Zach worked as an elected political official during the years preceding the US Supreme Court’s Obergefell ruling. The high court had not yet made up the nation’s mind for us on same-sex marriage.
Zach is a friend and fellow church member. I was excited when he won office. Yet I didn’t envy him when, a couple months into his first term, he encountered a same-sex marriage bill. Zach found himself swarmed by media, interest groups, and powerful political figures all pushing him to vote yes.
I remember sitting outside of our church building one afternoon on a metal park bench with Zach discussing the issue. A significant part of the conversation revolved around the question of how Christians should view the Bible in relation to people who don’t believe the Bible.
Zach and I agreed the Bible teaches that God created marriage for one man and one woman. Yet we also agreed that America is a pluralistic nation filled with people from many different faiths who disagree on what the Bible is and what it teaches about marriage. And his job was to serve and represent all these people, regardless of their beliefs.
Do you see Zach’s dilemma? As Christians, we know we must live our lives according to God’s book, the Bible. This is something we do in all of life, not just in private. Yet we also know that we must not impose our faith on other people. Doing so is futile. People must be “born again” by God’s Spirit. And imposing the Christian faith creates hypocrites at best and makes people despise Christianity at worst.
So how was Zach supposed to vote?
In the end, the legislators pushing the bill tabled it because they didn’t have enough votes. Zach could keep his powder dry for another day. But the conversations got me thinking about the Bible and politics. How do we think about its political relevance for a nation filled with people who don’t believe in the Bible?
THE BIBLE, POLITICS, AND THE CHURCH
Zach’s story forces us to think not only about the outward challenge of how the Bible applies to outsiders or non-Christians, it also points to an inward challenge for the church: How do we maintain unity with one another inside the church when we disagree on what the Bible teaches on important political matters? Furthermore, what role do pastors play in addressing such matters from Scripture?
Zach and I agreed on what the Bible teaches about marriage, but we had to think through what that teaching means for public policy on marriage. The Bible does not explicitly say how to view same-sex marriage laws. Then again, you might disagree. You might think the Bible is very explicit. And that’s just the thing: Christians often disagree on what the Bible does or does not “say” on different political issues.
Here’s another example: Christians agree that the Bible condemns racism. But does it address what people today call “structural racism”? Some say yes, others no. (We will think more deeply about structural racism in chapter 8.) Churches then divide as some members feel like the pastors must address perceived instances of structural racism, while others insist, “There is no problem!”
Speaking of pastors, they play a crucial role here. Let’s think for a moment about a pastor’s biblical job description, whether a staff pastor who is paid for the work of pastoring or a nonstaff pastor (like me) whom the congregation has ordained but earns an income elsewhere. A pastor’s job is to teach a church what to believe about the Bible. He lays out the path of biblical obedience, even binding consciences with it: “The Bible says you must walk this way, not that way.” Which means, a pastor without a Bible is a man with no authority and no message. The Bible doesn’t give him authority to bind the congregation’s consciences on the best dental practices, the most effective accounting methods, or the advantages of drywall over plaster. He only has authority to unite the church around God’s Word, not around his personal opinions.
Sometimes a pastor’s teaching will be a condition of church membership, as with what he teaches on Christ’s resurrection. Sometimes it leaves room for disagreement among members, as with one’s view on spiritual gifts. “Christian freedom” is what we call those places where pastors and Christians might have biblically informed convictions, but where they agree they can disagree and still be members of the same church. In places of freedom, a good pastor takes care not to lean into the consciences of his members. He does not try to convince them that his own view of such-and-such is necessarily the biblical one. He leaves each person’s conscience free or unpressured.
So think about all this in relation to political issues: Should a pastor endorse or denounce a political candidate? Should he share his position on various policy matters like immigration or health care? Tax policy or global warming? Same-sex marriage or abortion? My guess is, your instincts tell you the answer is, “It depends.” If so, I’d say your instincts are right, though it’s going to take me a little while to explain why.
In the scenario at the beginning of the chapter, politician Zach and pastor Jonathan had a conversation about the Bible and its possible implication for Zach’s decision. That fact alone might have unnerved some readers. There is strong tradition in America, especially in my own Baptist tradition, that says pastors should never advise politicians.
Here’s a story about another pastor from my church on Capitol Hill. K. Owen White pastored my church from 1945 to 1950. He left and eventually became the pastor of First Baptist Houston. When the 1960 presidential election rolled around, White and a number of other Protestant ministers began to worry that the Roman Catholic candidate John F. Kennedy might “take orders from the pope.” Hoping to address the fear, candidate Kennedy attended a meeting of the Houston Ministers’ Association on September 12, 1960. One of the sharpest interrogators in the room, said the New York Times report, was K. Owen White. Would the Roman Catholic Church shape his presidency? White and others wanted to know.
Kennedy attended the event precisely to answer this challenge, and he offered one of the more important speeches on the topic of church and state of his campaign. “I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute,” Kennedy said, “where no Catholic prelate should tell the President (should he be a Catholic) how to act and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote.” He wanted an America “where no public official either requests or accepts instruction on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches, or any other ecclesiastical source.”1
After the speech, White said of Kennedy, “I have nothing against him. I think he’s a fine man. But my questions remain about the policies of the church. There’s no question in my mind that they [the Roman Catholic Church] require members to take certain positions on public matters.”2
Both men made pretty strong statements. Kennedy didn’t think any politician should accept or request counsel on public policy from a pastor, as if religious convictions could be entirely separated from public policy. And though White denied it, he basically agreed with Kennedy. A church must never tell one of its members how he or she must vote on a public matter.
My park bench conversation with Zach on same-sex marriage flew in the face of both Kennedy’s and White’s comments. I walked Zach through a biblical framework of what this issue entailed and was clear about policy implications. I assume this former pastor of my church would have agreed with me on the nature of marriage, but would he have disagreed with my counsel to Zach, I wonder.
In most instances, I would agree with White. A pastor should not offer policy or election advice. A member of my church once pulled me aside after a class I taught on Christians and government. She wanted to know how she should vote in the upcoming DC mayoral elections. She didn’t want to vote for a pro-choice candidate, but all three candidates were pro-choice. And based on other issues she definitely favored one candidate over the others. My judgment in that moment was to leave her conscience free or unbound. So I offered her some criteria for thinking through the decision, but I did not tell her how to vote.
I suspect you’re beginning to feel how jumbled and complicated this topic is. It’s like a busy traffic intersection where a number of roads all collide and there are no traffic lights! The first question is how to interpret the Bible politically. The second is whether we should work to “impose” biblical teaching on non-Christians through our political activity. The third is how much room we should leave for Christians in a church to disagree. The fourth is the pastor’s role in all this. And on and on the questions collide.
It’s easy to err in at least one of two directions. Either we can assume that the Bible says nothing on matters of public policy. This is the side that Kennedy and maybe White claimed to represent. Or we can treat the Bible like a book of case law. We approach it looking to find the right answers on immigration policy, health-care policy, tax rates, and more.
You see this latter tendency among people across the political spectrum. Politically conservative pastors and theologians point to the Bible’s teaching on stealing to argue for private property and flat tax rates. Politically liberal pastors and theologians point to the Bible’s teaching on creation or caring for the poor to argue for environmental and welfare policies.
WHAT IS THE BIBLE?
Here’s what I want to help you see: when it comes to thinking about politics, the Bible is less like a book of case law and more like a constitution. A constitution does not provide a country with the rules of daily life. It provides the rules for making the rules. It establishes who the rule makers are and what the purpose of rule is.
The first sentence of the US Constitution, for instance, reads,
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
This long and elegant sentence explains the source of authority: we the people. It explains the purpose of the constitution: to form a union, establish justice, insure tranquility, provide defense, promote citizens’ welfare, and secure freedom. And it declares the people’s act of ordaining the constitution and therefore the government of the United States.
Then, as you read through the constitution, you won’t find anything about speed limits, housing construction codes, or tax rates. Instead you find who will make those kinds of decisions and how. It says there will be three branches of government, a bicameral legislature, popular elections, judicial review, and more. Again, it establishes who the rule makers are and the rules for making rules.
When it comes to the work of civil governments, we might think of the Bible as similar to a constitution. Let’s think about how theologians describe the Bible for a moment. Were you to join my church, you would have to affirm this statement about the Bible (slightly modernized here):
We believe that the Holy Bible was written by men who were divinely inspired. It is a perfect treasure of heavenly instruction. God is its author, salvation is its purpose, and truth without any mixture of error is its content. It reveals the principles by which God will judge us. Therefore, the Holy Bible is now and will be to the end of the world the true center of Christian union and the supreme standard for evaluating all human conduct, creeds, and opinions.
Think of this statement as a human preamble to sacred Scripture. I want us to draw two lessons from it.
First, the Bible is the book by which all our political activity will be judged. This is true for Christians and non-Christians. As my church’s statement puts it, the Bible is the supreme standard for all human conduct, creeds, and opinions. It reveals the principles by which God will judge us. You might call it God’s grand judicial review.
In other words, the Bible does not tell us what to do on trade policy, carbon dioxide emissions, and public education. But it does tell us that whatever we do in these domains will be measured by the principles of righteousness and justice explicitly established in the Bible.
In my conversations with Zach, it was God’s promised judicial review that I highlighted most prominently. Sitting on that bench, I pulled out these verses and read them:
Then the kings of the earth and the great ones and the generals and the rich and the powerful, and everyone, slave and free, hid themselves in the caves and among the rocks of the mountains, calling to the mountains and rocks, “Fall on us and hide us from the face of him who is seated on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb, for the great day of their wrath has come, and who can stand?” (Rev. 6:15–17)
Why will the kings and generals and every political class—slave and free—fear the coming of Christ’s wrath? Because they did not use their political opportunities, whether high or low, to live and rule perfectly according to God’s Word.
It doesn’t matter if a majority of the American public, the justices of the Supreme Court, and the US Congress do not acknowledge God or God’s Word. He is their God, and he will judge them by his standards, not theirs.
It doesn’t matter whether people acknowledge the Bible as their book. The relevance of the Bible to politics depends entirely on the reality of God and the judgment of God. If either God or his judgment is not real, the Bible has no relevance whatsoever. But if God and his judgment are real, the Bible is eternally relevant.
Does that mean Christians should impose the whole Bible on fellow Christians and non-Christians alike? Well, we don’t have the right to impose anything on anyone. But God does. The better question is, what commands does God impose on which people and how and when? Yes, he means to impose some things on everyone right now through governments. That’s why he gives authority to governments in the first place. Other things he imposes right now on children through parents. And still other things he imposes right now only on members of churches. In short, God assigns different jurisdictions to different institutions. Our task, then, is to pay close attention to what jurisdictions God has established for governments, for parents, and for churches, and only recommend those commands that he has authorized for each. And he will ultimately judge everyone accordingly.
For instance, has God authorized governments to prosecute all forms of sexual sin? It’s not clear to me that he has. He has authorized churches, however, to speak out against such sin and particularly to correct it among its members.
Yet marriage laws are different from laws that criminalize something. Marriage laws support, sponsor, and subsidize certain activities. So the question for Zach was this: has God authorized governments to support, sponsor, and subsidize homosexual activity? The easy answer is no. Zach’s refusal to support same-sex marriage would not be about imposing a Christian sexual ethic on others. It was about refusing to let the world impose its sexual ethic on him, which it was doing by asking him to endorse something God has not authorized government to endorse. It was about refusing to put his hand to anything that will provoke the judgment of God at the end of history.
Now, let’s return to my church’s statement of faith and consider a second point: it says the Bible has salvation for its end and is the center of Christian union. It doesn’t say that the Bible is a political strategy book, a legislative manual, or a book of case law. Instead it says its primary purpose is pointing people to redemption and what the redeemed life looks life, which is our Christian union. Our lives together within each of our churches should then illustrate or model how the nations should live. Our words and deeds in churches reveal the principles by which the nations will one day be judged. But that’s not the same thing as saying that all these principles should be legislated right now. Again, church and state possess different jurisdictions in the here and now. Most of the Bible’s emphasis, in other words, is on the people of God, not on principles for good government.
In fact, as we will see in the next chapter, even what the Bible says about good government it says in service to God’s people, the purposes of salvation, and the goal of Christian union.
What the Bible does say about good government itself is fairly meager. It’s not a long constitution, you might say, but a short one.
WE NEED TO DISTINGUISH BETWEEN LAW AND WISDOM
The two truths affirmed of Scripture by my church’s statement of faith puts us in the position of needing both law and wisdom. On the one hand, the Bible is the supreme standard, and where it does speak in binding ways, both we and all humanity are bound. That’s law. On the other hand, the Bible’s purpose is not to build up an empire or a nation-state, though it provides principles for understanding human life in all its domains. That’s why we need wisdom.
Distinguishing between law and wisdom is absolutely critical for knowing how to read the Bible politically.
Law is absolute and unchanging. I don’t care what nation or century you live in, you shall not murder. You shall not steal. All people are made in God’s image and are worthy of dignity and respect. And a government should reward the good and punish the bad. Think of these kinds of biblical laws as your constitutional basics. They should apply in all times and all places, whether you are the king over a kingdom or one of two hundred million voters. Christians will disagree over what counts as our laws or constitutional basics. Fine. But let’s at least acknowledge that the category exists.
The domain of wisdom, however, does not refer to matters of complete moral indifference, such as, should I have Cheerios or cornflakes for breakfast? Rather, wisdom is both the posture of fearing the Lord, as well as the skill of living in God’s created but fallen world in a way that yields justice, peace, and flourishing. In any given situation, wisdom beholds the flood of conflicting signals and competing voices. Then it arbitrates between right and wrong. It distinguishes between the worthy and the worthless. It chooses the better path when the better path is hidden by a thornbush. It discerns what people are made of and how they are going to act under certain circumstances. It recognizes the moral ideal and balances that with the politically realistic.
The relationship between law and wisdom can be likened to the relationship between the rules of a game and the strategy you employ to win a game. You have the rules of football; those are fixed. And then you have the coach and quarterback’s calculations about how to beat this team on this day on that field. Do you use the running game or the passing game? That’s wisdom.
Suppose then that a government wants to build a train track from city A to city B. But following the landscape one way will require them to go through mountainous terrain and put many lives at risk, while following the landscape in another way will require them to build a series of bridges through marshland and will come at exorbitant costs, which means higher taxes. What’s the biblical solution? Well, I’m not sure we can say there is one. We can say there are biblical principles we bring to bear on the question, but the answer finally depends on a number of complex calculations involving a host of moral and practical variables. It requires wisdom.
WISDOM IS CRUCIAL FOR APPLYING THE BIBLE TO POLITICS
Most of the political questions citizens face day to day are biblically unscripted. Instead, they occur in wisdom’s territory.
Sure enough, wisdom is absolutely crucial to politics in the Bible. Perhaps you know the story about God offering King Solomon anything he wanted: “Ask what I shall give you” (1 Kings 3:5). Solomon asked for “an understanding mind to govern your people, that I may discern between good and evil” (v. 9). He asked for wisdom.
Immediately the narrator turned to telling a story demonstrating that God gave Solomon wisdom—the story of the two prostitutes and the dead baby. Two prostitutes lived in the same house, both with newborns. One rolled over her baby in her sleep and killed it. Each woman then appeared before the king claiming the live baby was hers. Solomon weighed out the situation and then offered a solution: “Divide the living child in two, and give half to the one and half to the other” (v. 25). The real mother panicked, “No, give the child to her.” The lying prostitute replied, “Very well, divide him.” The exercise revealed each woman for what she was—the real mother or the fake. The king concluded, “Give the living child to the first woman, and by no means put him to death; she is his mother” (v. 27).
The narrator then summarized the story for us: “And all Israel heard of the judgment that the king had rendered, and they stood in awe of the king, because they perceived that the wisdom of God was in him to do justice” (v. 28).
This one verse, I dare say, gives us the Bible’s political philosophy in a nutshell. Forget about reading history’s greatest political philosophers, like Plato and Aristotle or John Locke and Thomas Hobbes. Read this one verse: the people “stood in awe of the king, because they perceived that the wisdom of God was in him to do justice” (emphasis added).
Kings, congressmen, ambassadors, generals, police officers, voters, city council members, public school teachers, judges, and juries need wisdom. They need the wisdom of God. They need the wisdom of God to do justice. This is a significant piece of our biblical constitution.
The Bible cares more about whether a government pursues justice by the wisdom of God than it cares about what form of government a nation possesses. Better a king who seeks justice with God’s wisdom than a democracy that despises him and pursues folly and injustice. God can use anything.
Listen to the glorious figure of Wisdom in Proverbs 8: “Does not wisdom call? Does not understanding raise her voice?” the writer asked (v. 1). She did call out, and she addressed all people: “I raise my voice to all mankind” (v. 4 niv). She was interested in Christians and non-Christians, Muslims and atheists, those who read the Bibles and those who didn’t.
And what did Wisdom say? She said good government depends on her: “By me kings reign, and rulers decree what is just; by me princes rule, and nobles, all who govern justly” (vv. 15–16). Not only did Israel’s kings need her. All who rule on earth do—the Virginia General Assembly, Moscow’s city government, the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare. The people who sit at desks and push pencils and make decisions in each of these agencies will promote the prosperity of everyone they serve by serving according to God’s wisdom.
How can this be if these rulers don’t acknowledge God? Because whether or not people acknowledge God, both they and this world belong to him. He created it according to his wisdom (see vv. 22–30), which means living by God’s wisdom means living according to the warp and woof of the world. To go against his wisdom is to go against creation’s design pattern. See how well that works.
Let me offer a few examples of how biblical principles should inform our calculations of wisdom.
Proverbs 10:4 NIV reads, “Lazy hands make for poverty, but diligent hands bring wealth.” A wise ruler, no doubt, will look for ways to maximize industry and not reward laziness. Certainly this has implications for welfare policies. How easy it is for a nation’s welfare policies to abet laziness and so exacerbate poverty.
However, Proverbs 29:7 reads, “A righteous man knows the rights of the poor.” And 29:14 says, “If a king faithfully judges the poor, his throne will be established forever.” A good king, like a good shepherd, doesn’t leave some of the sheep behind. He seeks to bless and benefit all. He is going to judge them and their circumstances with fairness. He is going to consider the causes of poverty and ask what might contribute to entrenched cycles of poverty.
Wisdom, then, is figuring out how to put these last two points together, and that might change from circumstance to circumstance. Some welfare policies help, and some hurt. We don’t want to promote policies that incentivize laziness, but we also want to consider various structural inequities that create cycles of poverty and do justice for those stuck inside of them.
PUTTING LAW AND WISDOM TOGETHER
Let’s see if I can sum up everything I’ve said so far with a picture. First, we should read the Bible politically less like a book of case law and more like a constitution. It gives us a few basics that we need to hold with a firm grip for building our governments and pursuing principles of justice. That constitution looks like this:
The Bible tells us to hold all its covenants, commissions, or commands with a firm grip. Most of those apply just to God’s people. Some of them apply to the nations. And, of course, wisdom is needed to tell us which is which. The Bible also tells us to pursue justice with a firm grip. In between these two is where most of the activity of good government occurs: in the loose-gripped domain of wisdom. Choosing a good political philosophy and good constitution is not ordained of God. It depends on wisdom. In most situations, I would prefer a democracy. On an island of pirates, perhaps not. Choosing which party and candidate to support and which policies to pass also depends on wisdom.
Now stop and think: what happens in courtrooms? Lawyers and judges argue. And often they argue about whether a certain law is constitutional. The Constitution is the standard by which all laws are judged. If a law is shown to be unconstitutional, it gets thrown out. Good lawyers and judges have skill in demonstrating whether a law coheres with the Constitution. They are wise, you might say.
Likewise, Christians will disagree and sometimes argue about whether a certain candidate or policy is more or less “biblical” or at least wise. And what we all need is the wisdom to know whether something is clearly biblical, binding all Christians, or whether it belongs entirely to the domain of Christian freedom.
TRAINING LAWYERS ON STRAIGHT-LINE VERSUS JAGGED-LINE ISSUES
Okay, so it’s class time. I want to train you to be a wise constitutional lawyer. If the Bible is our constitution, we need a lawyer’s skill in recognizing which political matters are biblical or constitutional, and which are not. My favorite text to assign for lawyer training is Robert Benne’s Good and Bad Ways to Think About Politics and Religion.
Specifically, Benne referred to two kinds of issues: straight-line issues and jagged-line issues. With the first, there is a straight line from core biblical principles to political policy applications. With the second, there is a complex and jagged line.
I would argue, for instance, that there is a direct path from biblical principle to political application with abortion. Abortion is murder, and the Bible commands governments to protect its citizens from murder. The path is that simple.
As an isolated issue, abortion is different than, say, health-care policy. This is more of a jagged-line issue. Christians might bring biblical convictions to bear in a conversation about health-care policy: we should care for the downtrodden, we should treat all people with dignity and respect, we should seek to remove entrenched cycles of injustice and the poverty that follows, we should ensure the insurers and medical practitioners are fair and honest and don’t swindle patients, we should be skeptical of governmental involvement in health care that arguably hurts the quality of care, and so forth. But it’s no easy task to add all these principles together in order to yield the biblical or Christian position. Hence, many Christians would admit that the path from biblical principle to political application is more jagged and unclear.
Broadly speaking, we can say that wisdom helps us determine whether an issue is a straight-line issue or a jagged-line issue. Obviously, it’s not always clear which is which. That’s part of the need for wisdom!
Now, even with a straight-line issue like abortion, questions of political strategy and implementation are significant. Just because we agree abortion is wrong doesn’t determine which is the best legislative or judicial strategy in stopping abortion. One Christian might argue for one strategy and another for another. Even here, then, wisdom is needed. Also, not all issues fall neatly into the straight-line bucket or the jagged-line bucket. There’s a spectrum between the two.
Yet here is why distinguishing between straight-line and jagged-line issues is important: churches and pastors should bind consciences on straight-line issues, while leaving jagged-line issues in the domain of Christian freedom.
The more something is a straight-line issue, the more the church will institutionally address it. Pastors will talk about it from the pulpit, and a church might exercise discipline over it. The more something is a jagged-line issue, the less pastors should lend their pastoral weight to addressing the matter, and Christians on both sides of an issue should be made to feel welcome. Abortion we address. Health-care policy we don’t.
Or think about party membership. Since our church is in Washington, DC, the pastors or elders work especially hard to keep party membership on the jagged side of the spectrum. After all, we want both Republicans and Democrats to get saved. Plus, we don’t think we have the biblical authority or competence to make the complex political calculations about the weight of various issues or the likelihood of certain political outcomes that would be necessary to say membership in this or that party is sin. Party membership remains an area of Christian freedom. But now suppose it’s 1941 and our church is in Germany. I think a pastor would be well within his biblical authority to oppose in a sermon the Nazi Party since it called for complete and idolatrous allegiance to Hitler. And a church would be well within its biblical rights to excommunicate a Nazi Party member. Likewise, a church would be well within its rights to excommunicate a member of the Ku Klux Klan today. In both situations, the biblical issues are so transparent that a church is within its rights to bind consciences.
But let me again make a qualification about pastoral speech. Just because a pastor knows that something is biblically right or wrong on a straight-line issue doesn’t mean he should propose policy solutions. That would be outside his expertise and authority and subject to the wisdom of those with more competence in those areas, whether Christian or not. My own pastor, for instance, is avidly pro-life. But he won’t promote a pro-life march from the pulpit (even though he might participate in one). Standing in the pulpit, he does not want to communicate that Christians, as a matter of conscience, must adopt the political strategy of marches. They might be wise; they might not be. The Bible doesn’t come close to saying, and his authority depends on the Bible. Now, you might disagree with his judgment on marches. That’s fine. I simply want you to see that there are some political matters a church might address through the pulpit or the membership, and there are some that it should not. John F. Kennedy and K. Owen White, at least in the previous statements, sounded as if they were of the opinion that the church shouldn’t address anything. I think that’s too simple.
Most political issues are jagged-line issues. There are only a few topics that we can put on the straight end of the spectrum, specifically, those issues pertaining to life, family, and religious freedom. By “life” I don’t just mean abortion or euthanasia, though those are two examples. I’m primarily talking about the basic call of government in Genesis 9 to preserve the lives of its citizens so that the Cains stop killing the Abels and to establish the basic equality and dignity of all people made in God’s image.
The more unhealthy and rebellious a nation is, the more often we can expect opposition from non-Christians on the straight-line end of the spectrum. Meanwhile, on the jagged-line end of the spectrum, we can expect non-Christians to be quite competent, sometimes even more competent than Christians due to God’s common grace.
WHY DISTINGUISH BETWEEN STRAIGHT- AND JAGGED-LINE ISSUES?
We need to distinguish between straight- and jagged-line issues for the sake of Christian unity and for the sake of our prophetic witness among outsiders.
Christians should unite around straight-line issues while leaving room for Christian freedom around jagged-line issues. Likewise, Christians should press against the culture on straight-line issues for the sake of justice and for loving our non-Christian friends and warning them of the coming judgment of God. Meanwhile, we might argue for our position on any given jagged-line issue, but we should be much slower to unite our position to the name of Christ, as if we’re saying to the world, “This is the Christian view on this topic.”
Again, abortion presents an easy illustration. I will gladly stand on a rooftop and shout, “Jesus hates abortion!” It’s a straight-line issue that the Bible clearly speaks to. I will not, however, do that for my views on inheritance taxes.
I hope you see how crucial it is to maintain these two categories for unity in the church.
So much political dialogue among Christians these days thoughtlessly and divisively treats everything as a straight-line issue. Whether in private conversations among friends or public conversations in the blogosphere, how often do Christians talk as if their position on health care or tax policy or immigration or foreign policy is the only acceptable Christian position, and that all other positions are sin? Wow! Way to raise the stakes and effectively excommunicate everyone who disagrees with you. Way to make your political calculation the standard of God’s own righteousness. When something is clear in the Bible, let’s be explicit and clear. But when the Bible isn’t explicit and clear, let’s leave room for Christian freedom.
On jagged-line issues, yes, make arguments. Attempt to disciple, even persuade. Write articles and books. Questions of justice might be at stake. But remember you don’t have the authority of an apostle. You don’t write Scripture. Therefore, you should be very reluctant to bind the conscience where Scripture does not—to say, “This is the Christian position” or “A Christian must vote this way.” If your church is ready to excommunicate someone for the wrong position, fine, go ahead and say it. But I hope you’ll admit that’s not the case for a lot of issues.
Christian liberty is crucial to church unity. When we speak beyond where Scripture authorizes us to go, we risk dividing the church where the Bible does not, and one day we will have to give an account to King Jesus for that. You’ve heard the saying, “In essentials unity, in nonessentials liberty, in all things charity.” That’s a good rule of thumb.
Also, uniting the name of Christ to our political cause in matters unaddressed by the Bible risks misrepresenting Jesus among non-Christians. It risks claiming that Jesus stands for something he doesn’t stand for. It risks teaching false things about Jesus.
HOW THEN DO WE READ THE BIBLE POLITICALLY?
Let me offer a few comments on reading the Bible politically. It’s so easy to misread.
How many times have you observed a zealous young Christian—wonderfully—try to think biblically about some political issue, say, immigration policy. So he digs back into the Old Testament and discovers God’s words to Israel about showing compassion to foreigners by reminding them they were once also exiles and foreigners. “Ah,” he concludes, “the Bible supports what I want to say about immigration policy.” Does it?
Or suppose a Christian congresswoman reads Proverbs 22:7 in her quiet time—“the borrower is the slave of the lender”—and becomes convicted to advocate for laws that abolish all lending. Would that be a good use of Scripture?
How do we read the Bible politically? Here are a few quick principles.
1. Ask which covenantal audience the author has in mind.
All the Bible is relevant for the church and all humanity in one sense. But it’s a little more complicated than that.
The Bible is structured by covenants, both common and special. And God gave each covenant to a specific group of people. He gave the common covenants to all humanity in common through Adam and Noah. That means Genesis 1 to 11 directly applies to all humanity. He then gave the special covenants to his special people, first through Abraham, Moses, and David, and then through Jesus.
What’s crucial is asking which covenantal audience God had in mind in any given text. All the laws you encounter in Exodus to Deuteronomy, for instance, comprise the Mosaic covenant, which God gave to the people of Israel. It wasn’t given to the Babylonians. It wasn’t given to you and me.
Non-Christians sometimes accuse Christians of applying the Bible selectively because we don’t keep all the obscure Levitical laws, say, concerning shellfish or clothes made out of mixed material. We’re not being inconsistent at all. Those laws belong to the Mosaic covenant, not the new covenant.
What about the Ten Commandments? In fact, they don’t apply directly to us, any more than the Chinese or Russian laws against murder or stealing apply to Americans. The Ten Commandments were explicitly given to the people of Israel. Now, it so happens that nine of the Ten Commandments are repeated in the New Testament (not the Sabbath), suggesting they directly apply to Christians (1 Cor. 10:11). And the commandments against murder, stealing, and lying directly impact a government’s ability to fulfill its Genesis 9:5–6 responsibilities, which belong to all humanity.
A similar principle applies to the New Testament. Jesus said to “love your enemies” and “turn the other cheek.” Does that mean the state should never go to war, or that policemen should never use force? No. Jesus’ intended audience here was members of the new covenant in their relationships with one another.
The wisdom literature, such as Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, are closely related to the creation literature of Genesis 1 to 11, which were for all people. That’s why non-Christians often find them directly applicable.
We always need to pay attention to which audience the Bible has in mind.
2. Ask what the author’s intention is.
Go back to Proverbs 22:7: “the borrower is the slave of the lender.” Was the author’s intention to establish government-housing policy? I don’t think so. His goal was to warn against the sense of enslavement someone in debt will feel, suggesting you might want to avoid it in many circumstances. At the same time, there are surely times when borrowing money is necessary. And a wise government might decide to get involved in various lending practices in order to protect the ones whose circumstances require them to take out loans. So, ask what the author is saying and not saying, and to whom he is saying it.
3. Consider what God has specifically authorized government to do.
In the next chapter, we’ll think specifically about what God has authorized government to do. The answer, we’ll find, is in Genesis 9:5–6, with a useful elaboration in Romans 13 and in historical episodes such as the stories of Joseph and Solomon.
Anytime we’re considering a biblical principle and how it might relate to government, we want to ask the question, has God specifically authorized government to do that? He’s clearly authorized government with the right to render judgment when lives are at stake. Can we build a case for universal health care from that basic principle? Some might say yes; some might say no. We don’t need to answer that question right now, but that’s where the conversation needs to happen.
An important part of thinking about the government’s God-given authority and jurisdiction is recognizing the difference beween prescribing something or proscribing it, supporting it or criminalizing it. As I suggested above, the Bible may not authorize governments to criminalize every form of sin, but nor does it authorize Christians to support laws that positively prescribe or subsidize sin. Thinking through supporting something is fundamentally different from thinking through criminalizing something.
So a Christian might decide not to support the criminalization of gambling or various forms of sexual immorality, believing that God has not authorized us to do so. But such a position is qualitatively different from a decision to establish state lotteries or same-sex marriage. State lotteries positively support and encourage gambling. Same-sex marriage laws positively support and encourage sexual sin through tax breaks and so forth. Yet does God authorize us to support either? I don’t think so.
Which sins has God authorized governments to criminalize? And what activities has he authorized it to support? To answer that we’ll need to consider what God specifically commissions government to do.
And that’s where we turn next.