Trump’s blasphemy is better than the blasphemy of supporting him

I’m sure if you’re like me, you are experiencing Trump fatigue. If he’s good at anything, he’s good at generating headlines, and so if you spend any time of US news media you will have had month after month of outrage on the one hand and complaints about the ridiculousness of the outrage is on the other. Nevertheless, I try to keep an eye on how the Christian world responds to him because the more that the church gets consumed by its culture wars, the more collateral damage accrues to the public image of Christ and it is nothing if not interesting to see what certain Christian groups will sacrifice in the fight for cultural dominance.

Pew Research Center just released data showing again how polarized the response to Trump is, with three-quarters of Republicans interviewed saying that he often makes them feel informed, hopeful, excited, happy, proud, and respected. At the same time, Christianity Today released an editorial in which (while calling for today’s “court prophets” to be more Christian and less partisan) the author gave significant leeway to Christian views that regard Trump as a political figure of the order of King David. This comes in a month in which Trump’s public racism led to crowds chanting for non-white American citizens to “Go back home,” asylum seekers were flown and dumped in Tijuana without resources, and the president was linked with the violent rape of a 13-year-old in the wake of Epstein’s arrest, a withdrawn charge from 1994 that isn’t even counted among the two charges of rape and 18 charges of sexual misconduct that stand against the man. The report of this rape was so underplayed that I had to search it to make sure that it wasn’t a weird slur that some troll had made up (a slur like “Ilhan Omar married her brother,” which Trump decided this week to spread from the highest platform in the English-speaking world). And July still has a good few days to run.

A month like this would be a career destroyer for anyone—unless they were being protected by a powerful group. Unfortunately for Christians in the rest of the world, Donald is protected by large sectors of the white American church (some examples here and here).

Dissenting Christians often seem apologetic in their denunciations of the path conservativism has taken in their country or outright unsure of what matters anymore. By way of example, in Trump’s most recent rally in which racist chanting captured the headlines, he also twice used the expletive “Goddamn.” I saw a few comments from Christians like this:

Now I get that this particular person is trying to argue from a position that all conservative Christians should be able to agree upon: “Christian” presidents shouldn’t be blaspheming. However, what sort of indictment is it upon your society that in a month of rape and pedophilia allegations, racism, intentionally cruel xenophobia, slander, and so on, the best hope for agreement that this person could marshal was that semi-blasphemous expletives are bad?

More troubling still is that this is hardly the blasphemy we should be most worried about. “Blasphemy” is a loan-word from the Greek that means “slander”. We can “slander” God’s name by using it as an expletive, thus cheapening it. However, this is surely a mild form slander (if this phrase counts at all). The kind of blasphemy that should really concern us is that which represents the betrayal of God by worshipping false things (e.g. Ezek 20:27-28) and the kind of blasphemy that results from Christian misbehaviour. We can behave in such a way as to cause outsiders to slander God. Consider how Paul in Romans 2:24 uses Isaiah 52:5: he says “For, as it is written, ‘The name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you [the Jewish leaders behaving in hypocrisy].'” Similarly, 2 Peter 2:2 says, “And many will follow their [the false teachers’] sensuality, and because of them the way of truth will be blasphemed.”

Has Christian support for Trump exposed idolatries? That the Faith & Freedom Coalition could say, “There has never been anyone who has defended us and who has fought for us, who we have loved more than Donald J. Trump. No one!” implies a few, in my opinion.

Has aligning the church with Trump caused God’s name to be slandered? Of course. Every day. The revelation that Trump doesn’t care about how he speaks about God adds nothing new to the discussion. There has been a relentless stream of attitudes and behaviours that make Christian alliance with him blasphemous.

The American church is said to be shrinking, and this at least in part is motivating the tactics employed in their culture wars. It seems as though Christians are worried that it is secularism that is pulling people out of the pews. Ironically, however, the fact that culture wars have led to an “all’s fair” approach on the part of sectors of the church has radically eroded away any distinctive voice for truth and morality in public Christianity. In prostituting itself to this president, Christians not only fail to be an attractive alternative to the moral brokenness of this world, we’ve become public defenders of some of it’s most grotesque abuses.

The culture wars are lost already because the church is not fighting with the weapons it has been given: truth, love, unity, justice, mercy. Maybe it’s not secularism that is emptying the church; maybe it’s the fact that the church has become such a den of robbers that the secular world has become more attractive than we are.

Excerpt from “Turn Neither Right Nor Left”

The following is a short section from the end of Turn Neither Right Nor Left. It was released recently and is now available on Amazon.com.

* * * * *

The war that Christians fight is, paradoxically, a war of love and peace. We fight spiritual warfare, and yet the fruit of the Spirit are all humble, other-centered qualities that we praise much and practice little:

“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.” (Gal 5:22–23)

In other words, if war produces unflinching commitment to the cause, it is important to recognize that the war that we’re meant to be fighting is one of good character and Christian perseverance. At all costs we pursue a no-compromise attitude to love even our enemies, and to do those things that guard our discipleship of Christ. While we tend to want to be right and to divide from those who differ from us, the New Testament is consistent in imploring us to be the kind of people who are humble, who listen to reason, who are kind, and eager to serve (e.g., Jas 3:17–18). It is consistent in calling us to peace and unity (e.g., 1 Pet 3:8–11).

Engaging in this warfare of peace and love has the ability to change our enemies to disciples. Look at what Peter says:

“Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul. Keep your conduct among the Gentiles honorable, so that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day of visitation.” (1 Pet 2:11–12)

As exiles in this world, Peter says, Christians ought to wage war not on our host nations, but on our own passions. By keeping our way of life pure, any accusations that our opponents might bring against us would be refuted by our good conduct. While it is not clear here that these enemies are glorifying God willingly, in 1 Pet 3:1, he says that our honorable behavior is a tool by which we win opponents over. But if our behavior is dishonorable, there’s no doubt that we’re losing the war.

The cold fact is that if the whole world rejected evolution, they would most likely be looking for the next scientific explanation and be no closer to Christ. If the whole Western world rejected feminism, it would be no more Christian than the patriarchal societies that feminism has not reached. If the whole church became premillennialist, it would not guarantee our unity in any other respect, we would not know Jesus better or love him more, and not a single soul would have joined us in our walk. If we managed to pressure the outside world into giving us our way on gay marriage, abortion, and so on, we might be happier with the morality of our laws, but it will have done little to restrain the morality of people and nothing to introduce them to Christ. On the contrary, if we insist on fighting with the weapons that we have been using, rather than the humble, self-sacrificial attitude of love and service that the Spirit gives us to use, we might have done more to put them off of the gospel than to commend it to them.

The polarized culture war that evangelicals have chosen to fight is a dirty, bloodied campaign to prevent the world from encroaching on us. Yet Christ has commissioned us to change the world—he has commissioned us to make disciples and to wash one another’s feet. It is this and this alone that has the power to succeed.

Update: New Ministry, New Book

This post is of a more personal nature than is usually the case for me. It has been an eventful few months. As of the start of 2019, I am no longer teaching at George Whitefield College in Cape Town. It was decided that we mutually agree that I should no longer teach at the college and that I pursue the completion of my studies and other opportunities. The college imposed a non-disclosure agreement and so I am unfortunately prevented from explaining anything directly related to my departure.

When my studies draw to a close later this year, I hope to publish some articles about the danger that a growing fundamentalist ethos presents to genuine evangelicalism. Fear and hostility toward any opinions that differ from the  views of an institution’s in-group threaten to factionalize evangelicalism even further, and it risks giving us a reputation for intolerance and arrogance, rather than the marks of genuineness that the New Testament envisaged for Christ’s body: love (John 13:35) and unity (John 17:22-23). That this is a problem is evident, for example, in the #exvangelical movement that is largely motivated by disillusionment with the toxicity evident in too much of the modern evangelical church.

I will be writing on such topics in promotion of a book that I wrote last year and which has been picked up by a publisher in the US called Wipf & Stock. The book aims at addressing evangelical fear that the world is changing the church, and rather in its place encourages us to recapture that which gives the church the power to change the world.

I am excited to share more about it towards the end of the year when it is due for release. Please pray that if it contains more good than bad, and if is the Lord’s will, that it may find an audience.

In the meantime, the next chapter in my ministry life is beginning to unfold too. Over ten years ago, when I started writing here on Longwind, I was working at a student ministry called the Student YMCA, based just off of the campus of the University of Cape Town. It had been a ministry goal in my seminary days to work with them, though I had not expected to join them right out of college. I only quit the Student Y to take up a teaching post at college because my family circumstances (having two young children) and the ministry needs at the Student Y at that time (involving evenings on campus) were not well aligned.

I am thrilled to be able to say that I have been invited to take up a post there again. Ministry at the Student Y is evolving, and it is moving towards the mould of a Christian study centre. This is not to say that it is leaving behind the core focus on evangelism and “teaching students to follow Jesus for life” (as the motto was when I first worked there). Rather, the plan is to add to the ministry a component that engages the university as a university and that contributes a Christian worldview to the issues and challenges of an academic environment. It will involve research projects and collaborations for which the academic training that I have undergone over the last decade will be an asset.

More will follow over the coming months, but as this is functionally a missions post, an important part of my future will be to fund-raise for the institution and for my own salary. Please be in prayer for that too.

Practice what you preach when you preach

This is addressed to preachers. Especially the evangelicals: those who believe that the Bible is the written word of God.

Let’s imagine that your church were visited by an outside researcher. An alien perhaps, or an angelic being if you’re not into the alien thing.

Imagine that this researcher was trying to determine what you believe about the Bible just by examining what you do with the Bible. How would you stack up?

What should we say about scripture?

As evangelicals, we believe that ‘all scripture is breathed out by God’, and so in spite of the fact that it was written by many human authors over many centuries, there is also an overall unity because God’s mind lies behind it all. So God has communicated with the world through the scriptures that He has preserved for us.

And what is God’s book like? Is it a coherent philosophy full of universal truths? Eternal wisdom on topics of spiritual interest? No, as we know, it is a raw collection of many different types of literature, including stories, prophecies, letters, and even poems and songs. The eternal truth and wisdom that it contains emerges from the storylines of the histories and the Gospels, or from the careful argumentation of the letters to the churches.

Are these books written to the believers across the aeons? Are they equally true and accessible to all readers? Indeed, they are written for all believers, but not to all believers. Each book had its own particular audience, bound to a particular time and culture.

This is how we believe God chose to speak His word to us—through this Bible. Yet when we preach every Sunday, does our practice bear this out?

What kind of preacher are you?

When an attentive outsider observes how you preach, what conclusion would they draw about your doctrine of scripture?

1. The Medieval Roman Catholic

Imagine you are the researcher, transported back in time to a Medieval Catholic church. The service is given entirely in Latin, including the message read from a collection of sermons. You don’t understand Latin, and so you are completely baffled, but no matter—none of the people beside you in the pews understand Latin either.

How would you judge the beliefs of this church? Where would they have found ‘the word of God’? Clearly they didn’t find it in the intelligible communication of scripture. Tradition and church order was obviously more important, even if nobody (not even the preacher!) understood what was being read.

More realistic doctrinal statement: God’s word is mediated by the Church, and the Bible is a document of Church order.

2. The motivational speaker

Now imagine you’re transported into a church in which the speaker is styled as a ‘life coach’. Perhaps the preacher discusses current affairs in order to provide some wisdom or encouragement to his listeners. The preacher may use the Bible, but only to help you towards ‘a better you’.

Many churches have declared their lack of confidence in the Bible, and teach this way as a result. Others teach this way because they are attempting to be Christianised versions of Oprah. Either way, the Bible is clearly of peripheral interest and only drawn in when a verse can be found that says something of service to the topic at hand.

More realistic doctrinal statement: The Bible contains much wisdom concerning the best way to live.

3. God’s word to us today

The previous two preachers are the kind that we as evangelicals love to hate, but how do we stack up in comparison?

In a church that I know and hold in high regard for many reasons, the sermons regularly affirm an orthodox doctrine of scripture, are based on biblical texts, and show deep reverence for the Bible as God’s word. However, the church is suspicious of academic study and intellectualism, and so its preaching usually prizes openness to what the Spirit is saying to the church now. They prefer to preach freely and without notes so as not to stifle the Spirit. Neither in its sermons or its cell groups does the church work systematically through books (or even chapters) of the Bible.

What conclusion would an observer draw about their doctrine of scripture? The sermons may be helpful exhortations to love, faithfulness and good works, but they are rarely if ever sustained explanations of the Bible.  Texts are separated from their contexts, and because there is no continuity week-by-week, there is never any sense of the storyline or argument of which each verse is a part. In practice, the Bible is a point of departure for a message generated from other sources.

Although messages are inspired by or based on the Bible, the preaching does not explain the message of the Bible in the terms in which it was written. The ‘word of God’ seems to be something that God ‘lays on the heart’ directly.

More realistic doctrinal statement: God speaks to His church, and this is often inspired by what is written in the Bible.

4. Direct application

A wedding sermon I heard this week (while playing ‘alien observer’ in another church) nicely exemplified the ‘direct application’ method of preaching.

The message was from Psalm 45, which speaks of the groom (seemingly the king) wielding the sword and the bow, the bride dressed in gold, and their children being princes in the land for generations. To his credit, the preacher moved through the text piece by piece, which would seemingly acknowledge that God’s word is related to the message of the text as it was written.

However, the text was assumed to be about every marriage (not the wedding of Israel’s king), and each of its details was assumed to be directly applicable to the couple being wedded that day. So allegories were constructed to account for the sword, arrows, and golden fabric, and the preacher even insinuated that it was the literal duty of the couple to have children.

Does it not matter that the psalm was written to Old Covenant Israel? That Jesus’ coming has changed things? That children played a special role in the OT that they do not in the NT? That Israel’s king and his children were theologically important in a way that does not translate any longer?

The preacher was at least explaining the text, but without the controls of literary and historical context that help to uncover what the text originally meant. He ignored the progression of time and revelation, and made no reference to differences in covenant and culture. He treated the Bible as though it were written to us, not just for us. Under those rules, I’m just pleased the message wasn’t about God’s command to be circumcised.

More realistic doctrinal statement: God supernaturally makes His word apparent to readers of the Bible (or perhaps only to specially chosen readers).

5. The topical preacher

Evangelical preachers seem most often to preach topically, that is, their sermons try to give the Bible’s view on justification, or homosexuality, or marriage etc. I have no major objection to topical preaching, but again, what would the observer deduce about our doctrine of scripture? The Bible itself is not arranged in this way. God’s word is not topical—the message emerges from material that is carefully arranged into plots and arguments, or structured as poetry. It has order, progression, context.

It is obviously helpful to distill out of these texts a theology of this or that, but should we consistently neglect how the Bible has been written in favour of a compendium of neat verses arranged around our theme for the day?

While topical preaching is often commendably biblical, it does not preach what God has said in scripture (at least not in the way that He said it); it preaches what God would probably say on a certain subject if we could ask Him.

More realistic doctrinal statement: The Bible provides enough information to allow us to uncover God’s word on various subjects.

‘What’s your point?’

I don’t mean to point fingers at other churches or to imply that my denomination (or our preaching) is more evangelical than yours. Who cares whose church is more at fault? Nor is this an attempt to provoke church members to become dissatisfied with their churches, or to suggest that the only valid preaching is exegetical preaching. Perhaps my hurried analysis of evangelical preaching is malformed and unfair. I’d welcome better suggestions concerning the relationship between our doctrine of scripture and our preaching of it.

This is merely a provocation. Our evangelical beliefs about scripture seem to be strongly worded in our doctrinal statements, but weak in practice. If we say that God has spoken in the Bible as we have it, why do so many churches neglect exegetical preaching almost entirely? The Good News is a message that is narrated by scripture. If we don’t work hard to understand that message in the terms in which it was given, we are likely to be presumptuous and to misunderstand it. And if we misunderstand the source material, our preaching can only ever be false (or, at best, true by accident). Is there any task more important than trying to attain deeper understanding of the message of the Bible?

Unless the Bible is the word of God in some mystical magical way, then the word of God is accessible to us only by exegesis. Yes, exegesis is hard and it demands painstaking study (maybe even in Greek and Hebrew). Understanding the message that was intended when it was written requires us to understand how each text connects to the next one, why a writer said what he said when he said it, and how his reader thousands of years ago would have understood it. Yes, it is somewhat academic, and yes it makes things rigid. But no, it does not limit the Spirit. It limits the spirit of the preacher, but not the Spirit of God. It is precisely the word of the Spirit that we have in scripture—why would His own words be a limitation?—and it is the minister’s duty to handle it with care (2 Timothy 2:15).

As evangelicals, we may preach that the Bible is the written word of God, but do we practice what we preach when we preach?