Particularism, or making absolute what God has left relative, Part 2

Os Guiness writes in his book The Call that the church needs to be careful not to “make absolute what God has left relative,” just as it must not “make relative what God has declared absolute.”  While we can say that a particular course of action is not Christian, we cannot say that there is, for example, only one Christian way to raise a family, write poetry, run an economy or be involved politically.

For those of us who are politically partisan, it is necessary to remember that much as politics should be influenced by our faith, we should not make absolute what God has left relative, just as we should not attempt to make relative what God has declared absolute.

It should also make us a bit concerned when we see someone declaring, as I quoted in my previous post,

Young people want nothing to do with The United Methodist Church because they see us for what we truly are: An outmoded religious body whose primary concern – how to perpetuate our own institution – is completely irrelevant to what young people need and want for spiritual nurture that aims to relieve the world’s suffering.

Have we reduced the Church to a social program that seeks to be “relevant,” to give young people what they “need and want for for spiritual nurture that aims to relieve the world’s suffering?”  If our aim is simply “to relieve the world’s suffering,” then perhaps the United Methodist Church is an “outmoded religious body”–after all, there are plenty of secular non-governmental organizations that purport to do the same, without all of that talk, so integral to the Christian faith, of “taking up our cross and following Him.”

But if there is more to life than simply the relief of physical suffering, then perhaps we still have something to offer that a secular NGO simply cannot–the living God, whose fellowship is found among those who claim to follow Christ in all aspects of life, and not simply the social-justice aspects.

Particularism, or making absolute what God has left relative

There has been a lot of visibility for Rachel Held Evans’ article “Why Millenials Are Leaving the Church.”  In it, the post-evangelical Evans argues that many of my generation are leaving the church because it doesn’t welcome gays and lesbians enough, doesn’t care enough about immigration reform, cares too much about sex in general, cares too much about abortion ; in short, because it is not politically liberal enough.  There have been a number of good critiques of the assumptions and conclusions of this article, and I do not want to rehash these.

UM Insight’s Cynthia Astle wrote an article in a similar vein entitled “Dear Bishops: Get Real!”  She writes in response to the bishops’ lament on the decline of member rolls and under-35 clergy that the reason for this is

“Young people want nothing to do with The United Methodist Church because they see us for what we truly are: An outmoded religious body whose primary concern – how to perpetuate our own institution – is completely irrelevant to what young people need and want for spiritual nurture that aims to relieve the world’s suffering.”

What follows is a four-point critique that the United Methodist Church is not doing enough on anthropogenic global warming or immigration reform, and that we are not doing enough to stop “economic injustice” and “community erosion.”  When several people replied to point out that what she has listed are simply liberal political causes (with the exception of “community erosion”), her reply is a variation on “take it up with God, because this is what he said we’re supposed to do.”

Ignoring the glaring omission of the gospel in her argument, and the assumptions of the exclusive validity of her four causes, it’s hard to deny that justice is God’s concern, and that God calls us to do justly.  But how does the Bible say that we should go about reforming society to be more just?  Does it say that we are to use the instruments of state to coerce compliance with a particular political agenda, or is the call for each one of us individually?  Do we enact social reform from the top down (i.e., from the organs of society to the individual) or from the bottom up (i.e., from the individual to society)?

Given that the Bible speaks to the church rather than society, proclaiming what the church is to do rather than what the world is to do, should we be so quick to push for the church to tie itself exclusively to one political ideology?

Following Jesus entails political commitments.  It means setting yourself under the authority of the Triune God who revealed himself in the Bible; it means doing, as an individual, what God has commanded.  But does it mean leveraging the tools of state to coerce behavior that is virtuous in the eyes of the leveraging party?

C.S. Lewis wrote in God in the Dock, “Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victim may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.  The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

At what point are we “doing what Jesus told us to do” and at what point do we become moral busybodies, intent on employing external persuasions to bring about virtuous behavior when what is needed is virtuous behavior coming from a changed heart and the internal conviction of the Holy Spirit?  For that matter, since God looks at the heart (1 Samuel 16:7), is virtue any virtue if it’s only external?