3.3 Greater Good Test Case (Health Care)

 We finish chapter 3 in the series, "What Would Jesus Vote?" Here is the series so far:

1. Would Jesus Even Vote?
2.1 (He would vote) As a Kingdom Citizen
2.2 We're citizens in two kingdoms
3.1 (He would vote) for love of neighbor and enemy
3.2 (He would vote) for the greater good

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Test Case: American Health Care
8. This discussion is all fine and good in the abstract. But where the rubber begins to hit the road is with specific issues. This is where our tribal sensibilities and gut assumptions begin to overwhelm our reason. It is also where our lack of expertise can begin to bite us. Things that seem obvious to us on a superficial level may become more complicated when we dig into the details.

Nevertheless, we need to explore the issues if we are going to make any progress toward a more Christlike approach to our political engagement. The question of health care seems like a good test case for the concept of the greatest good for the greatest number. So we gulp and step into deeper waters.

Let us start with the most general question. Would Jesus want as many as possible to have access to good health care whether they are believers or not? The answer seems pretty obvious to me. After all, healing and exorcisms stood at the very heart of his earthly mission. As far as we know, there wasn't a person he didn't heal if they sought him for healing.

To repeat some things we've already pointed out. God sends the much-needed rain on the righteous and unrighteous (Matt. 5:43-48). He sends the much-needed sun on both the righteous and the unrighteous. What would Jesus vote? At least at first glance, it sure seems like Jesus would vote for as many people as possible to have health care.

So what might prevent a Christian from supporting universal health care? Someone might try to show that it isn't economically feasible. Perhaps someone could argue that providing universal health care in some way lowers the overall average health care. Someone might argue that it is unconstitutional in some way, or a Christian might argue it is somehow unbiblical or unethical. 

Let's look at these counterarguments. Since the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is the current American option on the table, let's use it as our point of discussion. We can add that the United States is the only major Western country that does not provide universal health care in some configuration. Canada uses private providers funded by taxpayers to provide it. The United Kingdom has a government-run system funded by taxpayers. Germany and France have a mixture of providers funded by taxpayers, and the government oversees the system.

9. This is as good as any place to have an aside about the socialist boogie man. There is a fair amount of illogical rhetoric that says, "If you believe the government should run anything, you're a socialist." This is irrational on the merits. There is a spectrum of options from a government that runs practically everything to one that runs very little. Here is a spectrum:

• Truly Socialist: North Korea and Cuba would be examples of true socialism. North Korea currently allows no private enterprise and the government runs everything. It is a horrible place to live.
• Social Democracies: Sweden and Denmark have very high taxes to provide extensive governmental services, and their markets are heavily regulated. Nevertheless, they also allow significant economic freedom and have a vibrant private sector. They consistently score among the happiest nations in the world.
• Social market economies: Germany and France have less government regulation than Sweden but still have significant government-run services. The private sector still runs freely despite being a strong welfare state. They consistently score higher than the US on the World Happiness Report.
• Capitalist welfare states: Canada and the United Kingdom are capitalist countries that still provide significant social services based on taxes.
• Free Market Capitalism with some Welfare: The United States and Australia would have fewer taxes yet and fewer government services. Still, we have Social Security and Medicare. We have public education and a postal service, not to mention an army and police that are government-run.
• Libertarian Leaning States: Singapore and pre-2020 Hong Kong are/were examples of states with few government services and very limited government intervention in private enterprise. Nevertheless, Singapore does have some government services relating to housing and healthcare, and Hong Kong was returned to China's control in 2020. 
• Anarcho-Capitalist countries: There ain't any. Without any government, you would just have human chaos.

You can see that the US is nowhere near socialist, and no current candidates come anywhere close to socialist. Logically, you can't simply dismiss proposals by saying, "That's socialist." I call that "labelism," and it's a nothing burger. You need to have an argument as to why a specific proposal is good or bad.  The US currently has a number of government-run services that we will talk about throughout our journey. 

Let me also say, "prove it" to those who think privatization is always better for the greater good. I would say it is often good, but we should consider each case individually. For example, having a centralized national defense surely works far better than if you had a host of competing mercenary and private military groups running around. Talk about a civil war waiting to happen! And don't like a particular conflict? Just quit.

Capitalism aims to maximize profit. Its intrinsic goal is to provide as little as it can get away with at minimum cost. When Bolivia privatized its water supply, it led to a disaster that ended with the government renationalizing it. A private company, without government regulation, will cut as many corners as it can to maximize profit. These dynamics suggest that when essential services are in view, the government may be better suited as the provider -- or else it had better regulate thoroughly.

Let's put a pin in that conversation and come back to it as we move through various topics. We'll take a case-by-case approach with the repeated dictum, "Prove it."

11. First with regard to cost. Because emergency care is regularly provided to individuals who cannot pay, both a thoroughly adopted ACA system or a single-payer system like Canada/Britain would lower or significantly lower the overall cost of health care in America. Healthcare costs in the US are significantly higher than those of Canada, Britain, Australia, Germany, France, etc. Meanwhile, our life expectancy is lower. On the merits, we have no bragging rights here. On the numbers, we are not providing a greater good to a greater number in the area of healthcare.

12. A second concern is health care quality and wait times. Because of those who aren't covered and because of the higher cost of health care, the US does not provide better health care for its population on average. It would rank lower on average among the countries we have been considering. Places like the UK emphasize primary care, so there can be wait times for elective care, but there is no extensive wait for essential care. 

In England, one can walk into an emergency room and get immediate service. When I was a student in England, I was a little shocked that we immediately went to the hospital when a Rugby player sprained his ankle. My family avoided the hospital like the plague because of the high cost of emergency room services. 

My father had some sort of heart event a few weeks before he finally died. They didn't go to the hospital even though Medicare would have paid. In my opinion, years of avoiding the emergency room were in play. My mother actually hung up on 911 when he died, thinking a twitch of his toe might mean he was still alive. I have another family member who eventually had a heart attack after failing to get proper medical care for diabetes. Again, in my opinion, none of the above would have happened in Canada or Great Britain where the mindset is just different.

Australia supplements its essential public care with private insurance options. In this way, it maintains a baseline of public health while providing options for those who can afford more for elective services. At least on the surface, a system like Australia seems to provide the best of both worlds. It seems to provide a greater good for a greater number than the American system, which largely caters to the privileged -- a differentiation that finds no basis in the Gospels. The Gospels give us every reason to think that Jesus would reject such a class differentiation.

The ACA of course was based on a Republican-designed system utilized in Massachusetts and involves a market-based approach based on competition between private insurance companies. In other words, it is a capitalism-based system. One has to wonder if it would have enjoyed widespread Republican support if it had been proposed by a Republican administration! Of course, then, it might face widespread Democratic opposition. One has to wonder the extent to which opposition to the ACA has been about partisanship rather than substance.

13. What, if any, opposition to it can be made on biblical or Christian principles? Wayne Grudem in his Politics According to the Bible has made several arguments against the ACA and similar health care proposals. [4] Probably the most serious concern he had was its provisions for contraceptive care and abortion. However, the Supreme Court decisions Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. (2014) and Little Sisters of the Poor Saints Peter and Paul Home v. Pennsylvania (2020) have mitigated those concerns. Similarly, the repeal of Roe v. Wade has changed that dynamic as well. It is really a side issue rather than an objection to universal health care per se.

Grudem is also concerned that it dulls personal responsibility. Rather than having to steward one's resources and count the cost for one's choices, one can take health care for granted. Healthcare becomes devalued because it is in such easy supply. Instead of reserving the emergency room for real crises, one now goes for a sprained ankle.

I feel this one a little bit. But I feel this one as someone who has health insurance. Is it better for everyone to have access to healthcare, or is it better for those of us with healthcare to grow from having to make careful choices about using what we have? It seems like an argument for the privileged rather than one that is concerned for the greater good of all. 

Again, knowing what I know of the Gospels, Jesus seemed more concerned that the crippled beggar (without health care) be healed than that the Pharisee grow in personal responsibility by making disciplined choices (can't even think of a story like this). In the end, I believe Wayne Grudem and others are unable to see beyond their Western glasses to read the Bible on Jesus' terms.

I will set aside for a later chapter the argument of Grudem and others that Romans 13 does not allow the government to provide services to its people like healthcare. In my opinion, this takes Paul's comments way beyond anything he was saying. Paul is not giving a comprehensive view of the state in Romans 13. 

And, even then, he calls the state a servant for the Romans' good. If the Roman government had decided to use the tax money it collected to provide healthcare for its citizens, I have to think that Paul would have approved. More on this question in chapter 6.

14. That leaves us with one last objection, and that is the individual mandate. The way the ACA was meant to work financially was that everyone was required to have health insurance or else to pay a fine. After all, the way insurance works is that there are enough healthy people paying for insurance to offset those who need health services. By requiring young people who are not as likely to need health services to pay toward it, the system became financially viable.

Suffice it to say, the Republican-controlled Congress in 2017 kiboshed the individual mandate. Interestingly, premiums for the ACA have still remained relatively stable. Only about 8% of Americans are not covered with some sort of health insurance at the moment, down from 16% before the ACA. All in all, the ACA would seem to be somewhat of a success, although it arguably would have even greater success if it had bipartisan support.

It does raise a bigger question of whether it is biblical for me to have to pay for someone else. Some would view the individual mandate as tantamount to stealing. You are taking my money to pay for someone else.

But this is a pretty Western cultural way of thinking -- hyperindividualistic. It's not biblical thinking. After all, what are taxes but a way of collecting money to provide services to everyone as needed? And the Bible unanimously says to pay taxes. And the collection could be for you. You don't know when you'll need medical help.

In the end, this all strikes me as a self-centered way of thinking, not a biblical one. The spirit of Scripture is rather, "Whoever has the life of the world and sees a brother in need and withholds his compassion from him, how can the love of God abide in him?" (1 John 3:17). Isn't this also part of the message of the Parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10? In other words, it seems more like the selfish mindset of the world to resist giving to those in need. Shouldn't a person with a biblical, Christlike heart gladly give -- even sacrifice -- for the good of others? It's God's money in the end anyway, not mine. [5]

We will return to some of these questions more extensively in the chapters that follow. I will make the case that the American capitalistic system makes money something different from something concrete like a hammer. If you come into my garage and take my hammer, that's stealing. But the system of money in a country like America is a little different. The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) isn't even tied to something concrete like a gold standard. Its value is much more abstract. More to come.

15. In the end, it seems fairly clear to me that -- on this one issue -- Jesus would vote for as many people to have healthcare as is practically possible. If you think of it, giving away free healthcare was a major theme of Jesus' earthly ministry. He did not cater to the wealthy and privileged who could pay for his services. He targeted "the uncovered," so to speak.

In the end, objections to something like the ACA seem to me almost entirely based on tribalism. In some cases, it is based on what I would see as extreme ideology. But in general, one side suggests a solution so the other side opposes it. It could have been flipped, and it might be the opposite. Mitt Romney could have become president and proposed something like the ACA, and maybe Democrats would have staunchly opposed it.

What would Jesus vote? On this one issue, I think he would vote for as many people to have healthcare as possible.

[4] Wayne Grudem, Politics According to the Bible (Zondervan, 2010).

[5] Ron Blue, God Owns It All: Finding Contentment and Confidence in Your Finances (Lifeway, 2016).

3.2 (Jesus would vote) For the Greater Good

 Chapter 3 continues in the series, "What Would Jesus Vote?" Here is the series so far:

1. Would Jesus Even Vote?
2.1 (He would vote) As a Kingdom Citizen
2.2 We're citizens in two kingdoms
3.1 (He would vote) for love of neighbor and enemy

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4. Rather, Paul says in Galatians 6:10, "Therefore, as we have occasion then, let us do good towards all -- and especially toward those in the household of faith." Paul believed that Christians were oriented to do good to all people. He may have put the household of faith first on the list, but all people were on the list, including all the non-believers of the world.

We sometimes encounter any number of excuses to avoid doing good to others on anything like a systematic or macro-scale. For example, some would say that the state shouldn't be involved in helping others -- that it's the job of the church to help others and the government just messes things up. As I write this book, Hurricane Helena has devastated eastern Tennessee and Western North Carolina (September 2024). It has been amazing to see some in my denomination spring to action to help, using our church network as hubs to distribute water and other needed supplies. This effort seems absolutely biblical and wonderful in God's eyes. 

However, I might also add that the church would not have been enough for this moment. For all the good the church can do, it is no match for FEMA, the National Guard, the power companies (which are usually monopolies in certain areas), and other aid agencies created for disasters like these. In this case, they have also sprung into action and are doing their part. Aid was approved even before the disaster struck and, from what I can tell, all is playing out as best it can.  

By contrast, others would say that the church shouldn't get distracted with helping others because that's a social gospel, which they think is wrong. Or someone might say it's a distraction from trying to save souls, which is the church's number one business. I once heard an evangelism professor say that since the church has limited resources and the salvation of the world is such an important, urgent task, it simply doesn't have the time or extra resources to give toward anything but saving souls.

We will address all these distractions from doing good in the world soon enough. Suffice it to say, Jesus spent a good deal of time helping people as his first order of business. And it is a myth that the Bible only sees the government as an instrument of justice that isn't supposed to help people. Romans 13:4 says that the state is God's servant for your good. Once again, there is a whole lot of good to be done in the world. More to come.

Utilitarianism and Capitalism
5. Now, we get to the question at hand. What would it look like to apply the love principle to a country or a government? (There is another crucial question that we'll get to in the next chapter, namely, "To what extent should Christians try to make the laws of the land mirror Christian values?" But we'll hold off on that one for now.)

Assuming that the goal was to create a country that maximally played out the love of neighbor in its overall structure, what would that look like? It seems to me that there would be at least three dimensions in play:

1. It would try to set up a structure that brought the greatest good for the greatest number.
2. It would empower and protect the individual so that s/he was not overrun or oppressed by the majority.
3. It would restrain those actors who threaten or endanger the above.

The next few chapters will play out these goals for a thriving (a.k.a. loving) society. In the rest of this chapter, we will talk about the greater good. 

6. In the 1700s, a shift was taking place in British society. It was changing from a society that was largely directed and controlled by a king to one in which its people had more and more say in its direction. It was in this crucible that the United States was formed. As Lincoln put it in his Gettsburg Address, "a government of the people, by the people, for the people."

A man named Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) tried to come up with a way to orient England so that everyone counted, not just royalty and the aristocracy. The idea he came up with was what he called the "greatest happiness principle." The structure and decisions of society should be oriented in such a way that it results in the greatest happiness for the greatest number. It was a rough idea, perfected by thinkers like John Stuart Mill (1806-73) after him. 

This philosophy is called "utilitarianism." In theory, it is the bedrock of political decision-making. It is the language of the game of politics. Politicians always talk about bringing about good. Of course, it often is not the greater good they are really working toward. Rather, they may be out for the "good" of themselves or the good of special interest groups that are funding them or the good of their party or the good of some small segment of society. But politics typically plays the game of acting like it is advocating for the greater good. 

To some, it may seem strange to invoke these secular thinkers. But it seems to me that the concept of pursuing "the greatest good for the greatest number" is a pretty good starting point for thinking about what it might look like to shape a society that embodies the love of neighbor. Why? Because it aims to create a society where as many people are thriving as possible (without hurting the rest).

Of course, what is good? Questions like this are why politics is so complicated and why genuine Christians often disagree on who and what to support. At the same time, these complications also can open a door for us to make excuses and hide our true motives -- sometimes even from ourselves.

As we move forward, I'm going to very broadly say that to bring about good is to benefit someone. So the greatest good for the greatest number is to bring about the greatest benefit to the greatest number without hurting the rest. That last condition, "without hurting the rest," will be very important in subsequent chapters. 

Again, part of our problem in society is unintended consequences. Sometimes we try to bring about a good but in the process create more problems than we expected. You might fix one problem and cause two more. Or you might plug a leak that later causes a major catastrophe. 

In the next chapter, we will also talk about protections for individuals. One key to American society and other representational democracies is the concept of a "bill of rights" that protects individuals from actions that are positive to a lot of people but to the detriment of others. It might be really "good" for one group for another to disappear. But that isn't allowed.

7. At about the same time that utilitarianism was bubbling up from the British Enlightenment, capitalism was also being born, first set out by Adam Smith in this same period (1723-90). Issues of money are some of the most hotly contested in politics, and few of us are experts in economics. Here is another area where Christians can sincerely disagree -- as well as an area where it is easy to rationalize bad motives and hide them even from ourselves.

Our economic philosophies are so deeply fried into our psyches that it is incredibly difficult to have a sane, objective conversation about them. America's struggle with communism and the Soviet Union for almost a century has made it difficult for us to think rationally about such things, it would seem. A common tactic to dismiss a candidate is to put the label "socialist" on them. No need for further conversation or thinking at that point apparently.

I personally believe that a carefully monitored capitalism is the most likely path to a society where the greatest number of people are most likely to thrive without hurting the rest. Can capitalism hurt people? I believe history shows it can. It's like having a lion as a pet. It can be magnificent, but be careful that it doesn't eat you.

We'll have several opportunities to return to a Christian evaluation of capitalism in the pages that follow. For the moment, let's remember what the founding concept of capitalism was. The original goal of capitalism was to bring about the greatest thriving for the greatest number. The concept was that if you and I are in a back-and-forth over the price of something, we will eventually arrive at a cost that is mutually advantageous. 

You will try to get as much money as you can from me, while I will try to pay as little money as I have to. We will eventually meet in the middle, at a mutually advantageous price. We both win. [2]

Adam Smith's primary goal was to create a thriving society. It was not necessarily to create a wealthy class that would just replace the current aristocracy. In John Stuart Mills' synthesis of capitalism with utilitarianism, capitalism best tries to maximize happiness by setting up a system where, in our back-and-forth with each other, we arrive at the best outcome for the most people... without hurting the rest.

Notice that the operating premise of capitalism is human self-interest. One might even say selfishness. Everyone will try to get as much as they can for themselves. Far from being a sacred system, it is a system that is built on a recognition of human fallenness. That is why I believe it is likely the best core economic system. It has a proper understanding of human nature.

Interestingly, communism might actually work if everyone were a true Christian. Communism assumes that we will all share everything in our reach with everyone else. Acts 2:44-45 looks pretty communal -- they shared their possessions in common and each person redistributed his or her excess to others in need. The problem is that it doesn't work given human fallenness. I believe the twentieth century is rife with illustrations of its failures.

But capitalism also does not accomplish what it aims for without careful monitoring and guidance at times. Here again, we get into areas where even economic experts disagree. Good intentions can bring about unintended consequences that are bad.

For the moment, let us simply say that the goal of capitalism was never to create immense wealth for a few on the backs of the many. That is exactly the opposite of its goals. The initial goals of capitalism fall right in line with the goal of creating a society that loves its neighbor on the level of society.

It seems to me we have forgotten this goal. Milton Freedman famously wrote that the ultimate responsibility of the CEO of a business and its board is to increase its shareholder value and maximize profits. [3] I suppose that statement is in line with the way capitalism works. But the ultimate goal of capitalism must always be to maximize human thriving. Only then does it cohere with fundamental American values and, incidentally, have a chance to play out the love of neighbor on a societal level.

[2] Adam Smith described this natural meeting in the middle as something that would happen "as if by an unseen hand" in The Wealth of Nations.

[3] Milton Freedman, "The Social Responsibility of a Business Is to Increase Its Profits," New York Times, September 13, 1970. As a side note, one could argue that the economic philosophy of Freedman and others played a direct role in the ultimate fall of Russia into oligarchic corruption. Operating on a philosophy of almost no regulation or government intervention in the transition from communism, it is no surprise that Russia has largely become a state run by the incredibly rich with an almost entirely disempowered people. 

3.1 (Jesus would vote) for love of neighbor and enemy

This is a series titled, "What Would Jesus Vote?" in the lead-up to the election. Here is the series so far:

1. Would Jesus Even Vote?
2.1 (He would vote) As a Kingdom Citizen
2.2 We're citizens in two kingdoms

This post is on chapter 3. Jesus would vote for the greater good.

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Chapter 3: (Jesus would vote) For the Greater Good
1. When Jesus was asked what the greatest commandment was, he gave a two-pronged answer often summarized as "Love God, love neighbor." Here is the full quote:

Textbox: "Teacher, what is the greatest commandment in the Law? 

And Jesus said to him, "You will love the Lord, your God, with your whole heart and your whole life and your whole mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And a second is like it. You will love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments, the whole Law and the Prophets are hung." 

Paul is even more explicit in Romans 13:8: "The one who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the Law." In other words, if you love God and love your neighbor, you will have done everything that God requires of you. The love command is not another command. It is the command. If you have loved God and loved your neighbor, you have done all that God expects of you.

Just so that there is no doubt, Jesus says the same thing another way with the Golden Rule in Matthew 7:12: "Everything that you would have people do to you, so also do to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets." This is another way of saying to love your neighbor as yourself, and Jesus says that it captures all of Scripture. [1]

2. Now, I have heard some truly insidious interpretations of the love command. They are actually quite devilish, a good example of trying to evade the commands of God by ingenuity. This interpretation says that Jesus was not saying to love everyone. He was saying to love everyone in Israel. This clever (and possibly demonic) teaching tries to escape God's command to love everyone and redirects the command only to those in the church. 

Let that sink in. This re-interpretation basically says, "You only have to love other Christians. You don't have to love anyone else." And of course, you can decide who the true Christians are. It takes the clear message of Scripture -- in fact, the central ethic of the Bible -- and twists it so that we can hate whoever we want if they are not Christians. This is potentially a doctrine of demons.

What about loving your enemies? Jesus says in Matthew 5:43-44, "You have heard it said, 'You will love your neighbor and you will hate your enemies.' But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you." Here again, the insidious love-dodging interpretation says, "Jesus is only referring to your enemies within Israel. He isn't referring to people outside of Israel."

You get incredible points for cleverness, but this is again a doctrine of devils because it directly undermines Jesus' central teaching. After all, what examples does Jesus give to support what he is saying? Jesus says that God sends rain and sun on both the righteous and the wicked (5:45). That is, God gives good gifts to everyone on the planet. Jesus doesn't say, "Be like God who gives sun and rain only to Israel." He says, "Be complete [in your loving] just as God is complete [in his loving]" (5:48). In other words, you must love everyone.

What about the Parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10? Doesn't Jesus explicitly pick someone outside of Israel as his example of who our neighbor is? The response of this group of interpreters is that Samaritans were still within Israel. They are the kinds of enemies that we must love, enemies within the church (and true America). In this line of thinking, the church is usually thought to have completely replaced Israel.

I'm quite sure that the Jews of Judea didn't see it that way. They saw the Samaritans as vile outsiders. Jesus was deliberate in his choice of a Samaritan. His point was to pick someone that a Jew would not want to show love to, an outsider.

What about the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats in Matthew 25? Doesn't God sort out who gets to enter the kingdom and who doesn't based on whether they have helped anyone in need? Once again, a devilish ingenuity comes into play. The parable is no longer about helping those in need. It is about the way people have treated Christian missionaries. So God is not angry at the way people have treated others in general but the way people have treated Christians. Ingenious! Devilish!

This insidious line of interpretation gets even worse. It not only sees the church as a complete replacement for Israel, but it sometimes equates "Christian" America today with Israel. It thus blurs into the blasphemous America worship that we strongly warned against in the previous chapter. Now it is potentially a tool for Christian fascism.

See what this interpretation has done with the Bible. It has made it possible to hate everyone but "true" Americans and "true" Christians. In theory, it could open the door for the mass slaughter of those who aren't pure like the real church. It could open the door for a Holocaust of whomever you don't want to consider to be truly under the umbrella of God's people. In short, it is an incredibly scary, hard-hearted line of interpretation.

3. But Jesus did not filter his audience by whether they agreed with him or not. Yes, he did focus on Israel and Israelites in his earthly mission (Matt. 10:5-6). But this was never the end game. The long term goal was to see the whole world reconciled to God. The Great Commission was always the end game -- to make disciples of all the nations. This mission was not a "convert or die" one but one bringing good news to everyone. 

This is the message of Ruth and Jonah. God is not just concerned with his people. He cares about Moabites and Ninevites too. Look at the family tree of Jesus in Matthew 1. There you'll find Tamar who was likely a Canaanite and Rahab who was from the city of Jericho. Jesus says that God's eye is on the sparrow (Matt. 10:29-31) -- not just the Christian sparrows. Although it was not part of his earthly mission, Jesus casts a demon out of the daughter of a Syro-Phoenician woman (Mark 7:24-30). His conversation with the Samaritan woman in John 4 falls into this same category.

Someone might say, "But all of these ended up joining the people of God." True, but Jesus' talk about going two miles when compelled to go one (Matt. 5:41) was possibly an allusion to a Roman solider -- another confirmation that the enemy Jesus is commanding to love in Matthew 5 included non-Israelites. The transformed mind that Paul urges of the Romans (12:2) did not distinguish between those who do evil to you within the church and those who do evil to you outside the church (12:17). Rather, he says to try to live at peace with everyone.

He slides from these comments in Romans 12 into a conversation about the Roman state at the beginning of Romans 13, a clear sign that he has always had worldly enemies in view. This whole train of thought leads up to the love command in 13:10. If Paul means for us to restrict the love command only to others in the church, he has been very unclear about it, for he has been talking about the secular state.

No, the core Christian ethic is that we must choose to love everyone. This is its radical message. This fact makes any attempt to undermine this message all the more devilish, for it undercuts God's central command to us. It opens the door for us to unravel the very heart of Scripture. It must therefore be rejected in the strongest of terms. 

4. Rather, Paul says in Galatians 6:10, "Therefore, as we have occasion then, let us do good towards all -- and especially toward those in the household of faith" ...

[1] The phrase, "The Law and the Prophets" is a shorthand way of referring to all of the Old Testament. Jews conceptualized the Old Testament in three parts: the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings. "The Law and the Prophets" thus referred to the two main divisions of the Jewish Scriptures. 

2.2 Voting as a Kingdom Citizens (from a different kingdom)

Previous posts include:

1. Would Jesus Even Vote?
2.1 (He would vote) As a Kingdom Citizen

Jesus would vote as a kingdom citizen continued

Christ vs. Culture
5. America is a wonderful place for me. When you enjoy living in your country so much, you don't think much about whether your allegiance could ever be a question. However, the situation at the time of the New Testament was much different. The vast majority of those in the New Testament had nothing to do with the Roman government. They were just stuck under Roman rule whether they liked it or not.

Now, some early Christians were part of the Roman system. Sergius Paulus was a Roman proconsul who came to faith in Acts 13:12. Quite possibly, Theophilus was also a Roman governor of some kind, the person for whom Luke-Acts was written. We know that Paul and Silas were Roman citizens (Acts 16:37) -- that placed them in an upper elite within the overall empire. But these individuals are the exceptions in the New Testament.

The early church went to great lengths to try to show the Roman Empire that they were an asset to it. Take 1 Timothy 2:2. Paul urges Timothy and the Ephesians to pray to God for the emperor and all those in authority. He instructs them to live peaceful and quiet lives. Who wouldn't want people all over their empire like that?

I seriously wonder if Paul wrote Romans 13:1-7 in anticipation that some Roman official might some day read his letter. After all, Christian Jews had already been kicked out of Rome once before in AD49 because of controversies in the synagogues. [6] How brilliantly inspired to make it clear that Christians were an asset to the empire and not a threat! Paul tells the Romans to submit to the Roman authorities. He tells them to pay their taxes. He calls the Roman state "God's servant for your good" (13:4). They should have no reason to fear if they are law-abiding members of society.

It is of course ironic because the emperor at the time was Nero, who would eventually put Paul (and Peter) to death. We probably should take Romans 13 as the ideal situation, not the state as it often plays out. Paul knew full well that the Roman government was not always just. After all, Pontius Pilate put Jesus to death. These are some of the reasons I think Paul is being somewhat aspirational here and also positioning the Roman church advantageously in relation to the Roman state. 

1 Peter 2 is also addressing a church that is undergoing significant persecution. Peter tells the churches of Asia Minor not to make waves but to live squeaky clean lives so that they don't cause any trouble (2:12). He tells slaves to submit to unjust masters and wives to obey unbelieving husbands. The goal is not to give any pretense for persecution and to silence the foolish who say Christians are bad people. Like 1 Timothy, 1 Peter urges Christians to submit to the emperor, governors, and "every human authority" (2:13). [7] 

In 1 Peter we find a theme that we will also find in Hebrews. Christians are to consider themselves "foreigners and exiles" here on the earth (e.g., 1 Pet. 2:11). Even though Paul was a Roman citizen, there would always be a sense in which he didn't fully belong. Hebrews puts it this way: "We do not have any lasting city here, but we are seeking the one that is coming" (13:14). Whether it be Rome or Jerusalem, we belong elsewhere.

Hebrews 11 has already anticipated this statement earlier. Abraham did not have a country, but he was looking for a city whose builder and maker is God (11:10). He was seeking a heavenly homeland instead (11:16). We can line this language up with the expectation that the kingdom of God will come when Christ returns. As we mentioned in chapter 1, Paul says that our citizenship is in heaven (Phil. 3:20).

6. Those of us who live in a place like the United States live under a government that, on the whole, is far more friendly to Christianity than the Roman Empire was at the time of the New Testament. Still, there is a principle here. We should always keep in mind our priorities. We are citizens of heaven first. We should sit more loosely toward our earthly citizenship. That is not to devalue it. It is just to make sure we always have our priorities straight.

A good friend of mine, the late Keith Drury, once told me that his father would always say around election time, "I wonder who they'll pick as their president." It wasn't that he didn't vote. He did. But he installed in his children a reminder that, as Jesus put it, our kingdom is ultimately not of this world (John 18:36) -- at least not yet.

This is the perspective we find throughout the New Testament. We mentioned in chapter 1 that the New Testament takes a "Christ against culture" perspective in Richard Niebuhr's typology. In this view, the church is seen as something distinct and separate from the world. The New Testament saw the church as somewhat disengaged from the world.

Paul shows this dynamic well in 1 Corinthians 5:12-13 when he was dealing with the man who was sleeping with his stepmother. "What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church," he says. That's God's business. "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's." By contrast, the church should be very concerned about corrupting forces within the church.

We live in a different culture than Paul. I argued in the first chapter that we can have a much bigger effect on our culture than Paul was likely to have in his. If we can influence our world positively, why wouldn't we? But the principle remains. We are ultimately "other." We are ultimately strangers, immigrants if you would, in our lands.

Citizens in Two Kingdoms
7. A former colleague of mine told me recently that he and someone else in our church (who had been in the military) for a time had a battle over the American flag in the sanctuary. My colleague would sneak the American flag down from the pulpit and put it down on the level of the congregation. Then the other individual, as soon as he saw it, would put it back up on the platform. I couldn't help but laugh when I pictured this "game" that I think went on for quite some time. I think my colleague finally hid the flag from him.

I grew up with an American flag on the church platform. I never thought anything about it. There was a Christian flag up there with it. Although I now would not prefer it, I don't personally think it's worth blowing up a church. But I hope you're beginning to see why it doesn't seem quite right. No human state should stand on the same level as God's kingdom. Should Canadian churches have a Canadian flag on the platform? Should Orthodox churches in Russia have a Russian flag? Certainly, Nazi churches had a Nazi flag in the German churches.

There's a name for this dynamic. It's called "civil religion." It's what we've been talking about in this chapter. It's when the trappings of our patriotism begin to take on a religious dimension. [8]

I'm not trying to be heavy-handed or to give off a judgmental, condescending feeling. There's nothing wrong with patriotism. What I do want to do is plant a seed in your mind. Whenever you see matters of patriotism begin to give off a somewhat religious vibe, remind yourself, "My true citizenship is in heaven. I'm just passing through my current land as a stranger."

[6] As mentioned by the Roman historian Suetonius in his work The Twelve Caesars, in particular in Claudius 25.4.

[7] This instruction of course has exceptions. In Acts 4:19, Peter indicates to the Sanhedrin that when obedience to earthly authorities comes into conflict with God's commands, God's commands win.

[8] The term was used to describe these dynamics by Robert N. Bellah in his 1967 essay, "Civil Religion in America."

2.1 Voting as kingdom citizens -- unconditional loyalty

A few days ago I started a new series on the question, "What Would Jesus Vote?" (WWJV). The first post asked if Jesus even would vote: 

1. Would Jesus Even Vote?

I thought he would in our world, although it wasn't an option in the first century. 

We now begin to answer the question. The first answer is that Jesus would vote as a kingdom citizen.

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Unconditional Loyalty
1. I've given words as a minister at several burials for individuals who were once soldiers. To honor them, a team of veterans came to give a gun salute, and a flag was presented to the family. These were very meaningful ceremonies, and the flags the families keep are precious.

From time to time, I have gotten an uneasy feeling when the "Christian" part of the ceremony felt like a formality, and the American part seemed to be the truly important part to those present. That is to say, there have been times when it felt like the "religious fervor" for the American part was far stronger than the fervor for prayer to God or the reading of the Scripture. The feeling was something like, "Hurry up, preacher, so we can get to the good stuff." 

The feeling is a little like when the person who has died was a Freemason. Pastors are instructed to make sure that the Freemason ceremony is distinct from the Christian part of the burial. Those ceremonies can also take on a kind of religious flavor that, at least at times, feels like it is in competition with Christian Scripture and prayer. 

Some things are so deeply ingrained in our minds that it's hard to explain them -- or show that they're not quite right. There is absolutely nothing wrong with patriotism. July 4th is a wonderful day of celebration for us as Americans. Veteran's Day and Memorial Day appropriately remember those who have fought and sacrificed to preserve our freedoms.

These events can also take on a kind of religious-level fervor. It is very common in America for these holidays and devotions to find their way into our churches. We have a flag on the platform next to where the word of God is preached. These days become religious holidays on Sundays alongside Christmas and Easter. It can be hard to see why some of these dynamics are a little odd -- especially to individuals who worship with us from other countries.

2. It has taken me a long time to figure out how to express why these practices seem a little off. I think I am finally finding some words by using what I'm calling a "fervor scale." It is how we feel toward something special. First, there is respect (1). I'm calling this the lowest level of fervor. You respect a policeman. You might respect a teacher or a pastor.

Then there is devotion (2). You might be devoted to someone or something. Some people are very devoted to exercise. Others are devoted to various causes. Someone might be devoted to being a vegan.

Some people are devoted enough that we might speak of reverence (3). Some Roman Catholics revere their priests. I would say that much American devotion to the flag and to soldiers is certainly at the level of reverence. Soldiers killed in action can take on the flavor of Christian martyrs in terms of how much we revere them. Roman Catholics would argue that they do not worship the Virgin Mary. They would say they venerate her.

You can see what the highest level of devotion is. It is worship (4). According to Scripture, there is only one thing that Christians can worship, and that is God. "You will have no other gods before me" (Exod. 20:3) is the first of the Ten Commandments. It is really another form of the greatest commandment: "Love the LORD your God with all your heart, life, and strength" (Deut. 6:5). Jesus says that this love of God -- along with love of others -- sums up all of God's law (Matt. 22:36-40). 

Textbox: "You will love the LORD your God will all your heart and will all your life and with all your mind." Matt. 22:37

This is worship. We are also talking about holiness here. The more we set something aside as special, the more holy it is to us. God is ultimate holiness because he is the most special and "set apart" thing in all existence. He is in a category by himself.

The problem is that some may feel more devotion to things American than to the things of God. Even feeling the same devotion to God and country suggests either that our devotion to God is too little or our devotion to country is too much. There really is no debate about which must have our supreme allegiance. God says, "I am Yahweh. That is my name. I give my glory to no other" (Isa. 42:8). 

Textbox: If we have the same feeling about our country that we have about God, then either our devotion to God is too little or our devotion to country is too great.

In the movie National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation with Chevy Chase, as the elderly aunt begins to pray for the Christmas meal, she blurs into the Pledge of Allegiance. [1] It's funny because it is something that we could see happen. And the reason it could happen is because the feeling many Americans have toward their country is virtually religious, similar to the feeling someone might have in prayer. It fits.

But it is also inappropriate. In the case of Aunt Bethany, we might suggest that her devotion to God is too little. Is it possible that, in some cases, our devotion to country approaches the level of a devotion that should be reserved for God alone? [2]

If our devotion to anything other than God gets to the level of what our devotion to God should be, that is an idol. This is the sin above all sins -- to worship something instead of or alongside God.  

3. There is a sentence in a recent book that really clicked with me on this topic. Here it is: "Loyalty to the Kingdom must be unconditional, while loyalty to the country must be conditional." [3] This should be an obvious statement because to do otherwise puts country on the level of God, which is blasphemy. However, I have found that it doesn't feel obvious to everyone. In fact, this statement might almost seem offensive to some. This is a serious problem from a biblical and Christian standpoint.

There's a lot of talk about Christian nationalism these days. It has proven very hard to express what is being warned about here or why it is wrong. These things go so deep into our psyche that it can be incredibly difficult to see what's going on inside ourselves on a deep level. Here's how I might describe it. Christian nationalism is when the fervor for our country reaches a level where it is on par with our loyalty to God. In effect, we begin to worship our country. [4]

I recently processed this concept with someone. First, I suggested that virtually everyone feels free to disagree with the American government. Indeed, those who would most likely fall in the category of Christian nationalism are some of the most likely to strongly disagree with the current government. For example, many strongly opposed mandates for churches not to meet during the COVID pandemic. Some of the strongest language today against the government -- some of the strongest since the Civil War -- comes from individuals who might be categorized as Christian nationalists.

So how does that work? Those whose devotion to the United States falls somewhere near or in the worship category are most vehemently opposed to the United States? 

It's because their devotion is not to the real US. The real US consists of the real people who are its citizens, including individuals who immigrated here and became citizens. The real US is the real US government and the real people who are in office. It is the real Constitution and the real laws of the land as they stand.

The real America is far from perfect. The real America needs a lot of work. It is a beautiful dream but a work in progress. Pretty much everyone agrees with this.

Here is the big AHA moment. The America that some worship is not the real America. It is an ideal of America. It is their ideal of America. It is an America that some want to make by force -- which of course is not something the real America allows for at all. It is a vision for what they want to make America become based on their ideal of what it used to be at some point. (By the way, most American historians think this is a skewed picture of what it used to be.)

4. In the conversation I had, the respondent suggested that it is not the concrete America that should get our unconditional loyalty -- any more than any church denomination should. Rather, he argued, it is the ideal of America that is worthy of our unconditional loyalty alongside our unconditional loyalty to God. This response threw me for a bit of a loop because, again, it seems obvious to me that God must be on a level by himself. "My glory I give to no other" (Isa. 42:8).

But here's why that is idolatry and, ultimately, blasphemy. Even an ideal version of the US Constitution involves a President, a Congress, a Supreme Court, and a people who are human. This side of eternity, humans will always be susceptible to sin. In fact, any form of government this side of eternity involves fallen humans who are susceptible to sin and temptation.

What this means is that no matter how ideal a version of the United States you can imagine, it will always involve sinful humanity or at least humanity that is susceptible to temptation and sin. That means that even the most ideal form of America cannot have our unconditional loyalty. Any government run by humans will eventually involve sin. I shouldn't even have to make this argument, but it kiboshes any pretense that a human government of any sort could merit our unconditional loyalty. 

In fact, to say so is really a trick of the Devil to substitute something for God and his kingdom.

A related reason why even an ideal America could not be on the level of the kingdom of God is the fact that what actually makes the American system of government so good is that it involves thorough checks and balances against sinful humanity. The President does not have absolute power. The Congress does not have absolute power. The Supreme Court does not have absolute power. It was designed in full recognition of the human thirst for power and tendency to get into conflict over it. Given the uncertainty of men, it works better, I think, than any other system of government.  

Western representational democracies (call them republics, if you want) are thus quite possibly the best possible form of human government. They are so because they take into account humanity's nature as selfish and bound to try to seize power to itself no matter the effect on others. In other words, it is the best because humanity is sinful. 

But this comes nowhere near to being as good as the kingdom of God, where the monarch -- God -- is not only all knowing but all good. The kingdom is already inaugurated with Christ's resurrection, but it will not fully be here until Christ returns. This side of eternity, humanity will never be perfect citizens of the kingdom of God... but they will be when the kingdom fully arrives. That means that the kingdom of God truly will be a perfect kingdom in a way that no earthly kingdom can ever be.

No earthly kingdom can come close. Actually, it would be a joke even to suggest such a thing except that it is blasphemy, idolatry, and thus quite serious. Let us dismiss without any further thought that our loyalty to any earthly kingdom -- including some ideal United States -- can be unconditional. Our unconditional loyalty must be reserved alone for God and his kingdom. 

[1] I take this illustration from Miranda Cruz's new book, Faithful Politics: Ten Approaches to Christian Citizenship and Why It Matters (InterVarsity, 2024), 11-12.

[2] Let me be very serious for a moment. There was a philosopher in the early twentieth century (Wittgenstein) who argued that talk about God wasn't really about some Being out there. Rather, he argued it was just a type of language game that we play in certain religious settings. I don't agree with him. I think God actually exists out there and not merely in games we play with ourselves and others.

BUT, I wonder if he is right about many Christians. Could there be many people who call themselves Christians who really aren't in conversation with the real God? Their prayers are really talking to themselves. When they pray in church, they are really talking to those around them. Their devotion is really a game they don't even know they're playing. They enjoy the music. It gives them a buzz. It makes them feel good. They enjoy fellowship with the other people as they play the church game. They say God and the Bible, but they really mean the values and identity of their tribe. They read the Bible like a mirror for what they already believe.

If the worship of the real God isn't real for many Christians, then it would be no wonder if they feel the same or greater fervor for other things.

[3] Cruz, Faithful Politics, 12.

[4] Some people roll their eyes when you begin to make comparisons with Nazi Germany. But those who effectively worship America would be in that same fourth category as those who came to worship Germany, even though the fever is not as intense or empowered at this time. In the case of Germany, they did not worship the real Germany, but an idea of Germany that they then forced on Germany with a religious fervor. Christian faith in Germany also got intertwined with German nationalism with such a force that cautionary voices like Bonhoeffer's and others seemed like nothing next to it. 

This is called "syncretism," the blending of faith with cultural forces that are actually contrary to faith. While nation worship is very serious in the sight of God, in the past it has been mild and innocuous enough. However, since human nature has not changed, we should never say never. Hannah Arendt pointed out in the aftermath of WW2 that the main actors in Germany's evil were just ordinary people. She called it the "banality of evil," in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Viking, 1963).

3.2 Modernism on the Outskirts

The history of the ideology of The Wesleyan Church continues. This entry is on the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy of the mid-twentieth century. The picture to the left is Stephen Paine, president of Houghton College (1937-1972). 

Previous posts have been:

Preface to Wesleyan Ideological History
1.1 Wesley and High Protestantism
1.2 An Archaeology of Wesley's Thinking 

2.1 Methodist Ideology in the Early 1800s
2.2 Founding Perspectives of the Wesleyan Methodist Connection
2.3 The Birth of the American Holiness Movement

3.1 The Holiness Revivals of the Fin de Siècle

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1. The Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy -- what was it? It was when the clash between the forces of theological liberalism coming out of the late 1800s finally came to a head with the forces of conservative, orthodox Christianity. The word liberal today is often used as a broad term of derision. But in the late 1800s and early 1900s, it referred to a somewhat clearly defined movement and group of Christians who were "free" from the moorings of historic Christianity and Scripture. (The word liberal comes from the Latin word that means "free.")

Following the Enlightenment of the 1700s, the late 1800s saw the rise of evolution in science and the rise of higher criticism in biblical studies. Many thinkers who came from the Christian tradition not only abandoned any sense of Scripture as the word of God, but they also ceased to believe in the divinity of Christ, miracles, and any sense of a need for atonement. They used frameworks from the latest thought of the time to restructure their religion. 

In the early 1800s, Friedrich Schleiermacher in Germany saved theology for the German university by making religion about subjective feeling and a sense of absolute dependence on something greater than oneself. But one of the results was that Christianity ceased to be about something that was real "out there," something that was objectively real. Instead, it came to be about something going in "in here," inside me as a human being. Christianity began to lose any need to be grounded in history or external reality. It was now about inner feeling.

The pain of these trends first began to impinge upon the broader Methodist church in the late 1800s. Because the Methodists did not initially have any graduate schools or seminaries, their academics were often trained overseas in Germany or at schools that were not Wesleyan in theology. When they returned, they taught little about anything truly Wesleyan. Instead, they taught the trendy and more respectable ideas of the time.

(As a side note, when Bud Bence applied to do his doctorate at Chandler at Emory University in the late 1960s, he was told in no uncertain terms that he would need to do so in the field of church history. He wanted to study the theology of John Wesley, and the theology department at Chandler made it clear that he could only study Wesley as a historical artifact. But they would not tolerate any foolishness that might suggest Wesley's theology was actually still viable for today.)

Charles Sheldon's celebrated WWJD -- "What would Jesus do?" -- is a great example of early twentieth century liberal theology. WWJD is a noble concept. But did you know that Sheldon did not believe that Jesus was divine or that Jesus performed miracles? Rather, Sheldon believed that Jesus was a supreme ethical example, a model human. Sheldon was half right... and also quite wrong on the other half.

In the early 1900s, some of these individuals had reduced Christianity to a "social gospel." Mind you, there was nothing wrong with their concern to help people. This is a classic mistake that some orthodox Christians made in that era. Seeing that many of those who were concerned for the poor did not believe in the divinity of Christ or the Virgin Birth, they mistakenly acted like concern for the poor itself was wrong. They threw out the good with the bad.

Both parties only have half a gospel. Those who had reduced Christianity to a social gospel only had half a gospel. And those who were orthodox in belief but rejected any concern for redeeming society also only had half a gospel. I am extremely grateful that, at least in this period, Wesleyans, Pilgrims, Nazarenes, Free Methodists, and Salvationists all had a whole gospel -- they believed in the essentials of faith, personal salvation, and the importance of the church addressing those in need.

2. In response to "modernism," from 1910 to 1915 various scholars wrote in defense of orthodox Christian positions like belief in the Virgin Birth. The series was known as The Fundamentals. This was an attempt to push back against the teaching that was increasingly finding its way into the most prestigious American seminaries. In 1923, Asbury Seminary was founded for the Methodists as a ballast against the teaching coming out of Boston University. In 1929, Westminster Theological Seminary was founded as pull-out group from what was increasingly being taught at Princeton Seminary.

But the ultimate flash point was the Scopes Trial of 1925, in which a Tennessee teacher was fired for teaching the theory of evolution. In a nationally publicized circus, Clarence Darrow humiliated William Jennings Bryan before the nation for his literal interpretations of Genesis. The trial was so stressful that Bryan would die five days after it ended. Fundamentalism had lost its first main battle. It would lose a second in 1933 when Prohibition was revoked. 

Then again, liberalism would face its own crushing blow with World War II. One of the core features of theological liberalism was an optimistic view of human nature and human progress. It had the flavor of a postmillennial outlook and expected the world to get better and better. WW2 and the Holocaust rather confirmed that humanity was just as depraved as it had ever been. And, as astute as German scholarship may have been, it went right along with the immense darkness of Nazi Germany.  

The "prophecies" of Nietzsche had come true. A world without God is not a dreamy world of human goodness and progress. It is rather a world in which anything is permissible, and humans are free to pursue whatever they can get away with. It was a world without any objective meaning. 

3. So, what did these controversies have to do with the Pilgrims and Wesleyan Methodists? Almost nothing. Don't get me wrong. My Pilgrim grandparents made jokes about the idea that we evolved from monkeys. But these weren't hot issues in Wesleyan circles. No statements or actions were taken about any of these things in the first half of the twentieth century by Wesleyans. They were not part of any General Conference resolution. They were largely irrelevant to the forebears of The Wesleyan Church.

Why? Because no Pilgrims and Wesleyans believed these things. They largely weren't going off to seminary. They didn't have teachers at their Bible colleges who had gone off to Germany to study with F. C. Baur or Julius Wellhausen. Houghton, Central, and Marion College didn't have any professors who had studied with Bordon Parker Bowne at Boston University. The issues of modernism just weren't their issues. They were concerned about whether you kept the Sabbath or wore jewelry. They were concerned about whether you testified to an experience of entire sanctification.

As interpreters, the Pilgrims especially were what we might call "pre-modern" interpreters of the Bible. Like the Pentecostal movement that came out of the holiness movement, they were not wired to read the Bible in its historical context. Rather, they heard words directly from the Lord in the words of the Bible.

Let me give you an example from 1970. My family was trying to decide whether the Lord wanted us to move to Florida with my father's job. We prayed. We read the Bible, asking the Lord to show us what we should do. Judges 1:15 in the King James jumped out at one of my sisters, "Thou hast given me a south land." She felt like the Lord was saying, "I want you to move to Florida."

I would be careful about being too critical of this kind of interpretation. It is not unlike some of the exegesis used in the New Testament. For example, in Acts 1:20, Peter hears God saying to replace Judas as a disciple based on the words of Psalm 109:8, an imprecatory psalm originally about the enemies of the psalmist, calling for their demise. Peter lifts the words out of context and applies them directly to his situation in a way that was not part of the psalm's first meaning.

My point is that the Pilgrims heavily interpreted the Bible in a non-contextual or "spiritual" way. They had a largely "pre-modern" hermeneutic or paradigm of interpretation. They were open to allegory while high Protestants had tried to shut it down back in the days of Martin Luther. They tried to hear fresh words from the Spirit every day in their daily devotions. They did not try or really know how to read the Bible in its historical-cultural context.

The Wesleyan Methodists in general were more scholarly than the Pilgrims, but these issues still were not the issues they were focused on in the 1920s and 30s. Perhaps if there had been a General Conference in 1925, something might have been said about evolution. But since the Scope's Trial happened in the middle of the stretch between 1924 and 1928, the controversy had died down by the next General Conference. 

By contrast, those who had actually been fighting these battles largely stopped fighting in the public sphere. They had lost the war for the public imagination.

3. But that would not last long. After WW2, some new kids on the block chastised their predecessors for giving up. Harold Ockenga would start a new movement he called "neo" evangelicalism. Public activism would be a key feature of this movement. But the movement would have a different flavor. It would be good news rather than having the flavor of a war against evil.

Soon a young preacher named Billy Graham would become associated with this movement. He might very well have gone unknown except that, in a spur-of-the-moment decision, William Randolph Hearst put his money and newspapers behind him. Suddenly, a relatively insignificant rally in LA became national news, and a movement was born. Hearst would pay for every pastor in America to regularly receive a copy of a new magazine, Christianity Today, having an immense impact on American Christianity. C. F. H. Henry would be the editor.

I have a bit of a bone to pick with the way the history of this stretch is often told by people like George Marsden and Mark Noll. I can't blame them entirely because they built their reading of the history in part out of the way the leaders of the movement told the story, people like Harold Ockenga. When Noll identifies who the "fundamentalists" were before the neo-evangelicals rose, he identifies "dispensationalists, holiness folk, and Pentecostals." 

Wrong. We were never in that game. The "fundamentalists" these new evangelicals should have criticized for retreating were intellectuals of the early 1900s like J. Gresham Machen, and they were overwhelmingly Calvinist. (This telling of the history of evangelicalism is similar to the skew Donald Dayton faced in relation to the 1800s. The Princeton Calvinists of the 1800s were not evangelicals in the sense of Wesley or Whitefield. Finney and Moody were.) Holiness folk and Pentecostals were never in the modernist war such that they might retreat. 

The neo-evangelicals had a different post-war flavor from the real fundamentalist fighters before them. But they were in direct continuity ideologically with the "fundamentalists" they were now being condescending about. The difference is that they were riding a wave of post-WW2 optimism -- fertile soil for revival and the return of God and hope to American culture. It was the context that changed, not their ideology.

Get our name out of your mouth. We were never fighting that battle. Your "parents" were.  

4. What is fundamentalism? Let's bring some clarity here. The Pilgrims and Wesleyans were largely "pre-modern." That is, they read the words of Scripture without a strong view to its historical context. They read the Bible devotionally. When we talk about lectio divina today, it is essentially a return to reading the Bible this way. You read the words. You chew on them. You meditate on them. You let the Spirit speak to you however he wants to.

Modernism promoted reading the Bible in its historical context. There's nothing wrong with this. After all, the Bible says it was written to people who've been dead for thousands of years. If you want to know what the Bible first meant, you have to read it the way its first readers read it. And that means you have to read it in its literary and historical context.

The problem is that these two readings are completely different hermeneutics. When Augustine and those throughout Christian history affirmed the truthfulness of the Bible, they felt a freedom to hear the words in accordance with Christian tradition. Similarly, when the Pilgrims and Wesleyans read the Bible, they could hear whatever they thought the Spirit was telling them in the words.

Modernism changed the ball game. Now, the words of the Bible took on a more fixed and definite meaning. Context locked down the possibilities to a much larger extent. Now, for the Bible to be truthful, its original meaning had to be true, not just its words. Before, only the words had to be true. Now, after studying the literary and historical context, the resulting interpretation had to be true. This is a significant paradigm shift. [1]

Similarly, we now have the rise of archaeology and science to contend with. What if someone excavates Jericho and argues that there is no evidence for an Israelite invasion in the years 1500-1200, as happened with Kathleen Kenyon in the 1950s? The game has wildly changed from believing the words are true to coordinating the discoveries and evidence of the modern world with the words of the Bible.

Further, the criteria of truthfulness have subtly changed in the meantime. The truth of Scripture is no longer a matter of whether it is theologically true. Ironically, accepting the standards of modernism, fundamentalism now insists that the Bible can only be true if it reasonably matches modern understandings of history and science. Ironically, fundamentalism has adopted the paradigm of the modern world in its way of approaching Scripture.

Again, the Pilgrims and Wesleyans were blissfully making their way along with their "Pentecostal" modes of interpretation. These debates were largely taking place on the side, bypassing us. We were not the original fundamentalists. The forebears of the neo-evangelicals were.

So a fundamentalist is not simply someone who believes in the essentials of Christian faith. Fundamentalism has a flavor. It is combative. It is in a fight against modernism. It is anti-modernist while, ironically, using the very tools of modernism to fight against it. 

Pilgrims and Wesleyans of the early twentieth century largely were not fundamentalists. We were revivalists, trying to get people saved and sanctified. We weren't in that debate.

5. The neo-evangelicals of the late 1940s were a mixture of elements. There is what I might call the intellectual half, and there is what I might call the evangelistic half. Billy Graham was the face of the evangelistic half. He was the one in continuity with the evangelicals of the past. John Wesley, George Whitefield, Jonathan Edwards, Charles Finney, D. L. Moody, and Billy Graham. These all go together. Let's get as many people saved as possible.

I might add that, although the General Board of the Pilgrim church stopped to pray when they heard about Billy Graham's LA revival, he was always "other" in my family. He was that Baptist preacher who thought it was enough to get those people to pray a sinner's prayer and then, because of eternal security, never do anything more with them. We criticized him for, at least in the early days, not having any real system for discipleship to plug new converts into churches.

It was the same with Jerry Falwell in the 1980s. He was always "other." He had nothing to do with us. (He had a lot to do with the culture, as we will argue in a later post.)

The other half of neo-evangelicalism was the intellectual part. It was heavily Calvinist and was in the ideological tradition of A. A. Hodge, B. B. Warfield, and J. Gresham Machen. They drew a word straight from the Princeton Calvinists of the 1800s: inerrancy. Again, although it sounds like you're saying the same thing as all the prior Christians who affirmed the truthfulness of Scripture, the word now has a distinctly new connotation. The word now assumes the fundamentalist side in all the debates of the previous century against modernism. Its use assumes the standards of history and science that were on the playing field of previous debates.

Again, these debates were largely foreign to Pilgrims and Wesleyans. We simply weren't fighting these battles. At least most of us weren't. There was one Wesleyan who was deeply involved in these things. He was a Wheaton grad. When Houghton hired him as a professor in the 1930s, some wondered if he was Wesleyan enough. His name was Stephen Paine.

6. Paine brought all these issues to Houghton College and the Wesleyan Methodist Church. Paine had been in the swirl of all these movements. In fact, in 1960 he ran as the presidential candidate for the Prohibition Party. From 1966-68, Paine served as president of the National Association of Evangelicals, one of the organizations formed by the neo-evangelicals in the late 1940s. After retirement, he was the lead editor of the New International Version, which finally came out fully in 1984. Paine was a neo-evangelical's evangelical.

As a former Pilgrim, I suppose it is no surprise that Houghton always seemed to be on the edges of the Wesleyan Church to me. But I think that was also true of the Wesleyan Methodist Church too. For example, Paine expressed near the end of his presidency that he wished he had not spent so much time trying to appease the Allegheny district on matters like dress and standards. It was all for naught anyway, since that group didn't even end up going with the merger. 

But note the contrast. Paine wanted to be in the center of evangelical debates. The WMs were arguing over dress and standards.

In 1955, Paine brought a motion to the Wesleyan Methodist Church that the statement on Scripture be revised. He proposed that the phrase, "inerrant in the original manuscripts" be added to the Articles of Religion. Of course, the WMs had no problem with this addition. Certainly they believed the Bible was without error.

Similarly, when the Wesleyans and Pilgrims merged, the Pilgrims gladly voted for inerrancy to be in the new denomination's Discipline. The term had not been in their Manual. But of course, who wouldn't agree that the Bible is without error?

My historical point is that what was going on in Stephen Paine's mind was not the same as what was going on in the minds of the Wesleyan Methodists and Pilgrims. He was in a war, and the word carried immense assumptions for him. It had a history for him that it did not really have for the rest of the church. For him, it was ensconced in decades' long debates.

Note also his addition of "in the original manuscripts." As a Greek scholar, Paine did not think that the King James Version was accurate to the original manuscripts of the New Testament at a number of points. (Note: he would be quite different from the Wesleyans and Pilgrims at this point too, since everyone used the KJV at that time.) Neo-evangelicalism rejected "higher criticism" like Wellhausen's JEDP, but it did not reject what they called "lower criticism" to determine what the original text might have said.

7. When Bud Bence tells the history of The Wesleyan Church, he talks about forks in the road where the trends of the time led the church to pick between options. [2] For example, Orange Scott and Luther Lee picked abolition at that fork in the road. Coming mainly from a Wesleyan Methodist perspective, Bence identifies the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy as one of those forks where the Wesleyans picked fundamentalism.

I would say that was true of a few intellectuals in the WM church at the time. And it has had some ripple effects on the church. But I would argue that most of those debates happened in parallel to us. 

They did bring a polarization in some circles. Asbury Seminary had been founded by Henry Clay Morrison in 1923 largely to provide the Methodists with an orthodox option to the other Methodist seminaries of the time. (As a side note, my mother once heard Morrison preach in Kentucky in the 1930s during the year her family spent at Kingswood.) That means Asbury was founded in the wake of that battle. But Morrison was also wanting to promote holiness revivalism, which respectable Methodism had rejected.

There is almost always collateral damage in battle. Asbury's was Professor Claude Thompson. [3] Thompson was no modernist. He was in fact a strong supporter of Wesley's theology, and he had studied with a strong supporter of Wesleyan theology at Drew University -- although he had his own set of accusations. Thompson joined the faculty of Asbury Seminary in 1947.

But this was also the moment when neo-evangelicalism was on the rise. Although no one could point to any clear point where Thompson was teaching heresy, he smelled fishy to the new kids on the block. He was not a dispensationalist. He did not use the new term inerrancy with all that it now implied. Although he had the support of the trustees and the faculty, six faculty threatened to resign if he was not fired. Stephen Paine caught wind and also sought reassurances of Thompson's bona fides -- which he received -- from President McPheeters.

Initially, McPheeters tried repeatedly to assure all these internal and external voices that Thompson was not a modernist. But eventually, Thompson did the Christ-like thing and -- for the good of the school -- resigned in 1950. It was a wound he carried for the rest of his life because teaching at Asbury was his dream. Asbury would lose its accreditation with the Association of Theological Schools over the debacle as well as its status as a Methodist-approved seminary. Only when McPheeters resigned in 1962 did Asbury regain its accreditation.

You could argue that, in this moment, Asbury shifted for a time from being a Wesleyan-holiness seminary to being a neo-evangelical seminary. The neo-evangelical movement had a strong Calvinist-fundamentalist flavor to it. At its founding, Asbury had more of a holiness, revivalist flavor. 

When I came to Asbury in the late 1980s, David McKenna was president of the seminary. Asbury's statement of faith read that the Bible was "without error in all it affirms," as it still does. Beyond that, McKenna refused for Asbury to get embroiled in debates over inerrancy. Ken Collins has recently presented the ongoing flavor of Asbury on this issue in a recent issue of Firebrand. [4] He suggests that Asbury's statement has more in common with the Lausanne Covenant rather than the Chicago Statement of 1978.

I once argued that the Wesleyans have never really defined the term, which I think is wise. Asbury's sense that the Bible is "without error in all it affirms" is nice because it both affirms the truthfulness of Scripture and yet allows us to do the hard work of determining what Scripture affirms. Stephen Paine and those who went after Claude Thompson had very specific ideas about what the Bible affirms, and they insisted everyone else must agree with their conclusions. 

I had Harold Kuhn for a class at Asbury in the late 80s. He seemed like a nice guy. I enjoyed the class on biblical theology. He was the ringleader of those who went after Thompson in 1950. I'd like to think that, four decades later, he had some remorse for crucifying someone who, by most accounts, was more Christlike than he was. I suspect McPheeters would rather have taken his resignation.

[1] For more on pre-modern hermeneutics, see Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (Yale University, 1980).

[2] Elesha Coffman takes a similar approach in Turning Points in American Church History: How Pivotal Events Shaped a Nation and a Faith (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2024).

[3] I take some of this information from Darius Salter's work, The Demise of the American Holiness Movement: A Historical, Theological, Biblical, and Cultural Exploration (First Fruits, 2020), 212-15.

[4] Kenneth Collins, "Should Wesleyans Embrace a Doctrine of Inerrancy?" Firebrand. June 4, 2024.

What would Jesus vote? (1)

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

1. 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.