The Manhattan Declaration: Only Three Issues?

This Fall, a group of evangelical leaders got together, and on November 20^th, 2009, they issued the Manhattan Declaration. In doing this, they were hoping to call Christians to action regarding what they regarding as some of the top issues that we as Christians must deal with. Before I offer my brief critique, let me give you an idea of what it says. As well, many of my thoughts came from a very well written article that I read recently (read it here). Here is the summery of the declaration, as quoted from their website (Read the whole declaration here):

“Christians, when they have lived up to the highest ideals of their faith, have defended the weak and vulnerable and worked tirelessly to protect and strengthen vital institutions of civil society, beginning with the family.

We are Orthodox, Catholic, and evangelical Christians who have united at this hour to reaffirm fundamental truths about justice and the common good, and to call upon our fellow citizens, believers and non-believers alike, to join us in defending them. These truths are:

· the sanctity of human life

· the dignity of marriage as the conjugal union of husband and wife

· the rights of conscience and religious liberty.

Inasmuch as these truths are foundational to human dignity and the well being of society, they are inviolable and non-negotiable. Because they are increasingly under assault from powerful forces in our culture, we are compelled today to speak out forcefully in their defense, and to commit ourselves to honoring them fully no matter what pressures are brought upon us and our institutions to abandon or compromise them. We make this commitment not as partisans of any political group but as followers of Jesus Christ, the crucified and risen Lord, who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.”

While I do not deny the importance of many of the individual things they bring up, I have to disagree with the statement as a whole, for several reasons. First, they imply that, as Christians in the world today, these are the three big issues. These are the three things that should be on the top of our agenda. But are these really the most important things? As Christians who are called to sacrificially serve and love our world as the Body of Christ, are these what we should be most concerned about? I absolutely think that we must be engaged in our world, not just in a “spiritual” way but also in a real and tangible way. However, I think this must cover a wide and diverse spectrum of justice and love, not just three issues. We see throughout out the entire Biblical narrative that God is deeply concerned about justice and caring for the oppressed, and we must, as Christians in the world today, fight for that, wherever it may be found. We must not place a limit on or rank the issues that are important, especially when they are not explicitly stated in Scripture.

Second, the three things that they see as the top issues, when they unpack them in the Declaration, seem to do much more to support a right-wing political agenda then they do to seek out what the entire Biblical narrative and the history of our faith says should be the most important things for us as Christians. For instance, the first issue they bring up, the sanctity of life, seems to be almost solely about abortion. In the Declaration, four of the five paragraphs under the issue of the sanctity of life speak about abortion, and while the fifth one does manage to bring the issue to others things, it does little more than to list them as an afterthought. And the issue of capital punishment is strangely absent (because of course, the sanctity of life means the sanctity of life that we like. And what did Jesus say about loving our enemies?). If one of the top issues that Christians are to engage in is the protection of life, should it not be all life, wherever life is being threatened? If we are truly going to be pro-life, let us be anti-abortion, anti-capital punishment, and anti-war. I say this as someone that truly believes in the sanctity of life, because I believe that every human being is created in the image of God, and that not one of them is beyond the redemptive love of Jesus. So let us protect all life, and do so in real and tangible ways, not just with how we vote and what we say we believe.

Along that line, the other two issues are brought up in similar ways, with the dignity of marriage speaking to the current gay marriage debate, and the protection of religious liberty speaking to the supposed “war” against Christians and their ability to fight the other two issues. While I fully believe in both the protection of marriage and religious liberty, I disagree again on how narrowly defined these two things are. First, the protection of marriage seems to be solely about fighting gay marriage. Let’s not forget that a majority of divorces in this country occur within Christian marriages. Might we want to pull the log out of our own eye first? I just do not feel, in our broken and hurting world, and the gay marriage debate is one that we need to place at the top of our list, or the top half of any list that we might come up with.

Second, regarding religious freedom, I would agree more with their statement if it did not refer mainly to American Christians freedom to fight the first two issues in whatever way they want. The Declaration speaks of the “devaluing” of religious language in the media, the schools, and society as a whole, and how this is evil and must be fought. This does not seem to be religious liberty as much as an attempt to “Christianize” many of our believed institutions. Many, many places where Christianity has existed have had nothing resembling religious liberty, and Christianity has done just fine. Christianity does not need the endorsement, or even the consent, of a ruling political power to do what it does. In fact, the very nature of the Gospel will often put it in direct conflict with any ruling power, because the values of the Kingdom of God will always conflict with many of the values of any earthly kingdom, even if we attach that word which makes a horrible, horrible adjective: Christian.

Please do not get me wrong. I don’t think that the writers and signers of this Declaration meant something wrong by it, or were trying to simply issue a political document. I truly believe that many, if not most of them, did this based on deep Christian values and experience. And I do agree with some of it. I do believe that there are important things in this world that we as Christians must seek to engage and do so with the knowledge, experience, and values that we have found following Jesus. I just have a problem with narrowing them to such a degree, and failing to fully engage the issues they did include. I believe, and believe more so every day, that the Gospel is truly powerful and transforming for our world, and not simply in spiritual ways, but in deeply real and tangible ways. Let us seek how we might bring this Gospel to our world, and how we might do so not simply as individuals, but as the Body of Christ.

Grace and Love.

Luke

America: Christian Nation?

I just read a tremendous article by Bill McKibben on the idea of America being a “Christian nation,” and how, given the way we often live, it is kind of a paradox (Read the entire article here, it is well worth it). While I have plenty to say about it, I figured I would just quote some of the most poignant points, as he had quite a lot of great things to say. So, here are a few excerpts, and I urge you to read the whole article:

“The gospel is too radical for any culture larger than the Amish to ever come close to realizing; in demanding a departure from selfishness it conflicts with all our current desires.”

“Take Alabama as an example. In 2002, Bob Riley was elected governor of the state, where 90 percent of residents identify themselves as Christians. Riley could safely be called a conservative—right-wing majordomo Grover Norquist gave him a Friend of the Taxpayer Award every year he was in Congress, where he'd never voted for a tax increase. But when he took over Alabama, he found himself administering a tax code that dated to 1901. The richest Alabamians paid 3 percent of their income in taxes, and the poorest paid up to 12 percent; income taxes kicked in if a family of four made $4,600 (even in Mississippi the threshold was $19,000), while out-of-state timber companies paid $1.25 an acre in property taxes. Alabama was forty-eighth in total state and local taxes, and the largest proportion of that income came from sales tax—a super-regressive tax that in some counties reached into double digits. So Riley proposed a tax hike, partly to dig the state out of a fiscal crisis and partly to put more money into the state's school system, routinely ranked near the worst in the nation. He argued that it was Christian duty to look after the poor more carefully. Had the new law passed, the owner of a $250,000 home in Montgomery would have paid $1,432 in property taxes—we're not talking Sweden here. But it didn't pass. It was crushed by a factor of two to one. Sixty-eight percent of the state voted against it—meaning, of course, something like 68 percent of the Christians who voted. The opposition was led, in fact, not just by the state's wealthiest interests but also by the Christian Coalition of Alabama. “You'll find most Alabamians have got a charitable heart,” said John Giles, the group's president. “They just don't want it coming out of their pockets.” On its website, the group argued that taxing the rich at a higher rate than the poor “results in punishing success” and that “when an individual works for their income, that money belongs to the individual.” You might as well just cite chapter and verse from Poor Richard's Almanack. And whatever the ideology, the results are clear. “I'm tired of Alabama being first in things that are bad,” said Governor Riley, “and last in things that are good.”

“It's hard to imagine a con much more audacious than making Christ the front man for a program of tax cuts for the rich or war in Iraq. If some modest part of the 85 percent of us who are Christians woke up to that fact, then the world might change.”

“Similarly, a furor erupted last spring when it emerged that a Colorado jury had consulted the Bible before sentencing a killer to death. Experts debated whether the (Christian) jurors should have used an outside authority in their deliberations, and of course the Christian right saw it as one more sign of a secular society devaluing religion. But a more interesting question would have been why the jurors fixated on Leviticus 24, with its call for an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. They had somehow missed Jesus' explicit refutation in the New Testament: ‘You have heard that it was said, ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also.’

Global Climate Change: Christian Action vs. Scientific Debate

Often the debate over Global Warming has been divisive and brutal. People with strong convictions on both sides passionately argue, and even accuse those on the other side of lying, deception, and political games. The huge underlying question in this debate has not been global warming itself as much as how much our human action has contributed to global climate change. In the last few years, it seems that those who argue that human activity has caused, or at least accelerated, global climate change have been getting the upper hand. Many reports, articles, and papers have seemed to point decisively to a correlation between humans and climate change (see this, this, and this, for a few examples).

The question that I continue to wrestle with is to what degree we, as Christians, are supposed to enter into this debate. I have seen people within the church be some of the most ardent defenders, and attackers, on both sides of this debate. But should this debate, and any evidence that is produced by either side, even matter when it comes to caring for our planet? I just read an awesome article by Greg Boyd (see it here). In it, he questions some of the assumptions made by those who insist that global warming is happening to the degree that many would like to think. However, his point is not really about climate change itself, but rather that, within the Kingdom of God, none of this should really matter. To quote him from the article, “Our commitment to live as good stewards of creation and as good caretakers of the animal kingdom shouldn’t be affected in the least by the state of the ever-changing and usually ambiguous scientific or political debate.”

I think this is very well said. Why should some scientific research tell us what we already know as followers of Christ, namely, that we must care for the world in which we have been created to live on? Whatever the next report says, how we care for creation reflects what we think about its creator. We should seek to end the exploitation and destruction of the plants and animals not because there is a new finding that says our human activity is hurting the world, but because that is what we have been called to do as citizens of this planet and of the Kingdom of God. I want to care for the world that we live on, not because I heard on the evening news that I should, but because as a follower of Christ I have no other option.

Taking Christ out of Christmas, or Putting Him Back In?

It is that time of year again. The air is cold and crisp. The hustle and bustle of the holidays is all around. And those little slogans are appearing on signs and on the lips of people. No, I am not referring to “Happy Holidays” or “Merry Christmas.” I am referring to the “Keep Christ in Christmas” chant that usually begins shortly after Thanksgiving. Many vocal, and probably for the most part well-intentioned, people have made it their duty to decry what they see as the removal of Christ from the holiday that so prominently bears his name. Against the secular tide of holiday cheer they stand their ground, protesting anytime a Christmas tree is taken out of a public place or a simple “Happy Holidays” in muttered instead the proper “Merry Christmas.” Now don’t get me wrong, I love the Christmas season. I think it is a beautiful time for Christians everywhere to celebrate this beautiful and radical and mysterious idea that the God of the universe came down as a little baby, and entered into our human existence. While we are not supposed to just celebrate this a one time of year, I love that at the Christmas season we can come together and remember what God has done through the powerful act of incarnation. However, I have a few problems with the effort that has been put into the “Keep Christ in Christmas” campaign.

First, can anyone really take Christ out of Christmas? If this is a time of year for Christians to celebrate the incarnation and the work of God that has come through that, can people simply take that away? People can choose not to celebrate Christmas, choose to make fun of it, or even choose to fight having anything resembling it in any public place. But again, can they take Christ out Christmas? If your Christ is so easily taken out of Christmas by a few people who have every right not to think about Christmas the same as we do, what Christ are you serving? I believe that this idea of incarnation that we celebrate at the Christmas season, that God radically and decisively broke into our human existence so that humanity, and indeed all of creation, might be redeemed, is powerful enough to be true no matter how we keep Christmas. Also, can we as Christians really expect those who are not a part of our faith to keep the Christmas holiday the same as we do? Yes, the holiday began as a Christian holiday and is still considered one. But if others don’t want to celebrate it like that, who cares? I am serious, why must we make a big stink when those who are not Christian fail to celebrate Christmas like Christians? If we want to keep Christ in Christmas, how about we do our best to follow him this season, and remember what he did, and do our best to live as followers of him. This would involve less talking and more doing, which is usually better when it comes to showing the world our faith.

This leads to my second problem with the fight to “Keep Christ in Christmas,” which is, we would probably do better if we did our best to live in a way that kept Christ in Christmas rather than going out of our way to point out how people outside the faith are failing to do so. This is the season which we so beautifully celebrate the incarnation, so might we try to live a little more incarnationally? What if, instead of putting money and effort into signs and slogans, we put that same money and effort into making sure people around us had food for the holiday season? Or better yet, what if we said no to the soul-killing materialism that plagues the Christmas season and instead provided clothes to people who were cold? I am not saying don’t buy any presents for friends and family, but rather I am imagining what might happen if we kept Christ in Christmas by radically living out his Gospel in our homes and communities? After all, it is not our job as Christians to make sure that the culture around us conforms to our way of living, but rather to, in the midst of the wider culture, live out the Gospel of Jesus. This is what it means to live incarnationally, to be willing to enter in to our culture in a real and tangible way and live out the Gospel so that those around us might see the beauty of Christ.

Please let me say it again. I love Christmas time. I love everything we as Christians get to celebrate this season. So, in the midst of doing so, let us think how we might truly keep Christ in Christmas. As we go about our activities this Christmas season, let us be thinking about how we might live more incarantionally. Let us think how we might tangibly and powerfully live out the Gospel to those around us. Let us think how we might celebrate with, rather than fight against, those who do not hold the same faith we do or the same ideas about Christmas that we do. We must remember that Jesus is far bigger than Christmas or any other human holiday or institution that we might place him in. Christmas is beautiful, but only because we serve a God who is far bigger than Christmas.

Have a wonderful and beautiful Christmas season.

Luke

Tension in Two Kingdoms

"The proper distance from a culture does not take Christians out of that culture. Christians are not the insiders who have taken flight to a new "Christian culture" and become outsiders to their own culture; rather when they have responded to the call of the Gospel they have stepped, as it were, with one foot outside their own culture while the other remaining firmly planted in it. They are distant, and yet they belong . . . distance born out of allegiance to God and God's future. . . . Both distance and belonging are essential. Belonging without distance destroys . . . but distance without belonging isolates." —Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace

Hope: One (Awesome) View

"If one hopes for the sake of Christ in the future of God and the ultimate liberation of the world, he cannot passively wait for this future, and, like the apocalyptic believers, withdraw from the world. Rather he must seek this future, strive for it, and already here be in correspondence to it in the active renewal of life and of the conditions of life, and therefore realize it already here according to the measure of possibilities. Because this future is the future of one God, it is a unique and unifying future. Because it brings eschatological liberation, it is the salvation of the whole enslaved creation. The messianic future for which Christianity arouses hope is no special future for the church or for the soul alone. It is an all-encompassing future. As all-encompassing future, its power of hope is able to mediate faith to earthly needs and to lead it into real life."

-- Jurgen Moltmann

Re-Imagining Church: Acts 2 Style

Imagine with me for a minute. Somewhere in America, in a town that is big, yet small at the same time, there is a church community. At first glance, there is nothing incredibly unique about this community. They meet together on Sundays, they have a diverse group of people, and most of them spend a good deal of their week either at work or with their families. But on closer inspection, you begin to notice a few things. You begin to notice that the people genuinely love each other, and do so during the whole week, not just on Sundays. You notice that they don’t spend a lot of time in “church”, but out in their community, just being a part of it. You notice that, even in the midst of hard financial times, no one among them is wanting for the basic necessities. You notice that they do their best to love their neighbors, both their literal neighbors, as well the Jesus definition of neighbor (which includes, well, everyone). You notice that, because of many of the things above, that people in their community that have no connection to the church look favorably on the church community, whether or not they call themselves “Christians” or even religious, and some also begin to hang out, recognizing that something really good is going on within the community, and they want to be a part of that. You also notice, maybe most amazingly, that these are not crazy people in some fanatical commune, but people with relatively normal lives, families, jobs, and lifestyles.

This imagined idea of a church community grew in me as I thought about the small yet powerful section in Acts 2:42-47. Here (as well as elsewhere in Acts and the letters of Paul) we get a vision of the early church community, a vision that is still powerful today because of the reality of the Gospel. As people who desire to live out this gospel that Jesus left us, how do we go about it, especially when it seems that the church as a whole seems to fight and squabble about it? Jesus, when he departed, did not leave a handbook on how to structure the church community, nor did he leave a “to-do” list. What he left was the Gospel, a way of living within the Kingdom of God, which he himself had lived out among them. He also left his Spirit to guide the church. I think it is beautiful that the early church community was not an institution that was left by Jesus, but a community of people empowered by both the Gospel vision of Jesus and the power of the Holy Spirit. With these two things, they were able to imagine and dream and live out the Gospel in a mighty and powerful way.

Now, some have argued that the church today must get back to the early church model, and do everything just like they did. The church today has gone too far away from this, they say, and in order for the church to survive, we must do exactly what the church in Acts was doing. I do agree that the church today does need to rethink some of its practices and beliefs, and that there are certain things that would do good to change. However, I also recognize that we live in a different time then the people in the book of Acts, and have completely different lifestyles and worldviews then they did. In this way, I feel that the book of Acts is not a manual for how to do church, but rather a glimpse into a beautiful, Spirit-filled community of the first century that is figuring out how to live out the Gospel with which they have been given within their communities. Thus we can read the book of Acts as a beautiful, true, and powerful story about the growth of the church, and rather than follow it word for word, use it to re-imagine what that same thing might look like in our own day.

So what might this look like in regards to Acts 2:42-47? Let us briefly begin a walk through this narrative, and re-imagine how the truth and beauty of this story might guide us today and we re-imagine how to live the Gospel of Jesus out in our world and in our church communities, using the first verse from this narrative:

“They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer”

This really shows that the church was all about four things: Learning together, being together, eating together, and praying together. First, they were willing to sit under the apostles and learn together. They recognized that there were those within their community that had been with Jesus and had learned a bunch through those experiences, and wanted to learn from them. Today, we don’t exactly have anyone that walked on this earth with Jesus, but we do have people in our communities, both those who have chosen to study and learn in order to serve the church, and those who have amazing experiences that are beautiful and transforming, who can serve the church through their instruction and teaching. At the same time, it is always important to remember that those who serve the church in this way are simply a part of the Body of Christ, and not somehow different or more important than those who feed their neighbors or serve with the kids ministry. Second, they devoted themselves to the fellowship, the church community. This was not a collective group of individuals that went and did their own thing, but a group with a community identity, that was devoted to each other. I think it is so important to re-imagine church at this point, because we live is a culture of rampant individualism. We have a tendency to be devoted to ourselves first, and our church communities second. It is so important that our church communities are not simply places we go on Sunday, but a group of people that is devoted to one another. This is much harder today, with our varied and scattered lives and jobs, but in is no less important, and something that we must fight for and learn how to do better. Third, they devoted themselves to the breaking of bread. They ate together. Something that was a normal part of their everyday lives (if they weren’t living in poverty) had now become an important part of their community. Church for them did not seem to be a service once a week, but connected even to the most regular daily activities. Re-imagining this for today, we might look at how we view church during our week. Is it something we “attend” once or twice a week, or is it something that is intimately connected to our everyday lives, even the most mundane parts? Eating together can be powerful, as it connects our physical sustenance with the Body of Christ. How might we re-imagine this in other ways today? Fourth, they prayed together. Prayer is also something that, for the most part, has been moved to the realm of the individual. Sure, we pray in church, but often it is quite short and repetitive. How might we re-imagine this? Let’s recognize the power that comes with communal prayer that comes out of a community seeking God. I am not sure how prayer works or affects God, and I am skeptical of anyone that says they do, but the biblical narrative, as well as my experience, say that people praying together can be powerful. I think an awesome way we can begin to re-imagine church is to recognize that the people of God praying as a Body can be so much more powerful than all of our models and formulas for how we can do church better.

I hope that this brief example was helping in explaining what I mean by re-imagine. I know that it was not complete in every way, and that much more might be said about many of the things that came up in that first verse regarding how we do church. Some might even say that I went too far with some of what I said, wondering were I got some of the things I was talking about, as they clearly were not in that verse, or even in Acts. That all brings us back to what I was saying before. I think it is so important to view Acts not as a formula to follow or a checklist to accomplish, but as a story of people who experience God in a powerful way and, with the powerful of the Holy Spirit, went about living in that reality. And through this story, those of us in the Body of Christ today can learn from the beautiful, messy story in Acts to re-imagine how we might live as the church today. This is not going to be easy. Yet, as people empowered with the gospel and living in our crazy and awesome world, it is so important.