To R. Scott Clark and his blogpost on the culture war and the Gospel. In that article, he rightly criticizes fellow believers who look to win a culture war in America to take America back. This appeared in Heidelblog.
Every Christian needs to worry about how we marginalize other groups more than about how we might be marginalized now and in the future. And that is just as true for Calvinists as it is for those evangelicals who do not recognize Calvin's teaching on the 2 kingdoms. And regarding that teaching, we need to look at history to see how well Calvin's practice matched his theory. That history should tell us what we can realistically expect from his modern day adherents.
The culture war talk is for those, religiously conservative Christian or not, who look to achieve some degree of supremacy and control over society. Such people look at democracy as a means to their desired ends rather than an end. Those who look to natural law to settle issues raised by the sexual revolution and other social uprisings regarding sex will surely be disappointed. For not only does nature provide more than an ample number of examples of the existence of homosexuality which bring benefits to a given species, other societies that are more in-tune with nature, such as Native American tribes, have often recognized more than two genders. Thus one cannot use the natural law argument without pushing at least some of one's religious beliefs on others and thus violating the distinction between the 2 kingdoms as recognized but not practiced by Calvin.
In the end, what sabotages our sharing of the Gospel is that we, religiously conservative Christians that is, have never learned the difference between showing proper respect to legitimate authority figures and structures from embracing authoritarianism. Evidence of that is seen in whom Clark says we religiously conservative Christians can align ourselves with politically.
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Dec 6
To Bradford Littlejohn and his article on whether Nationalism can unite us. This appeared in First Things.
Sanitized definitions of the word 'nationalism' can never be adequate. For history shows us that regardless of how we scrub away at the definition, nationalism's true gang mentality and group authoritarianism emerge as permanent stains.
Part of the history I am referring to is what is written above about the Native Americans who resisted the ethnic cleansing being pursued by the European settlers. For Littlejohn cites Lowry in writing the following:
Lowry has no compunction about speaking the language of Manifest Destiny: “It is understandable that the Indians fought us. . . . But theirs was a losing battle, militarily and culturally. . . . Their way of life was not going to survive competition with the dynamic, churning engine of wealth and power next to them.” As a matter of hardheaded historical reality, he argues that it “wasn’t realistic” for thinly-spread Indian tribes to control most of the continent while multiplying whites remained confined to the Atlantic coast.
In the end Lowry was not trying to justify Native American resistance, he was simply rationalizing the carrying out of race-based Manifest Destiny. For he declared that the white settlers were entitled to the land because their way of life was superior to that of the Native Americans and because the white settlers needed breathing or living space. And white settlers took that land using a combination of force and unbroken treaties.
History tells us that white American settlers were not the only ones who believed that they were entitled to the land of others because they were superior to those others and they needed breathing or living space. And it isn't only history also teaches us that it is far easier to condemn others for doing what we do than to condemn ourselves. All we need to do is to reflect on our reactions to the immigrants crossing our southern border to see our selective use of standards.
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