When we list the various ways we sin, “thought, word and deed” we might make the mistake of seeing this as a list like this one, “grape, watermelon, apple.” They all fall under the category of fruit, but that is the extent of their relationship. Not so with thought, word and deed. Thought, word and deed is more like acorn, sapling, oak tree. No one would mistake an acorn for a tree, but leave it alone long enough, in ordinary circumstances trees happen.
We have become such a virtual culture that we think it possible to separate our thoughts and words from our deeds. We enter into cyberspace to debate ideologies and policy perspectives. Things might get heated but it’s not like anything ever comes of it. Everyone just shuts down their windows, turns out the light, and goes to bed. Except things do come of it. Terrible things.
One of strongest cases one could make for the influence of “Christian nationalism,” not that there is much of a case, is found in how conservative evangelicals tend to view foreign policy. We are hawks. We see those dove Democrats as the party of Neville Chamberlain. (Of course, the truth is that Democrats are at least as war hungry as their Republican counterparts.) When we embrace American exceptionalism it is one small step to embracing American empire. Sure, we’ll cast it as something humanitarian. But just as Democrats think that whenever there’s a hardship within our borders the feds need to come up with a new program to spend it away, so too many Christian conservatives think that whenever there’s a hardship outside our borders the feds need to send in the troops. In the former instance real people with real hardships are put deeper into hardship, and more people not in hardship are dragged there by the bloat of government. In the latter, our emotive, unbiblical, grabbing the ears of a passing dog response results in wives weeping over graves, mothers clutching folded flags, little girls growing up without their daddies.
Russia has invaded Ukraine. Putin is a bad and dangerous man. People are dying and global balances are teetering. As we debate what ought to be done can we please start with this question- does the US government have any jurisdiction there? Does NATO? Does, absent Security Council approval, the UN? Does real calamity grant the US government jurisdiction? The true, historical conservative position on this is the same as it is on vax mandates. No. The US government doesn’t have the authority to require anyone to get a vaccine, much less an experimental one, much less an experimental one that doesn’t work like vaccines once did. Nor does it have the authority to join Ukraine in removing Russia.
If you feel strongly about the vax, by all means, get one. If you feel strongly about freeing Ukraine, by all means go there and fight for it. No one is stopping you. Those beating the drums of war in this country, however, are not the ones who will go, fight and die. Governments run up debts in the tens of trillions because every spending opportunity looks important when you’re spending someone else’s money. Governments wage wars because opportunities look too inviting when you’re spilling someone else’s blood, including that of your own soldiers.
American empire isn’t so dangerous in the abstract, when it’s just an idea. It’s only slightly more dangerous when it’s something we talk about. These, however, are just the first two steps to flag draped coffins. Ukrainians fighting to the death against the invading Russians are heroes to be honored. American soldiers dying in the same war would be pawns, victims of the same overreach by their own leaders as the Russians dying in the war. Neither country has any reason to be there. May the Russians go home, and may the Americans stay home.
Richard Weaver first made a name for himself when he published his seminal work, Ideas Have Consequences. It is a brief work with ideas that are still reaping consequences. He was to the secular academic world something of a Francis Schaeffer, introducing thousands to the concept of worldview, arguing that what we think about little things, more often than not, is determined by what we think about big things. Weaver demonstrated how a modernist worldview was not something academia simply studied, but it was instead something that shaped academia. Indeed, modernism is academia’s mother. You wouldn’t have the latter if you did not first have the former. Schaeffer named many of the strongholds we are called to tear down, the sundry “isms” that we in the evangelical world carefully study, the same ones we once studiously ignored.
While I don’t deny the importance of the study of worldviews, I’m afraid there just might be something modernist about our modern fascination with “isms,” whether we’re fighting or promoting them. The Bible does argue that we fight against every lofty thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, but on the other hand, it spends far more time worrying about sins on a grand scale. The children of Israel, for instance, are never sent a prophet who thunders against them because they have embraced behaviorism. He never destroys a city with fire and brimstone because the citizens there believed in utilitarianism. No, the problem doesn’t have much academic allure. The problem was always idolatry. Nations rise and fall, cultures ebb and flow, based on this simple question: do they worship the true and living God? Worldviews may shape how we see the world, but theology shapes our worldviews.
We are a schizophrenic people. We have a love/hate relationship with our own nation/history/culture. We, at least within the church, prefer to define ourselves in light of the heroes of our past. We are the heirs of the Puritans and the Pilgrims, faithful men and women. We are the children of Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, George Washington. We were, and there is the heartache, were, a great people. Today we are a nation of looters and rapists. We are child predators and baby killers. Today, third world nations, with pity in their hearts, send missionaries here, for the sake of our souls. And so we want to know where it all went wrong. When did our city on a hill become Sodom and Gomorrah?
Of course, since the fall of Adam, wherever we were, there we would find the seed of our own destruction. But such doesn’t mean we can’t look for particular forces that toppled us in a particular direction. Some, for instance, see the war between the States as the great moment of national apostasy. Others look to the Scopes “Monkey” Trial as a watershed moment when we turned our backs on the God who had so blessed us. Still others think it all went wrong when prayer was removed from the state’s schools. A few might argue that it was January, 1973, when the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Roe v. Wade.
I’d like to posit a different theory. The handwriting was already on the wall, we had already been tried in the balance and found wanting, when our New England forbears jettisoned not just the rugged Calvinism that had sustained them in times of hardship, but when they began to embrace Unitarianism. Here the problem isn’t simply the playing fast and loose with the Bible. The problem wasn’t merely the Pelagian revival, the notion that culturally speaking, we could create the New Man, and usher in paradise on earth. The problem wasn’t the smug pride that drove the rejection not only of the Bible, but of the wisdom of our fathers in church history. The problem was this, we stopped worshiping the true and living God. The evil of Unitarianism is that it isn’t Trinitarianism.
So now what do we do? We do not simply change our worldview. We do not simply elect better politicians. We do not merely refute Darwin or Skinner or Derrida. All of this is lopping the tops off of dandelions, bandaging cancer cells. No. There is but one way for us as individuals, as families, as churches, as a culture, to become once more pleasing in God’s sight. We must worship God in spirit and in truth, which means we worship Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We repent for our idolatry, and we turn away from it.
The historians will argue for centuries over what brought about the downfall of this once great land. Dissertations will be written, and tenures will be denied. Great schools of thought will do battle with competing schools. Arguments as elaborate and as rickety as the tower of Babel will rise and fall, like rising and falling empires. But there is only one thing that exalts a nation, one way for a nation to enjoy blessing from the true and living God, and that is our worship of Him and Him alone. We will only enjoy His blessing when we pray, “And may the blessing of God Almighty — Father, Son and, Holy Spirit, abide with you now and always.” So let it be done, for the sake of our fathers, for the sake of our children, and for the glory of our triune God.
Yes, and no. How we answer depends a great deal on what we mean by “right.” A right can be that which sound ethics requires that no one take away from me. Our forefathers, for instance, argued that we have an inalienable right to keep and bear arms. It would be wrong for the state, or my neighbor, to take from me any of my guns. Or, on the other hand, too often a right is understood as that which others have an obligation to provide for me. Taking the second amendment here, I doubt anyone would argue that my right to keep and bear arms means that the state has the right to tax you in order to pay for me to have a gun. Politically speaking, in other words, rights rightly understood are more about what the state may not do to restrain me than they are about what the state must provide me.
Do I, for instance, have a right to high-speed internet access? A smart phone? I hope we can all agree that the state would be wrong to forbid me to have these things. In that sense these things are within my rights. On the other hand, I hope we haven’t yet sunk so deeply into an entitlement mindset that any of you would suggest that the state has an obligation to provide any of these things for me. There was a time when I only had a dumb cell phone, the kind you get for free when you sign up for service. I didn’t have an I-phone because I couldn’t afford one. Is it right that some people should have I-phones, while I have to actually push real buttons on my phone? Of course it’s right and fair.
Health care, though, that’s not a luxury is it? Aren’t we all due the basic necessities? No, we’re not. Where, I wonder, would one find in the Bible, or in the Constitution, anything that suggests that the state has the right to tax my neighbor in order to provide health care for me? Or more basic still, food for me? Why then are we debating this at all? Every member of Congress, and the President of these United States, swears an oath to protect and defend the Constitution. Every professing Christian recognizes the Bible as our alone ultimate authority. So again, why the debate?
Because when we want something and can’t afford it, we’re quite content to ask the government to tax others to pay for it. This crosses the political spectrum. We think the good guys want limited government and the bad guys unlimited government. Yet I remember like it was yesterday the standard bearers of limited government arguing against Obamacare not because it was federal overreach but because it would damage LBJcare, Medicaid. No, that debate isn’t about freedom versus tyranny. It is instead about one group of socialists dickering with another group of socialists about who will receive what piece of the pie that was wrongly stolen from others. All because we’re so wrong about rights.
Jesus knew of what He spoke when He warned us to look out for the beam in our own eyes before getting too concerned about the speck in the eye of our brother. Our problem, having been forewarned by Jesus, is that we seek, through the diabolical art of simultaneous translation, to shrink this warning down to size. That is, we escape the far reaching implications of this command by turning it into a mere warning against hypocrisy. We fail to meet this standard, we seem to reason, only in those instances wherein the mote and the speck are of exactly the same genus, species and phylum. We think Jesus is telling us only that we should not remove the speck of sin a in our neighbor if we are more guilty of a more egregious form of sin A. Certainly a failure here carries with it a special flavor of hypocrisy that must be sweet to the lips of the serpent. But we ought to realize that the issue is the relative size of the sins, not the relative ontological closeness of the sins.
If my friend, for instance, misused his computer as is the manner of too many men, and I, on the other hand, availed myself of the services of “working women” I would certainly run afoul of this warning if I got in his face about the computer. The same is true, however, if my friend is a touch stingy, and I confront him on it while I am up to my eyeballs in the fear of men. The warning hits home corporately if his tradition has not sufficiently entered into the necessary implications of the sovereignty of God, and my tradition is given to profound intellectual pride. Truth be told, my tradition is given to profound intellectual pride. All those who are persuaded that their minds are the cat’s meow will, at least for a time, visit the world of the Reformed. And they will feel right at home. There together we will use our great intellects to catalog the theological errors of our neighbors. We will look down our noses at the poor benighted fools who use canned and inaccurate spiels to bring in the lost, while we do nothing to bring in the lost. We will show our impiety by mocking the Gnostic tinged piety of those with tender consciences in our midst, while our robust consciences throw genuine guilt off like so much dandruff.
We will focus more clearly on the sin in our own lives, those beams that so blind us, as we seek to better tend our own gardens. We will do that when we begin all our intellectual exercises, even all our spiritual exercises by asking this question first- where is my sin in all this? Here, though, is the glorious promise. The upside down economy of the Lord Jesus applies here as well. That is, even as we must be last to be first, we must die to live, so we must turn inward, looking to our own sins and our own weaknesses if we really want to change the world. Removing beams in our own eyes will have far greater global impact than going in a speck hunt in the eyes of our neighbors. I want to change the world. It must, however, begin with me.
Dunamis Fellowship and Sovereign Grace Fellowship continue our weekly Bible study at 7 eastern. Tonight we continue, Meeting Jesus. All are welcome to attend. Come early (6:15) and we’ll feed you. You can also watch on Facebook Live, RC-Lisa Sproul. We hope you join us .
