Two thoughts occurred to me while I was reading my devotions
this morning. The first was upon reading
Psalm 144, which decries the invasion of foreigners "whose right hands are
deceitful." If God defends us
against such people, the psalmist says, then the nation will prosper. "Blessed is the nation whose God is the
Lord," he finishes.
I sat in bed thinking about that, and I thought, "How
true. If we could keep out the claims of
foreign ideas, not physical foreigners but foreign faiths and unfaiths, then
how much stronger would we be. How much
healthier would we be if we exercised Biblical living, and if we weren't
plagued by the dogmatization of the sinful nature." Once
we were a Christian nation, I thought.
But then I thought about a blog I had just read (Faith and History) which said
that actually, the rights that Jefferson cited came not from Christian
theology, but from John Locke, whose religious beliefs were unstated and whose
political philosophy often flew in the face of orthodoxy and orthopraxy. He believed that government was best based on
the notion of self-interest, not righteousness.
If that is the root of our political practice (not that it hasn't
governed us all along), then we've never really been a Christian nation. We have been a great nation, a nation with a
strong Christian presence and a Christian foundation, but the principles on
which our government is based have been humanist from the beginning. We are another Rome.
Rome, if you believe the Aeneid, was a nation of immigrants
that made itself great. It rose up at
such a time as was proper. It defeated
another empire, one, if you believe Chesterton, with beliefs that could have
destroyed all the good in the world. It
was the gateway for the gospel into Asia, Africa, and Europe. It was a center of learning, and at some
points in its history, a representation of what good government should be. At other points in its history, we see nasty,
glaring injustices like the arenas and massacres of whole peoples. We see that in our own history as well. They as a nation were not Christian. They were not founded on Christian
principles; they did not behave in
Christian manners, even when Christianity was the official religion of the
state. Rome was a humanistic state. God raised it up to accomplish his purposes,
and when those purposes were accomplished, he let it fall. I'm still in the middle of "City of
God," but that's what Augustine reportedly said the Romans of his day who
were watching Rome fall around them, and I imagine it's what he would say to us
today.
So have we ever been a nation whose God is the Lord? Has anyone?
We have had our moments.
Emancipation comes to mind, but even that came at the expense of how
much blood and as a result of how much sin and with how much political
motivation? The history of any nation is
proof of total depravity, really. Even
the good things that we do are not perfect things; they are tainted by everything that preys on
humanity's soul.
I think it's time, and I know I'm not alone in this, for
American Christians to realize that we are no longer the majority, and we can
no longer act like the majority. There has been an "How dare they?"
element in our rhetoric that needs to go away.
We need to speak the truth and defend it as if it weren't common sense,
because it isn't. We need to have reasons, but we also can't be ashamed to say "Because God says so, and I trust Him to make it work." Paul tells us pretty
plainly that the wisdom of God seems like foolishness to the world, even
if the power to recognize it is wired
into our souls. If godly thought and behavior came naturally
to sinful humanity, God wouldn't have had to issue the Law of Moses, let alone
take on human flesh and suffer and overcome death.
No comments:
Post a Comment