My Problem with Andrew Sullivan's Problem

This is another passage by passage response to some article somewhere.  This time its  Andrew Sullivan, “My Problem with Christianism: A believer spells out the difference between faith and a political agenda,” Time Magazine, Sunday, 7 May 2006 [cited 10 May 2006].

Are you a Christian who doesn't feel represented by the religious right? I know the feeling. When the discourse about faith is dominated by political fundamentalists and social conservatives, many others begin to feel as if their religion has been taken away from them.

Well, anyone familiar with the writings of the early Church Fathers knows that the relation between Christians and “political fundamentalism” and “social conservativism” has a long tradition.  For example, after the Christians “took over” the Roman Empire, homosexuality, though still widely practiced, was illegal.  Sullivan seems to think that Christians having an interest in the laws they live under and the government that runs their lives is something new and unusual.  It isn’t.  I’m not saying it is inarguably legitimate.  The relation of Christ to culture has been a subject of discussion since the earliest days of the Church; and there are at least five views on the subject:  Christ against culture, Christ of culture, Christ above culture, Christ and culture in paradox, and Christ transforming culture (see, e.g., H. Richard Neibuhr, Christ and Culture).  And  Sullivan’s  is  only one view.

The number of Christians misrepresented by the Christian right is many. There are evangelical Protestants who believe strongly that Christianity should not get too close to the corrupting allure of government power.

So what?  There used to be many Christians who thought that sex was something little more than a necessary evil.  That doesn’t mean they were correct.  And if government power is so corrupting that Christianity should not get too close (a ridiculous way of putting it), then why should anyone get too close?  And what is “too close”?  Probably, just closer than Andrew Sullivan thinks his opponents should be.

There are lay Catholics who, while personally devout, are socially liberal on issues like contraception, gay rights, women's equality and a multi-faith society. There are very orthodox believers who nonetheless respect the freedom and conscience of others as part of their core understanding of what being a Christian is.

Well “socially  liberal” can mean many things.  I am a devout Christian; and I also consider myself socially liberal.  I don’t believe in any contraception except self-control, but I hold that as an article of faith, binding only upon those who hold to the same faith; to me that’s logic.  With respect to gay rights, I agree that gays have rights.  However, because I believe that it is a prerogative of a state to define what marriage is, to decide that homosexual  unions are not heterosexual  unions and therefore that they are not to be called the same thing, I also believe that this position can be given the force of law.  The Christian, as a citizen has input on this matter, just like the non-Christian.  I believe that what women do should be a determination of their faith system, not government; I just am not familiar with a move on the part of any Christian to legislate “a woman’s place.”  (I also do not hold that “equal” means “identical,” which is what the left seem to hold.)  I am also comfortable with a multi-faith society.  I find positively offensive Sullivan’s intimation that we wish by political means to put down all other faiths but our own.  (There are numerous indications in Scripture that when Jesus Christ returns to this good earth there will be—HORRORS!!!—unbelievers.  It stands to reason, then, that Christians will always live in the presence of people of other faiths.  And here’s a little secret, Sullivan: Most, if not all, Christians, even us “right-wingers,” know this.)  One implication of Sullivan’s assertion that, “There are very orthodox believers who nonetheless respect the freedom and conscience of others as part of their core understanding of what being a Christian is” is that everyone, not just Christians, should stay the heck out of politics, or risk being thought of as someone who does not respect the freedom and conscience of others

They have no problem living next to an atheist or a gay couple or a single mother or people whose views on the meaning of life are utterly alien to them--and respecting their neighbors' choices. That doesn't threaten their faith. Sometimes the contrast helps them understand their own faith better.

Sullivan cannot possibly know any “right wing” Christians personally if he thinks that they either move to different neighborhoods or run atheists and gays out of town.  Single mothers?  Is he kidding?  In my church, we baptize their children; and we all of us make the affirmation of god-parenthood.  My denomination?  The Presbyterian Church in America, one of the most conservative denominations in the country.  Sullivan’s insinuation that we “right-wingers” view atheists, gays, single mothers, or pro-choice people as some sort of threat to our faith is further evidence that he doesn’t know his opponent.  He is arguing against people who don’t even exist.

And there are those who simply believe that, by definition, God is unknowable to our limited, fallible human minds and souls. If God is ultimately unknowable, then how can we be so certain of what God's real position is on, say, the fate of Terri Schiavo? Or the morality of contraception? Or the role of women? Or the love of a gay couple?

Well, there are those of us—we must be the smart ones—who believe that, yes, God is unknowable to our limited, fallible human minds and souls, but only if we mean by “knowable,” “exhaustively knowable.”  Heck, no one is exhaustively knowable.  But that doesn’t mean that we do not truly know.  I truly know my wife; but I do not exhaustively know her.  I don’t know everything about her, but what I do know, I truly know.  So, no we cannot know everything about God, but what we do know we truly know.  If God is so unknowable, then was Sullivan’s Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, wrong when He said (to God, by the way), “[T]his is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent” (John 17.3)?  How can Jesus be so stupid as to suggest that eternal life is knowing God, if God is as unknowable as Sullivan says that He is?  If God is as unknowable as Sullivan seems to assert, then why does He say, through the prophet Jeremiah, “[L]et him who boasts boast about this: that he understands and knows me” (Jeremiah 9.24)?  Where Sullivan and Jeremiah are at odds, I’ll throw in with Jeremiah.

Also, faith for many of us is interwoven with doubt, a doubt that can strengthen faith and give it perspective and shadow. That doubt means having great humility in the face of God and an enormous reluctance to impose one's beliefs, through civil law, on anyone else.

Well, it may be the case that, for Sullivan and others “faith…is interwoven with doubt.”  But since Sullivan is a Christian, it should be a bit important what faith is to Jesus. When one reads the Scriptures—even if we limit ourselves to the Gospels—it ought to be clear that, for Jesus, faith means certainty.  When Jesus chastises people for their lack of faith, the presence of doubt is what He chastises them for.  Sullivan must be unfamiliar with passages like Matthew 6.30; 8.26; 14.31; 16.8; Luke 12.28.  In Matthew 14.31 Jesus refers to doubt as the contrary of faith:  “You of little faith…why did you doubt?”  And in contrast with Sullivan’s view that certainty necessarily means pride, Scripture requires both certainty (i.e., faith) and humility.  Finally, it is interesting to see that, for Sullivan, it is apparently just fine for people who believe in gay marriage to impose their belief on others by means of the civil law, but it is not so for those who do not so believe.  I have never seen ANY reluctance on the part of the Left—religious or otherwise—to impose their beliefs on others.  Neither have they ever had any reluctance to do so by means that circumvent the democratic process; that’s right, I mean the courts.

I would say a clear majority of Christians in the U.S. fall into one or many of those camps. Yet the term "people of faith" has been co-opted almost entirely in our discourse by those who see Christianity as compatible with only one political party, the Republicans, and believe that their religious doctrines should determine public policy for everyone. "Sides are being chosen," Tom DeLay recently told his supporters, "and the future of man hangs in the balance! The enemies of virtue may be on the march, but they have not won, and if we put our trust in Christ, they never will." So Christ is a conservative Republican?

This is a complicated one.  It isn’t so much that Christ is a conservative Republican.  But He is the one from whom we have our worldview.  Unless Christians are to shut themselves up in monasteries, or accept as true the proposition that they are to have absolutely no voice in their government, they shall have to align with one of the two major coalitions.  If I use a Venn diagram I just find more overlap between the Christian worldview and a conservative approach to politics and economics.  For one thing, the ground motive of the Left is Marxism, which is an explicitly non-theistic (if not downright anti-theistic) worldview.  Marxism has a non-theistic metaphysics, a non-theistic epistemology, and a non-theistic ethic.  Conservatism can be corrected by input from the Christian worldview; Marxism (and by extension, liberalism) cannot be.

Rush Limbaugh recently called the Democrats the "party of death" because of many Democrats' view that some moral decisions, like the choice to have a first-trimester abortion, should be left to the individual, not the cops. Ann Coulter, with her usual subtlety, simply calls her political opponents "godless," the title of her new book. And the largely nonreligious media have taken the bait. The "Christian" vote has become shorthand in journalism for the Republican base.

I have nothing to say in defense of Rush Limbaugh, except that I did not know that he is a Christian.  I know that his brother is.  As for Coulter, well, her opponents are godless because they are, by and large, Marxists.  Marxism is a godless worldview.  And nothing, including throwing the word “god” around, can change that.  And the fact that journalists have chosen to use “Christian vote” as shorthand for the Republican base means nothing.  Saying it, doesn’t make it true.  I see it as an attempt to malign Christians, or Republicans—or both.  My using the word “jackasses” as a shorthand term for liberal journalists would mean what, exactly?  Nothing.  What Sullivan tells us here about journalists only tells us something about journalists, not Christians.  The Romans used to call Christians atheists.  But I doubt that atheists would have us.  One more thing about Coulter: Back off Sullivan.  I’ve  a bit of a crush on her.  (Don’t tell my wife.)

What to do about it? The worst response, I think, would be to construct something called the religious left. Many of us who are Christians and not supportive of the religious right are not on the left either.  In fact, we are opposed to any politicization of the Gospels by any party, Democratic or Republican, by partisan black churches or partisan white ones.

Anyone who does not recognize just how political the Gospels are is right up there with someone who doesn’t know that, on the Christian view (right out of Jesus’s own mouth, no less), having faith means being certain.  Over against Caesar Jesus says that He, and not Caesar, is Lord.

"My kingdom is not of this world," Jesus insisted. What part of that do we not understand?

1.  Wait!  What happened to that uncertainty that Sullivan expressed above?  You remember; it went like this:  “If God is ultimately unknowable, then how can we be so certain of what God's real position is on, say, the fate of Terri Schiavo? Or the morality of contraception? Or the role of women? Or the love of a gay couple?”  Despite the Bible’s recording God as saying, among other things, “Man shall not lie with man as with woman,” Sullivan wants to claim that we just can’t be certain of God’s position on the love of a gay couple.  But now he’s certain.  How did he go from that uncertainty about all matters faith-related to certainty about what Jesus meant when he said, "My kingdom is not of this world"?

2.  On top of all that, I would have to say that Sullivan understands not one single part of “My kingdom is not of this world,” especially the part that says “not of this world” (ek kosmou toutou).  First, it is interesting to note that Jesus uses the word kosmou, and not ges.  Had He used the word ges He would then have been referring clearly to the planet.  His use of the word kosmou indicates His intention to refer to what some scholars call the “spirit of the age,” which we may think of as the current philosophical fad (e.g., the “post-modernism” that currently reigns as the spirit of the age in which we live).  On this view, Jesus is not saying that His kingdom has no existence on earth.  He is saying that the philosophical and theological base of His political economy is not rooted in merely human thought.  Also, it sometimes happens that an important part of a sentence may be a single word.  In this case it’s a preposition, “of,” (“ek” in the Greek, meaning “origin” or “source”).  When Jesus said that his kingdom was not of this world, He wasn’t saying that His kingdom had nothing to do with this world.  He was saying—if you know something about how prepositions work—that the origin, or source, of His kingdom, and His kingdom authority, was not to be looked for, or found, in this world.  For the same Jesus who said, “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18.36) also said (get this, Sullivan), “All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth” (Matt. 28.18).  This world, whether Sullivan likes it or not, belongs to Jesus Christ.  As it is written in the Mishna: “All the worlds were created only for the Christ.”  And while it doesn’t mean we are authorized to institute a coup (since the only person qualified to rule absolutely is the Christ to Whom the Kingdom belongs), it also doesn’t mean we need to keep our mouths shut.  Taking part in politics isn’t the same as trying to institute the kingdom just because our ground-motive is the Christian worldview.

Let me offer at least one way in which the Christian worldview operates in motivating us politically.  Take abortion as an example.  Sullivan would have us believe that leaving it up to individual choice is appropriate and consistent with a Christian worldview.  The Christian worldview motivates us to be concerned for both individuals and the societies they comprise.  If we believe that the evidence is in and that this evidence shows that abortion, among other things, has brought about a cheapening of human life such that restricting it would be beneficial for the society (not to mention the innocent life that isn’t ripped apart and sucked away like debris up a shop-vac hose) then why should we not try to restrict it?  Why should we not try even to do away with it completely?  Not only that, but it does not seem to us incorrect to think that the creator of life, who provides only for the killing of the guilty, may have a small problem with the killing of the innocent.

Now, if Sullivan thinks that we are mistaken about the facts, or about Scripture, or certain articles of the Christian faith, then why not correct our understanding of these matters?  As Jesus once said (John 18.23) to someone who slapped him, “If I have spoken wrongly then testify of the wrong, but if rightly why do you strike me?”

Finally, don’t let it escape your notice that although Sullivan raises the matter of doubt he himself has no doubts that: (1) the Christian faith has been hijacked; and (2) that this is wrong.