most profound beliefs and commune with God. Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone.

This is shaping up to be one of the most interesting elections in recent memory, with three different candidates seeking to break a different axis of the White Male Christian dynasty of US presidents. Mitt Romney, who would be the first Mormon in the White House should he win, is in a unique position in that his religion, unlike Obama’s race and Clinton’s gender, positions him at a major disadvantage from the establishment without his minority group providing him with much of a corresponding advantage.

Romney’s recent speech was meant to allay the Christian Right’s fears of a Mormon in office, and if the news reaction is any indication, was a smashing success. The thrust of his speech was an ecumenical plea to ignore the differences of our religions with a bit of patriotic “Yay Freedom!” thrown in for good measure.

What he is trying to say is “I am a person of faith. Forget the fact what my faith is, that I am a Mormon. You might be Christian. You might be Jewish. I’m a person of faith. I believe in God”
Roland Martin, CNN

Shy of the Unitarian Universalist Church, hardly any marginally doctrinally versed Christian - even one who would gloss over the doctrinal divisions among Protestantism, Catholicism, and Eastern Orthodoxy - would consider Mormonism of the same lineage as the Christian faith. Though the Universalist idea that all religions point to God is appealing to the masses as a nice feel-good belief, I doubt most Christians will buy it. Kennedy appealed to a similar popular idea in his famous speech to which many are comparing Romney’s - that religion is private and inconsequential in the public sphere.

Romney also purported that religion and freedom are necessary for each other. He even said explicitly that one without the other will perish. The point that freedom requires religion requires a very loose definition of freedom and religion: the Greeks of ancient Athens, for example, were by any modern definition “free” in the political sense, but their religion had become an allegory for the machinations of the natural world, and the gods were effectively nonexistent by the time of Aristotle. Whether this can be called religion is debatable, but his juxtaposition of the first point - that religion requires freedom - is flatly and demonstrably false. In fact, nearly the opposite is true: it is amid the lack of freedom that religion most flourishes. Persecution is a fire that refines and purifies faith.

There are countless historical examples of this, for it is the martyrs that people of any religion esteem: the Confessing Church is arguably the best snapshot of the ideal of the Church in modern history. Forced underground after a Nazi program banned the Bible in churches to be replaced with Mein Kampf (”the most sacred book to Germany, and therefore God”) and required the adoption of a doctrine of Positive Christianity - a reformulation of the Christian faith to conform with Nazi ideals, the Confessing Church exemplified not only compassion by hiding Jews and other persecuted groups, but doctrinal integrity by continuing to meet under the banner of Orthodoxy. The Church worldwide is still indebted to the Confessing Church for the theology that came out of it during that period. It was only when the war ended and freedom in the Western sense was restored that, to the dismay of leaders like Moltmann, the Confessing Church was rendered all but unnecessary and the German Church as a whole strove to return to its prewar state.

The Church in China is another oft-cited example. The house churches that meet against the will of the State and its theologically flaccid official churches embody on a larger scale than in any Western country the devotion and sacrifice inherent to true Christianity. The Early Church is another, persecuted under the Roman Empire until Constantine instated religious freedom in Rome, securing for it a dominant material and political position that sent it on a long slide of decay and corruption.

No, though freedom may or may not require religion in the loosest sense of the word, religion if it is truly of God in no way requires freedom, or any earthly institution to persevere. False faiths may fall away under stress, but it is the mark of Godliness to be made stronger by persecution.

Tune in next time for: Why I support Romney anyway