What would Jesus vote?

For the last couple months, I've debated whether to try to write something along the lines of "What would Jesus vote?" (WWJV). I just haven't been able to come up with an outline or approach that felt good or engaging enough to be worth it. For whatever reason, I feel like I'm on a better track today. Here's a tentative outline (work in progress):

Preface: Would Jesus Even Vote?
1. As a Kingdom Citizen
2. For the Greater Good
3. To Protect the Individual
4. To Restrain Evil
5. To Empower the Edges
6. For Life
7. For Peace
8. For the World
9. For the Earth
10. For Truth

Preface: Would Jesus Even Vote?

1. In Philippians 3:20, Paul reminds the church at Philippi that they are, first and foremost, citizens of heaven and the kingdom of God:

"For our citizenship exists in heaven, from where also we await a Savior: the Lord Jesus Christ."

It would be easy to miss the scandalous, controversial dimension to what Paul is saying here. Philippi was a Roman colony. That meant that the citizens of the city had the status of being citizens of Rome. It was like they lived in a suburb of the capital city. The vast majority of people in the Roman Empire were not citizens of Rome, and the vast majority of cities were not Roman colonies. Frankly, the vast majority of people living in Philippi were not citizens of the city.

Paul says this to the Philippians because it was especially relevant to them. If anyone there was tempted to boast in their Roman citizenship, Paul dashed their pretense to pieces. If someone thought their citizenship gave them special status or significance, Paul shuts that thought down. Who are the truly "important" people? It's those who are citizens of heaven, not any particular country or city on earth. Any privilege a Roman citizen in the city might have, Paul has already spoken to that thought earlier in the chapter: "Whatever gain I had... I consider it dung that I might gain Christ" (3:7-8).

There is nothing wrong with being proud of the country in which you live -- at least with a healthy pride. There is nothing wrong with being proud of your ethnic heritage. However, Paul sets down the principle very clearly here. It's dung when you put it next to Christ. We are not putting any heritage down here. Rather, we are putting Christ in his properly exalted place.

The use of the word Savior was also particularly powerful. The Romans often considered their emperors to be saviors. A famous inscription about the first Roman emperor, Augustus, calls him, "savior of the whole race of humanity." [1] It is very plausible that when Paul tells the Philippians that believers are awaiting a Savior from heaven, he is implying that they have no political savior on earth.

Finally, Paul is in prison as he writes. I along with many other scholars think he was in jail at Ephesus at the time of writing. The traditional view, of course, is that he was under house arrest in Rome (see Acts 28). Wherever he was, he was under the thumb of the Romans at the time of writing. That makes his identification of their true citizenship and true Savior even more powerful. After all, Paul himself was a Roman citizen. But that mattered nothing next to his heavenly citizenship.

2. Jesus did not come to earth as an angel. He came to earth as fully human. That means he had DNA. That means he had to choose whether to come as a man or a woman. He had an eye color. He either had ear lobes or he didn't. In that sense, he did not come as a universal human. He came as a particular human even though he represented all humanity, all genders, all body types, and all personalities.

He also came to a particular time and place. He came to an obscure part of the Roman Empire, the Galilee. He didn't even come to the "important part" of Israel but the backwater hill country to the north. Nazareth was not an important village. Maybe 200-500 people lived there. They probably did not have a synagogue building at the time but rather probably met in the open air in some central part of the village.

They primarily spoke Aramaic, although many may have known enough Greek to do business in nearby marketplaces. Jesus was born into a culture. They had ways of looking at the world like people born in specific places everywhere. They were not the ways we grow up with in twenty-first century America. Reading the Gospels -- in fact reading anywhere in the Bible -- is going to be a cross-cultural experience if we're reading it in context.

Why am I saying all this? Because we will not understand what Jesus' words and actions really meant if we do not know something about the context. The Spirit no doubt broadened Jesus' words for a more universal audience as God inspired the Gospel writers, but any study of the Gospels in depth reveals that they also had specific contexts and audiences that shaped their words. 

3. So, Jesus did not address a modern democracy or republic when he taught the Galilean crowds on the countryside. He did not speak to people in Jerusalem who would have a chance to vote in November. He spoke primarily to Jews who were under the thumb of Roman rule. There was no voting of Pilate out of office. 

There were three general options. First, if you were in a particular place of power, you could become complicit with the Romans. Many Sadducees and chief priests seem to have done this. You could argue that the toll collectors took this course. They collected money from local people and passed it on to the powers that be. You could assimilate and accommodate.

Second, you could become a revolutionary and fight. This never ended well. Whether you were Judas the Galilean, Theudas, or the many revolutionaries who fought in the Jewish War (AD66-72), this path led to almost certain death. Although Jesus wasn't a revolutionary, he was likely crucified under the charge of being one.

The third approach was the one that Jesus took. It was the approach that Paul and Peter seem to advocate as well in the rest of the New Testament. That is to live in an adjacent kingdom, namely, the inaugurated kingdom of God. You pray for the empire. You pray for your rulers. But you only engage them when you need to. Most of the time, you ignore them as something foreign and alien to the true kingdom.

4. We'll explore what it might mean to live as a kingdom citizen in a foreign land in the first chapter. For now, we just want to point out that Jesus did not "vote" in the political world he came to. He treated the kingdoms of the earth as something separate from the kingdom of God.

No where is this clearer than in his well known answer to the question of whether Jews should pay taxes or not. He asks for a coin in Mark 12:15. He asks whose image is on it. "Caesar's," they say. Then Jesus effectively says, "Well, give his coin back to him then." In other words, the world of Roman coinage and money, the world of the Roman Empire itself, has nothing to do with the kingdom of God.

In the terms of Richard Niehbur's famous 1951 book, Christ and Culture, Jesus expressed a "Christ against culture" perspective. [2] In this approach, the broader culture is seen as something foreign and greatly distinct from the world of the church or the kingdom. The Amish are often mentioned as a great example of this approach. As we will see in the first chapter, this perspective appears throughout the New Testament.

5. But that is not the end of the story. Every book of the New Testament including Revelation was written to address an audience in the first century under the Roman Empire. It doesn't exactly tell us how to play out its principles in a different time and place under different circumstances. As a human being, Jesus couldn't vote in the first century. But he could if he came as a human today. 

All the political instruction in the New Testament was written to individuals under a dictatorship. To apply the Scriptures faithfully, we have to wrestle together to apply its teaching to a world where we do get a say in the way society proceeds. Most of you reading this book do get to vote. The Bible does not tell us the specifics of what that looks like because none of its books were written to twenty-first century Americans or people in any modern nation.

Would Jesus vote? I suspect he would most of the time. Who and what would he vote for? That's where it gets more complicated. It gets complicated not only because different Christians picture Jesus differently but because our minds are so heavily clouded on matters of politics. So many of us are so sure of ourselves while, at the same time, being incredibly blinded to the historical and cultural forces at work on us.

It is with great fear and trembling that I step into this fray. I jump into the fray, for one, because I am a New Testament scholar and there actually would be substantial agreement among biblical experts on many of these issues. I therefore jump secondly because I'm not sure that this community of experts has done a good job of conveying these broad agreements on a popular or even ministerial level. 

The voices clouding our judgment are many. The ingenuity of the opposition to biblical principles is at times astounding. Sometimes such voices are sincere. Sometimes they are devilish.

Richard Mouw once affirmed with approval the sentiment of C. F. H. Henry on this topic, one of the shapers of modern evangelicalism. [3] Henry suggested that pastors should stick to the big principles of Scripture and the faith rather than tell congregations who or what to vote for specifically. While I may see things a little differently than Henry (and Mouw) in that article, I continue to agree substantially with them for the following reasons.

For one, you are likely to have individuals in your congregation of different political stripes. You need to be the pastor of the whole congregation and, indeed, a missionary to everyone in your context. If you pick sides too vehemently, you may very well be quenching the Spirit in terms of having an effective ministry.

For another, as a minister, you probably lack expertise in many of the relevant areas needed to make informed, concrete decisions on specific issues. One of the problems with American politics right now is that everyone thinks they are an expert at everything. Meanwhile, we feel free to ignore the people who actually are experts. We may agree that Jesus valued those on the margins. But how to play out that principle best effectively will require a whole lot of expertise most of us don't have. We can agree that the Bible commands us to value strangers in our midst. How to do that practically is complicated.

Finally, we are often unaware of our own biases. Forcing ourselves to stay more neutral helps us keep ourselves honest. It helps force us to see the positives and negatives on both sides. As we will strongly argue in the first chapter, God is neither a Democrat nor a Republican. Rather, kingdom concerns overlap with the stereotypical interests of both parties at various points.

However, I do believe there are exceptional moments in history. In retrospect, the rise of Nazi Germany immediately comes to mind. However, even in such times that seem so clear in hindsight, I guarantee you that the cloud of politics was in play, where Bible-believing Christians did not see what now seems to be obvious. Evidence emerged after the death of the famous conservative Bible scholar Otto Michel that he had perhaps been sympathetic to the Nazi movement at first, although he spent his entire life after the war vigorously working toward Jewish-Christian reconciliation. 

Even now, many Christians believe we are in a similar time without ambiguity as to what a Christian should support. The problem is that there are vehement proponents on both sides. One hopes that, looking back one day, the correct moral choices will be clear. But they are not clear at all at the moment, given the extreme polarization.

It is with such a cloud hanging over our heads that we begin this journey. Can we discern clearly what the core Jesus principles are? Can we pierce the darkness of our blinders and at least get some strong impressions of what Jesus would urge us to do if he were to speak to us directly in this moment?

[1] In Myra, located in modern day Turkey. The Gospel of Luke is probably deliberately contrasting Jesus with Augustus when the shepherds are told that a "Savior" was born that day in Bethlehem (Luke 2:11). Jesus was born during the reign of Augustus, who is explicitly mentioned in the same chapter (Luke 1:1).

[2] H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (Harper & Brothers, 1951).

[3] Richard J. Mouw, "Carl Henry Was Right" Christianity Today. January, 2010.

[4] R. Braun, "Conformation or resistance?" On the discussion about Otto Michel and National Socialism, 2012.