Perceiving the kingdom of God as an actual political reality is a game changer. Once you see that Jesus has his own political agenda, his own vision for arranging human society, his own criteria for judging nations, then it’s impossible... 1/7
...to give your heart and soul to the power-based, win-at-all-costs partisan politics that call for our allegiance. Unfortunately, what I’ve learned through bitter experience is that a lot of people don’t want the game changed. They want to win the game—not change the game. 2/7
My most vehement critics tend to come from those who regard my deep ambivalence toward a political “take back America for God” agenda as a scandalous betrayal. They simply cannot imagine how God’s will is going to be done if “our side” doesn’t win the political game. 3/7
This is the game most of the church has played for seventeen centuries—use Christianity to endorse or buttress a particular political agenda. Christian then becomes a mere adjective to the dominant political noun. 4/7
What is dominant is a particular political agenda. Politics trumps everything. The political tail wags the Christian dog. Christianity’s role is to serve a political agenda. 5/7
So viewed through the American lens, Christianity is seen to endorse democracy and capitalism, just as it was once seen in Europe to endorse monarchy and feudalism. 6/7
To even suggest that Jesus doesn’t necessarily endorse every aspect of Jeffersonian democracy and laissez-faire capitalism is enough to get you burned at the stake (hopefully only in a metaphorical sense).
-A Farewell To Mars, p. 155 (2014) 7/7
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During Columbus’ governorship of Hispaniola the Arawak people were either sold into slavery or forced to supply a certain quantity of gold every three months. Those who failed to meet the quota had their hands cut off. That’s when the mass suicides began.
Modern scholarship places the population of Hispaniola in 1492 at no less than four million people. By 1520 it had fallen to 20,000. Do the math! The Niña, Pinta, and Santa María had brought Death to the Americas.
Bartolomé de las Casas, a young Spanish priest with the Columbus expedition, was so appalled by the barbaric cruelty of his fellow “Christians” that he spent the rest of his life documenting the abuses.
One of the most remarkable things about the first Christians is that they didn’t try to hide, downplay, or gloss over the fact that the One they worshiped as King of Kings had been crucified. Paul says “I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified.”
The early Christian hymn that Paul quotes in his letter to the Philippian church doesn’t merely say Jesus died, but that he was crucified. The earliest Christian creed doesn’t flinch from confessing that Jesus suffered under Pontius Pilate and was crucified.
For Christians living at such a far remove from the first century, the depth of this scandal may be hard to grasp, but your hero being crucified would be the last thing a Jew or a Roman living in antiquity would boast about. And yet the early Christians *did* boast about it.
For most Western people “God” is the amalgamation of all the philosophical “omnies”—omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, omni-everything. What we end up with in this approach to understanding God are our own ideas, preferences, prejudices, fears magnified to the omni-degree. 1/4
But a Christian understanding of God is entirely informed by Jesus. It is Jesus who gives definition to God, not the philosophical “omnies.” We don’t know God according to philosophical categories, but by the revelation of Jesus Christ. (cf. Matthew 11:27) 2/4
The whole point of confessing the deity of Christ is to know what God is like. We must not make the mistake of saying, “I already know what God is like and now I know that Jesus is God.” No! That’s all backwards. It is Jesus alone who knows the Father and reveals the Father. 3/4
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DBH on Christianity in America:
No nation in the wake of Christendom’s decline has done more to confuse the story that Christians should tell with the kind of stories sinful human beings long to tell. 1/6
In the American imagination our national history is one of a chosen people fleeing the wickedness that is in the world so as to become a holy nation set apart, called to recreate humankind in a new and Edenic condition. 2/6
And somehow, then, with a buffoonish crudity almost unprecedented in terrestrial history—or, perhaps, an unfeigned naïveté positively touching in its earnestness, depending on how one looks at it—a good number of American Christians find it possible to believe that... 3/6
I long ago left behind a literal reading of the Bible. But now, at least to a certain extent, I find myself leaving behind an analytical historical-critical reading of the Bible as well. 1/6
So today if I’m reading the Bible in the morning as part of my daily spiritual exercises and I read about the walls of Jericho falling down I don’t muse upon the fact that archeological evidence does not support this. 2/6
I know this fact, but now that I know it, I can set it aside and allow the inspired storyteller to tell the story. Because, although I know what biblical archaeology says about this story, I also know that there are walls that need to fall... 3/6
There are real challenges to sustaining a vibrant Christian faith over the course of a lifetime. I fully understand the need to rethink and to adjust course in our faith journey. I’ve had my own experience with this. (1/6)
In midlife I discovered that the Christianity I knew was too weak and too thin, too compromised with consumerism and too accommodating to Americanism. To sustain a vibrant Christian faith I had to find a Christianity worthy of the Christ whose name it bears. (2/6)
The good news is that such a Christianity exists. It’s always existed — though rarely, if ever, is it the dominant expression of Christianity. Sometimes we have to go on a theological journey to find a faith that can endure for a lifetime. (3/6)