As Christians we confess with our hearts that our salvation is in Christ. More to the point, we acknowledge that God became man in Jesus, lived a sinless life on earth, suffered and died on the cross under the burden of our sins, and rose victorious from the grave. He ascended to the Father and has promised to return to establish his everlasting kingdom in the new heaven and new earth. This is spelt out in the ecumenical creeds of the church and in the evangelical confessions of the 16th and 17th centuries. We rejoice in the promise of our salvation and the hope of a renewed creation, purged of the destructive effects of sin.
But then what? How do we live in the meantime? This is hardly an academic question but cuts to the heart of our faith, which, as St. James the Apostle tells us, is dead if it does not bear fruit in works of righteousness (James 2:17, 26). As I’ve read some of the discussion surrounding the Manhattan Declaration, I have been, not exactly confused (as Joe Carter professes to be), but bemused. Bemused enough to ask: if we are saved by grace, exactly what are we saved for? To be sure, we are saved from sin and from the power of death that comes in its wake. But what are the implications of this salvation for the way we live life — indeed all of life, including those elements that characterize our social, political, economic and artistic life? Or are these fields of human endeavour exempt from the sinful patterns that produce the need for salvation in the first place?
The answer to the latter question is absolutely not. We human beings have a wilful tendency to embrace idols of our own making in every area of life, not just in our church or devotional life. Redemption in Jesus Christ renews God’s good creation in its totality, and not just abstract individual souls. Redemption reaches into the remote corners of everyday life, renewing the ordinary activities that are a part of our created nature as God’s image-bearers and shapers of culture.
If this is true, then it suggests that gospel and law in the larger sense are not the dialectical polarities that some make them out to be. Jesus never repudiated the law but came to fulfil it (Matthew 5:17):
For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished. Therefore whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 5:18-19).
It is true, of course, that the apostles released gentile converts from their obligation to follow all the intricacies of the mosaic law code (Acts 15:1-35). St. Paul condemned those who would impose circumcision on the early Christians and asserted unequivocally that “no one is justified before God by the law” (Galatians 3:11). Nevertheless, Paul could never have argued that Christians are free from the law whereby God governs the cosmos and the norms given to his image-bearers for living. Paul was not an antinomian and took pains to repudiate those who misinterpreted his teachings in such a way. We are by no means free from the central command to love our neighbour as ourselves (Galatians 5:13-14). In fact, Paul goes so far as to write that “we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them” (Ephesians 2:10).
How is this relevant to the debate over the Manhattan Declaration? Its relevance comes in the confession that the gospel does have an impact on the ways we live our lives politically. Politics is not a realm of neutral rationality, as some would have it. Along with the rest of life, it is the setting for a cosmic struggle between competing false gods — whether these be the jealous gods of individual rights, the messianic proletariat or the redemptive nation. This is the point I attempt to make in my own Political Visions and Illusions.
There are good reasons to critique the Manhattan Declaration. For example, its treatment of religious freedom contains troubling language concerning the supposedly “unconstrained conscience” of man. To hold that “God alone is Lord of the conscience” appears to downplay the extent to which he uses the communities, including the institutional church, of which we are part to shape our hearts and minds for his service.
Yet if we confess that the gospel changes everything, reorienting the way we live our entire lives, even our lives in community, then the issues addressed by the Declaration can hardly fall outside the scope of the gospel in this sense. Changing laws will not bring anyone to salvation. However, it may well be that efforts at legal reform are among the fruits of that salvation.
November 24th, 2009 | 1:54 pm | #1
Thank you, David, for you post. I have read (most of) your book and have enjoyed it tremendously.
The gospel will always inform our conscience, and how we vote (if we live in a land that allows us to vote) will always be according to our conscience. Why would we think otherwise? When participating in democracy that is to be expected. This is why the whole “Changing the laws won’t lead people to salvation” argument is a red herring. Democracy itself is not meant to be a means to bringing salvation to sinners, because it is not concerned with making Jesus Lord. As you argue in your book its designs end up idolizing the voice of the people. Some people don’t want to live according to Christian ethics–some people do—and so we find ourselves in messy culture war where real gains and losses occur.
On the other hand, I understand the concern about being reduced to a voting block. When pundits and PR firms analyze evangelicals solely by their voting habits we are thought to be a people who are only moved by two issues: gay marriage and abortion. That is embodied in the Manhattan Declaration for all to see. And that is how democracy understands us. For some that is a badge of honor. For others, it is a trivialization of God’s Kingdom, his people, and his gospel.
Perhaps evangelicals need to have a more thoroughgoing critique of democracy. Perhaps not a jettisoning of it altogether, but at least an awareness that it is a pattern of this world that will one day pass away.
November 24th, 2009 | 3:06 pm | #2
Well said, David.
November 24th, 2009 | 3:17 pm | #3
David –
Extraodinarily-smart piece here, for which you deserve the credit.
The rub comes at the end, as you might expect:
I think a massive irony here is that I agree with you in theory — that if/when, as things work out in God’s plan, there will be reform in the legal system, it will be due to the direct influence of the redeemed.
The problem in this case, though, is two-fold:
[1] This document doesn’t vow to reform the legal system: it vows to resist oppression in these matters (and Al Mohler has gone so far as to intimate that the document doesn’t actually advocate any action at all — which I found rather bizarre). It certainly doesn’t reform the legal system, either.
[2] There’s no question that this document does talk about things which the Gospel actually does address. But doesn’t it seem simply inconcruous that the way to fix a Gospel-centered problem is by making some kind of legal reform?
I think the parallel to the first-century church for us is somewhat imposing at this point. The first church found itself in a world where it had no overlap in terms of the definitions of vice and virtue — yet its first order of business was not to reform the laws: its first order of business was to live as sojourners and aliens, doing the things their King would have them do.
I think we miss this often in our Western way of doing things: while it is a blessing to have a democratic republic, it’s not hardly our home field.
I look forward to your response.
November 24th, 2009 | 4:00 pm | #4
Adam, you write:
You may recall from my book that I make a distinction between democracy as a mere form of government and democracy as an ideology, the latter assuming that justice will be done when the people have their way politically. I support democracy understood in the modest structural sense. However, I disagree strongly with one-time presidential aspirant Al Smith, who said that the cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy. Evangelicals need to critique democracy, especially in this latter sense.
Albert:
Thanks for your kind words. I sense you and I are kindred spirits!
Frank:
It may be odd that I, as a Greek-Canadian, agree very largely with a “Turk”, but I do. Yes, it’s not clear to me either that the document is proposing to reform the laws of the United States, although one might be justified in assuming that it is at least implied. . . if, that is, we were ever in a position to do so. Yet even if it is merely a matter of resisting injustice, then I think my position is unaltered. This resistance against injustice could still be viewed as one of the fruits of salvation.
You write this, Frank:
Not if the problem is of a political nature. One quite properly addresses political issues politically. If the state is failing to do justice to the unborn, to marriage as a distinctive institution, or to the rights of religious believers, then surely one must address concrete injustices in a way that takes these seriously as public legal issues?
We address psychological problems psychologically and economic problems economically, no? That doesn’t mean we do so any less as Christians. It simply means we understand the multifaceted character of God’s world and even more of the human person.
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