Wilberforce and Modern Christians

When Christopher Luxon gave his maiden speech, I was astounded by how many Christians were excited by what he had to say. I was disappointed. Yes, he pointed out the difference his faith has made to his life. He pointed out that it was helpful having something bigger than oneself.

Yet he then went to show how ill-thought-out his theology of politics was – a shameful thing in a Christian seeking to lead in civil government, but unsurprising given the weak state of the church in New Zealand. In his maiden speech, Luxon praised and highlighted the work of Christians like William Wilberforce who worked tirelessly for the abolition of the slave trade. Yet in a contradictory fashion, he continued by explaining his faith was personal to him and that he didn’t think religion should dictate to the state, and that politicians shouldn’t use their political platform to force beliefs on others.

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The Looming War and The Resistance

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I received an email from a reader a week or so ago and in one sentence he put his finger on a feeling that has been growing in my mind. He wrote, “In my lifetime there has never been a time where it feels like there are so many dark forces around us; it feels like we are in precursor stages to something much worse.” It certainly feels like we are on the edge of something. And when I say “something”, I do not mean pink cupcakes with chocolate sprinkles. More the kind of something that Gandalf refers to when sitting with Pippin on the walls of Minas Tirith and says, “It’s the deep breath before the plunge.” Ever since the fall of Adam, there has been constant warfare between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent. Sometimes it’s a Cold War and hostilities are not open, but every now and then open war breaks upon us, whether we would have it or not.

Perhaps those of us thinking like this are of a naturally pessimistic nature and we would think this about any time that we live in. Maybe history will show us to be utterly and completely wrong. Perhaps we are misreading the signs of the times. But I don’t think so. I think that we are like the dreamer who has awoken with relief from a nightmare only to realise that the disaster of his nightmare is real and imminent. If we are right, what are we to do? What is the battle plan? Where ought we to focus our efforts? Here are things I think urgently need addressing by Christians and the church in New Zealand.

1. We must acknowledge our individual and corporate sin as the reason we find ourselves in this current situation and repent by making changes where Christ in his Word calls for change. (Part 1A and 1B).

2. We must commit ourselves to dependence on our king. This means prayer, particularly for wisdom and courage and a renewed appetite for His Word, particularly looking at how God’s people of old have responded to times like these. (Parts 2A, 2B and 2C)

3. We must confront the Church’s unholy dualism and learn once more to apply the lordship of Christ to all things. (Parts 3A, 3B, 3C and 3D)

4. We must develop and practise an evangelism that not only calls for personal salvation, but Christ’s lordship in every sphere of life. In other words we must disciple the nations to obey everything that Christ taught and call unbelievers to recognise Christ’s kingship on earth. (Part 4)

5. We must seek to build a Christian counter-culture. and in that attempt, embrace Christian truths that make the world cringe.

6. We ought to prioritise Christian marriage and family as one of the most powerful methods of resistance

7. We must protect our children while we train them for the day they join us in the battle.

8. We must pray for and seek out leaders who understand the times, encourage (literally make or put in courage) timid leaders and challenge the compromised.

9. We must prioritise obedience to our king over wealth, comfort and respectability. We must be prepared to suffer for holding to the truth.

10. We ought to put our hope in the sovereignty of the reigning Christ who is subduing all his enemies. This is our Christian hope. We know how the story ends. He wins. And since this is so, we should fight like we can actually win, and at the very least, go down swinging

No doubt clearer thinkers will see other essential ingredients in our resistance. Feel free to let me know your thoughts on this. In future posts, we will explore each of these in a little more detail.

Law and Freedom

What most modern Western people (including many Christians) are asking for in the name of freedom’ is in fact a new slavery, when they attempt to secularize the public sphere and pursue freedom without the Lordship of Christ. To object to this by saying that non-believers are not accountable to God’s covenant law (moral law) is finally to say that we have no basis for presenting the gospel to the unbeliever – since Scripture defines sin as lawlessness and only lawbreakers need the gospel!

The Mission of God: A Manifesto of Hope for Society by Joseph Boot)

Why Modern Christians Separate Faith and Politics

In every culture, law is religious in origin and so it must be recognized that in any social order the source of law is the god of that society and that to which the people have bound themselves. To change the law order is then an implicit or explicit change in religion – revealing a change of gods (allegiance) in that political realm. This further implies that no absolute disestablishment of religion is actually possible in any society. A culture can certainly disestablish one faith or church, but it merely replaces that faith with another one, be it Islamic, Buddhist or any other humanistic faith. This is clearly what has taken place in the modern West. We have traded the God of the Bible for the god of the state (man enlarged), where the ‘will of the people,’ personified by an elite bureaucracy, now redefines law in the name of the people, the new god. This has been in no small part due to a faulty theology amongst Christians and the consequent abdication of responsibility by the church in the socio-political sphere. Due to the philosophical dualism that has so greatly influenced the church (discussed in chapter two), modern Christians have tended to separate God’s law and covenant from real history and implicitly assumed that the state is not actually accountable to God’s standards.

Joseph Boot in The Mission of God: A Manifesto of Hope for Society

The Biblical Role of Government

For too long now, Christians in the West have not really had to think too hard about the biblical role of government. We have lived in the afterglow of a civilization raised up by Christian presence in the past. Thus tyranny, where the gospel shone its light was eventually destroyed. It is unfortunate for us that we have forgotten the lessons learned through centuries of persecution and tyrannical governments. If we are not careful, we are set to learn them again; the hard way.

The all too common response of pastors and Christian leaders in the evangelical church at least in my experience in New Zealand is to assume since state government is ordained by God there are really very few biblical limits on what it can do. Christians are told to submit unless we are told to do something that is a sin. This seems a little too simplistic to me.

In the evangelical church, this naivety is regrettably combined with a dualistic worldview. The gospel is seen as about personal salvation rather than the universal kingship of Christ. Faith is expressed in the private sphere through prayer and Bible reading. The standard held up of faithful Christianity often involves giving up ‘the things of this world’ like a difficult job in order to spend more time helping out in ‘Christian’ (church) activities. Living out the Christian faith at work is equated with sharing the gospel of personal salvation, or perhaps ensuring personal integrity and honesty in one’s business dealings, or perhaps starting a work Bible study meeting. None of this is bad per se, but it is an unfortunately truncated view that neglects the application of the lordship of Christ to 90% of the average Christian’s life.

Consequently, many Christians have not thought through a Christian view of (among other earthy subjects) politics. So it is, that we have Christians who view politics as dirty and unworthy of Christian interest, and simultaneously take for granted the default socialist statist approach to governance. Thus, the role of state has continued to grow and grow unchecked with little or no Christian opposition. This should not have been.

Education is a case in point. In New Zealand the 1877 education act was passed into law. It established ‘free’, compulsory and secular education for all Pakeha New Zealand children. Well-grounded and Biblical Christians should never have supported this legislation, but around the world acts like this were supported with very little outcry from Christian leaders. R.L. Dabney’s prescient opposition being one prominent exception. Little by little the state’s appetite for control has grown and expanded. As each successive generation passes away, a new generation grows up assuming the current approach to government is normal.

So it is, that we have a state that believes it is responsible for our children’s education, our health, our economic well-being, our housing, our media and the information we receive, our charity and so on, right down to managing our interpersonal actions to ensure we don’t offend each other. We are slowly but surely being enslaved. What we need is a Biblical worldview of government. And given the pandemic and government actions as a response to this, we had better figure out what we think and how we must act toward government quickly.

In posts that follow, we will explore some Biblical passages that will help us develop our thinking on government and its role.

Ban the Phrase “Full-Time Christian Ministry”

Have you ever heard the phrase “full-time Christian ministry”? I think it’s time we stopped using phrases like it. They help entrench an unholy dualism in Christian minds and cause us to imagine there are two tiers of Christians. On the one hand, we have the elites; those who ‘do’ ministry. These are the truly ‘on fire for God’ Christians. They are the ones who are ministering with all of their lives. Then there are the rest of us ordinary Christians who get along to church, but spend much of our lives plodding along doing less significant things. Sometimes, this group are thought of, as Douglas Wilson puts it, as ‘breeders’ and ‘tithers’. Yes, we’re back to the topic of vocation.

What is generally meant by ‘full-time Christian ministry? People who use this phrase are thinking of pastors, church workers, missionaries and people whose work is in parachurch organisations. Now, these are wonderful God-given roles. We should in no way denigrate them. Yet most Christians are not and will never find themselves in these situations. Does that mean that most Christians are living lives that are somehow less pleasing to God? Should pastors encourage church members to cut back on their ‘secular’ or non-church obligations so they can assist more in institutional church ministries by conflating this as giving up something for the sake of the gospel? No! God has not called every Christian to work as pastors or church workers, and that means that the positions we are called to, cannot be inherently lacking in value or less significant.

Interestingly, in Ephesians 4:11-12 we read that Christ ‘gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ.’ This flies in the face of the dualistic perception we often have. We tend to think that it is the pastors and teachers of the church who do the work of ministry, and the members of the church assist them in doing it by giving money to the church. Not so! Our pastors, by opening the Word of God to us, are designed to equip us to do works of ministry.

So, every Christian is in full-time Christian ministry. If they are not, they are sinning. Being a Christian impacts everything. After all, Jesus Christ rules this earth right now. So as a father, you are called to engage in that duty as a subject of the king, loving and serving your children. That’s Christian ministry. As a doctor, you are called to minister as Christ’s agent by loving and serving those you try to physically help. That’s Christian ministry. As a retail assistant, you are ministering Christ to your customers as you love them and assist them to find the best solution for their needs. That’s Christian ministry. We need to get away from the nonsense that unless you are engaging in a five-point gospel presentation with a work colleague (as important as this is) that your work is just marking time or simply aiding you to feed your family.

Let’s cast off the dualistic notion that there is a sacred or spiritual realm that is more important than a secular or earthly realm. After all, God created this earth and described it as very good. He doesn’t zap us into heaven when we come to Christ, but calls us to live out our trust in the King as we live in his realm. We are to seek to see his kingdom come and his will be done here on this earth. That means Christian living is not just about what happens when we are praying or singing worship songs or helping out with an institutional church ministry. It happens all day every day in whatever legitimate arena of life God calls us to.

Our Saviour State

“In our case, the story we’ve heard countless times concerns how the secular state, our supposed “savior,” came to exist. As the story usually goes, after the Reformation, Europe was torn apart with religious strife. The infamous “wars of religion” wracked Europe until finally, with a great sigh of relief, our fathers stumbled into the virtues of tolerance, and the secular state took over the public square. Our “deliverance” was that bloodthirsty religious convictions were finally banished into the realm of “personal belief”—a realm, of course, that had no effect on public behavior. In this story, not only are we saved by something other than the Christian gospel, but we are also saved from the Christian gospel. The story is compelling, widespread, constantly reiterated, and almost entirely false. Unfortunately, even many Christians have been taken in by aspects of it. This is how most Christians in the West have made their peace with the “escapist” option mentioned earlier. Religion is to have no effect on our views of what should and should not be allowed in the public square, but may be allowed to inform us what will get us salvation in the next life.”

from “Heaven Misplaced: Christ’s Kingdom on Earth” by Douglas Wilson