Evangelical pastor Rick Warren, referring to the two thieves who were crucified on either side of Jesus, said, "If you’re looking for the #realJesus, not a caricature disfigured by partisan motivations, you’ll find him in the middle, not on either side.” He got blowback from other evangelicals. But I don’t think they blew the trumpet we needed to hear.
Much was said in opposition to his remark, but one response was, in my view, a good summary of much of what I read or heard. It is found in this Fox News report:
[C]onservative commentator Allie Beth Stuckey declared. “Jesus is not ‘in the middle’ on the murder of children, gender deception, the definition of marriage, or anything else, for that matter. In fact, I seem to remember Him having a particular disdain for the lukewarm.’”
She is correct. Jesus is not lukewarm on any of those particular issues. He might not be lukewarm on a particular issue Democrats champion, though one doesn’t immediately come to mind.
But I believe a recitation of particulars is not sufficient for the day. A different and louder trumpet needs to be sounded. There is a more fundamental problem at the foundation of both party’s houses. It stands to reason that this problem extends to their respective leaders.
The fundamental problem that must be trumpeted to our political party leaders (and to Christians) is pervasive unbelief in the Triune God revealed in Jesus Christ.
Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer wrote the following in the preface to the second edition of his book, Unbelief and Revolution (1868): “For all its excellences, modern society, having fallen into bondage to the theory of unbelief, is increasingly being seduced into a systematic repudiation of the living God.” (Emphasis in the original).
Abraham Kuyper followed in the train of van Prinsterter’s work. Unsurprisingly, Kuyper extended van Prinsterer’s conclusion in the form of a warning to the United States. It was delivered in his Stone Lectures to Princeton seminary in 1898:
[A]lthough on the American continent, in a younger world, a relatively healthier tone of life prevails than in senescent Europe, yet this will not for a moment mislead the thinking mind. It is impossible for you to shut yourselves off hermetically from the old world, as you form no humanity apart, but are a member of the great body of the race. And the poison having once entered the system at a single point, in due time must necessarily pervade the whole organism. (Emphasis supplied).
The United States adopted unbelief as the foundation for our nation's jurisprudence in 1938. The decision was Erie Railroad v. Tompkins, 304 U.S. 64.
The issue was the nature of common law. Common law is the jurisprudence undergirding the American war for Independence. It is unwritten law. It is rooted in the existence of a transcendent law that judges were to (1) discern, (2) sift through the grid of experience (precedents) for greater understanding, and (3) apply to resolve a dispute among litigants.
Specifically, the question before the Court was whether there was any law of such transcendent authority that a federal court could apply it to resolve a dispute among litigants from different states.
The answer was no. The reason was unbelief in the transcendent as it pertains to law. The majority of the Justices denied “there is ‘a transcendental body of law outside of any particular State.’”
What does this mean as a practical matter? The lawfulness of abortion and obscenity, for example, became strictly state-by-state and local community-by-local community matters, respectively.
However, the larger import of this denial was the Court’s adoption of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s earlier statement of fundamental legal precept, “[L]aw in the sense in which courts speak of it today does not exist without some definite authority behind it. . . . “[T]he authority and only authority is the State.’”
Kuyper’s observation proved prescient. We were not sealed off from the European poison of unbelief birthed in the French Revolution. Our nation’s brightest legal minds usurped all authority pertaining to law. Now law can be fashioned according to our conception of existence. We now live in a tyrannical condition.
Worse yet, since then, this god-denying precept has governed what are acceptable grounds for legal and policy advocacy, even among most Christians engaged in that work.
As with responses to Warren’s comments, Christians fussed about particular changes in the Republican Party’s platform on abortion and the marital relationship. But the statement of fundamental precept in its Platform got no attention to my knowledge.
The preamble urges people to “call upon” the “American Spirit of Strength, Determination, and Love of Country” that “led us” in the past. Supposedly, that “American Spirit” is what we need “if we are going to lead our Nation to a brighter future.”
I consider this a call to unbelief. It is mysticism at best. Otherwise, it is fundamentally idolatrous: The Triune God of Providence and the “American Spirit” share the stage of history.
I believe Jesus takes a side against all unbelief wherever it is found. He brings judgment on it. However, the gospel pattern is that life follows judgment.
That’s why I pray the Father would in Jesus, by the Holy Spirit, grant repentance to the leaders of both parties. Absent that, in time, Jesus’s “side” will bring judgment on them and their parties.
Psalm 82:6-8 (KJV) gives us the trumpet Christians need to sound:
I have said, "Ye [are] gods; and all of you are children of the most High.” But ye shall die like men, and fall like one of the princes. Arise, O God, judge the earth: for thou shalt inherit all nations.
