http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/15595258/does-god-or-satan-send-affliction

Audio Transcript

And we’re back again for another week and for another Fourth of July on the podcast. I think it’s the fourth time an episode has landed square on the holiday — at least our fourth. So happy Independence Day for those of you here in the States. If the inbox is any indicator, questions over politics, patriotism, and the pulpit are perennial concerns. When better to broach the topic than on a day like today?

Jamison, a pastor in Virginia, writes in to ask this: “Pastor John, hello and thank you for this podcast! I admire your approach to politics and patriotism. You seem to be very careful here. Even when the heat is turned up in election times, and pastors feel social pressure to endorse specific candidates, you notoriously refrain from participating. As you have watched this impulse in American Christian life for many decades, this impulse among Christian leaders to periodically endorse candidates and to get involved in politics, what observations have you drawn from your decades of refraining?”

Maybe the most important or helpful thing that I can do in response to this question is to point to passages of Scripture that capture the emphasis I think is needed, not just in the American church, but in the global church, the church around the world. Because the tendency to confuse and combine Christian identity and its earthly expression, the church, with political identity, ethnic identity, national identity, or any other earthly identity — that conflating tendency is so strong, and I think so destructive to the radical call of the gospel, that it needs steadfast resistance generation after generation.

Christian Identity in a Politicized World

So my burden is to join forces with the Bible (as I understand it), and millions of faithful Christians, to encourage and nurture a faithful Christian identity that will survive and thrive with faith and hope and joy and love and purity, whether America survives, or Brazil survives, or Britain survives, or China survives, or Russia survives, or India survives — or not.

So let me point to six kinds of passages that shaped my passions in that direction.

1. Not of This World

Jesus said to Pilate, “My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting, that I might not be delivered over to the Jews. But my kingdom is not from the world” (John 18:36). From which I infer that we’d better be very, very careful before we undertake any processes that involve force or coercion to put the kingdom of Christ in place. Any identity that we can put in place by force or weapon or law is not the kingdom of Christ. In this age, King Jesus is creating a people a very different way. That’s number one.

2. Hidden with Christ

Paul said in Colossians 1:13, “[God] has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son.” And again,

If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory. (Colossians 3:1–4)

“Our most fundamental and defining identity and location is the kingdom of Christ, not any kingdom on earth.”

So our most fundamental and defining identity and location is the kingdom of Christ, not any kingdom on earth. It is the right hand of God, not the right hand of any earthly power. Our most essential life is Christ, and only when he comes will we be openly known for who we really are.

3. Citizens of Heaven

Philippians 3:20–21:

Our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself.

So no earthly citizenship, whether American or Russian or Chinese, has any ultimate allegiance over those who are in Christ Jesus. Our political allegiances are to Jesus. No party, no nation, no ethnicity, no ideology has any ultimate claim on us. Our decisive constitution is the word of God, and no human document.

4. Chosen Race, Holy Nation

Peter says in 1 Peter 2:9, “You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.” These are ethnically and politically shattering words. Born-again Christians, real Christians, are a chosen race (genos eklekton), a holy nation (ethnos hagion). The kind of human we are and the kind of nation we belong to is not any longer our essential identity. We are a new kind, a new nation. None of the existing human realities, ethnic or national, is God’s chosen and holy people. Christians are a new thing, a new reality, a new people, a new nation, a new ethnicity and race. And we should bear witness to it.

5. Resident Aliens on Earth

Therefore, Peter says in 1 Peter 2:11, “Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul.” Christians are not first Americans, or Canadians, or British, or Russians, or Nigerians. In every nation, we are exiles. Let that sink in. I want to scream that from the top of the buildings to every nationalistic tendency. In every nation, we are exiles.

Jesus said, “If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you” (John 15:19). If you are going to run for office, be sure to inform your constituency that you are a resident alien. Your primary citizenship and allegiance are the kingdom of Christ.

6. Servants of God

Peter said in 1 Peter 2:13–16,

Be subject for the Lord’s sake to every human institution, whether it be to the emperor as supreme, or to governors as sent by him to punish those who do evil and to praise those who do good. For this is the will of God, that by doing good you should put to silence the ignorance of foolish people. Live as people who are free, not using your freedom as a cover-up for evil, but living as servants of God.

“We belong to God. We are slaves of God, not any man. We are his servants. He owns us. We do his bidding.”

In other words, realize as Christians that you are free — free from emperors, free from governors, free from presidents, free from worldly powers and parties. We belong to God. We are slaves of God, not any man. We are his servants. He owns us. We do his bidding. And when the human state tells us to pay our taxes and keep the speed limit and shovel the snow off of our sidewalks, we do it, not because the state is our authority, but because God is. We submit for his sake and in his limits.

7. People from All Nations

Jesus said in Matthew 28:19–20,

Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.

Now that does not mean, “Go and turn pagan cultures into whitewashed tombs with the paint of so-called ‘Christian’ externals.” We know that. We know it doesn’t mean that, because Jesus defines “discipling nations” — which is the neuter plural Greek word ethne, “nations” — by “baptizing and teaching them,” and the “them” is masculine plural. That’s crucial. You don’t disciple political entities. You don’t disciple ethnic corporate realities. You disciple “them” — autous, plural in Greek — people that you can baptize.

In other words, our job is to so magnify Jesus and his saving work, among all the peoples of the world, that individual human beings are brought from death to life and formed into the image of Christ. In every race, ethnicity, nation, this new people, this chosen race, this holy nation among all the nations are to let our light so shine before others that they may see our good works and give glory to our Father who is in heaven (Matthew 5:16). “Keep your conduct among the Gentiles honorable, so that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day of visitation” (1 Peter 2:12).

You Don’t Need to Know It All

Now I have no illusions, Tony, that until Jesus comes, Christians will ever agree on precisely what it looks like in professional life, and political life, and cultural life for the church to be the kingdom of Christ — a kingdom, Jesus says, that’s not of this world.

But my encouragement to pastors is that you don’t need to figure that out. You don’t need to figure that out for all of your amazingly diverse people invested in a thousand ways, in all kinds of cultural and professional and political endeavors. You don’t need to be the expert to figure all that out. We’re not smart enough. Speak these biblical truths and others that you see as relevant from Scripture. Call your people to radical allegiance to King Jesus. Set them on a quest of lifelong learning, and trust the Spirit of God in their lives.

I love being a Christian.

I mean, I love Jesus, but I love all the rest of it too: brunch after church with friends and hylomorphism and late-night Eucharist on Christmas Eve and C.S. Lewis and John Donne and Charles De Koninck. I love Durham Cathedral and the Aksum Empire and Neoplatonism and canon law and candles and martyrs who chose death over denial and countless little communes of monks and Anabaptists and Puritans and Methodists and charismatics who read Acts 2 and 4 and decided to just go ahead and do it.

I love knowing that nothing good will be lost and there are no ordinary people and death has been killed. I love sacred Scripture mysteriously breathed by God through the words of men and that our God and King gave us his body to eat and his blood to drink.

And I also think it’s true, so there’s that.

But there have been times I have found belief to be almost unbearable. And I’ve met enough people who have shared this particular difficulty that my story might be worth sharing.

Walk Away, or Pray for Faith

I was baptized at 16, but didn’t become serious about following Jesus until grad school. And then for the next decade or so, I went through . . . call them “crises.” Times I couldn’t stop thinking, obsessively ruminating on certain things — two in particular.

First: If Calvinism was right, as I then understood it, how could I understand that God is good? Second: How can I live in a world where people I love may be going to hell?

These circling thoughts left me exhausted over my own attempts to make sense of everything, and with a grief-fueled nostalgia for the time when, as a secular person, I didn’t worry about any of this stuff. I felt alienated from non-Christians and even from Christians who didn’t share my intensity and anguish.

During some of my worst moments, I felt like I was presented with a choice: you can cease believing, or you can pray for faith. Ceasing to believe didn’t feel like a choice that would change reality. It felt like choosing to somehow sit on the sidelines, to become a non-player character. Yet apostasy did seem to offer me the psychological comfort of escape.

I prayed for faith.

Obsessive Moral Threats

I’m not sure when I first heard the word scrupulosity. At some point, I probably googled “religious OCD,” which is more or less what it is. And I was very familiar with OCD.

Around age 12, I was diagnosed with “obsessive-compulsive disorder.” If you’re unfamiliar with OCD, it makes threats that feel moral. You feel like you’re both morally wrong and physically unsafe, and what will put you morally and physically right again is obsessively performing various rituals (you’ve heard them: handwashing, not stepping on cracks, etc.). Often, what you care about most is what the disorder “chooses” to threaten you about: “wash your hands just right or your child will die, and it will be your fault.” That kind of thing.

Most people with this disorder are not delusional. They know the threat isn’t real, that it’s irrational, which often makes the disorder profoundly embarrassing. “Don’t mind me, just going to, um . . . wash my hands seven times and then turn off the tap with the backs of my hands, because . . . well, you go ahead and start dinner.”

I ended up receiving various kinds of treatments (medication, cognitive behavioral therapy), which helped enormously. And by the time I was out of high school, my OCD was pretty much dealt with. It proved to be a weird blessing in my life to have experienced this before my adult conversion, unrelated to Christianity.

After college, I started spending time with people who actually believed that Jesus was not at all dead. And then I found that I actually believed that too. And the stakes in life suddenly became much higher.

Enter Scrupulosity

Conversion is always disorienting. But God gave me time to work through the normal confusions of new Christianity: the sense that there is nothing one can hold back; the realization that God makes no guarantees that you won’t, for example, eventually be martyred; all the normal pricks of an awakened conscience; all the joy and amazement that first Christmas when the carols you’ve sung your whole life suddenly come alive and blaze with glory.

Then, sometime within the first two years, I had my first major bout of scrupulosity.

Like OCD, scrupulosity produces an irrational sense that one is in profound danger and has a bad conscience. It’s confusing because it can overlap with one’s “real conscience” and real fear of hell, but it’s distinct enough to recognize once you get to know it. I could discern something “off” about it. It wasn’t “what reality is like,” “what being a sinner and having a bad conscience is like,” or “what Christianity is like.”

Being curious by nature, and also a nerd when it comes to history and historical theology, I started digging and discovered that scrupulosity is a spiritual malady that has caused pastors to say, “Oy, not this again,” for about two thousand years. It’s also a neurological, OCD-related condition that can be treated on that basis. In fact, confessors, spiritual directors, and pastors have been using tools similar to cognitive behavioral therapy for a good portion of church history — long before medications provided additional treatment options.

Christians’ Doubting Disease

There are two pretty distinct versions of scrupulosity. There’s the one that resembles “classic” OCD, which leads sufferers to obsessively perform rituals, like prayer (“If I don’t say these exact words with exactly the right feelings, they won’t count”) or confession (Luther’s poor confessor!) in order to feel like they’ve gotten it “right.” And then there’s the delightful experience of repetitive, racing thoughts, obsessively ruminating over theological questions, which one feels like one must resolve in order to be at peace. Neither makes for a particularly good time. But in my experience, the ruminations are the real bear.

OCD has been called the “doubting disease.” Did I really lock the door? I think I did. I remember doing it. But if I did, why do I doubt so profoundly that I did? Why do I feel in danger? Better check. In other words, subjective uncertainty presents itself as something to pay attention to, something that gives good information.

Now imagine how difficult it might be for those dealing with this disorder to evaluate their subjective assurance of salvation, which in some Christian traditions has been viewed as a necessary mark of true salvation. If one must sit on the “anxious bench” until one receives assurance, a person with an unaddressed scrupulosity disorder can sit there for a long, long time.

As I said earlier, questions I found myself obsessively ruminating over included “Does God want everyone to be saved?” “How can I trust that he wants me to be saved?” The questions can get very refined indeed: “If Calvinistic monergism is true, is God good? Is ‘good’ meant equivocally or analogically when we predicate it of God? Are you sure? But are you sure? How about ‘love’? Better think about this for five hours in the middle of the night to try to solve it.” My scrupulosity demanded that I give attention to these subjective uncertainties until I had subjective certainty, the kind that doesn’t come like that. And during the darkest seasons of such ruminating, I was tempted with apostasy as a palliative for my psychological pain.

But I prayed for faith.

Living with a Trustworthy God

I know this might sound simplistic at first, but one of the most helpful things for me has been simply learning to trust God more. I don’t mean “trusting God” as some immediate mental choice in moments of struggle, though it is that too. Rather, I just mean living with him as my King for longer, and learning that he is trustworthy and that I don’t need to get answers to all my theological questions before I am able to rest in that.

“God’s character is one thing we do not need to doubt.”

In non-religious OCD, one learns to talk back to one’s mind: “Yes, I know you are subjectively uncertain, but that has nothing to do with reality.” As a Christian with religious scrupulosity, I do the same. And more, I’ve learned to get out of my own head. I have a kind of mental box, Susannah’s Big Box of Unanswered Theological Questions. I’ve found it incredibly helpful to realize it’s okay to have such a box, and that there will be items in it until I see God face to face, and probably afterward. The fact that we don’t see how all the data points of Scripture and experience and tradition fit rationally together should not for a moment cause us to discount the data points we do have about God’s character. His character is one thing we do not need to doubt.

In my worst episodes, I didn’t really doubt the truth of the Scriptures. In a sense, that was part of the problem: scary passages felt like chains binding me, guns pointed at my head. But it also meant I could hang on to the passages of God’s unequivocal grace. “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). “The Lord is good to all; he has compassion on all he has made” (Psalm 145:9). There is nothing original that I can offer here: these are uncompromising promises about God’s character and his love of each of us, and of those we love. I held on to these white-knuckled. And then, gradually, I realized that I didn’t need to hold on that tightly, because I was being held.

Out of the Pit

If you’re wondering whether you or someone you know might be suffering with scrupulosity, it can really help, first, to know that it is a thing. It’s a real neurological disorder, and there are many online resources available from credible medical and Christian ministry sources to begin understanding how it works and how to pursue diagnosis and treatment. It’s also an old thing. I found help reading memoirs and anecdotes of saints from the past who have suffered very similar experiences, like St. Therese of Lisieux, St. Ignatius, or John Bunyan.

“When your own thoughts are a trap, you cannot just think your way out of it. You need the help of others.”

It’s also important that you don’t attempt to figure it out alone. Doubt, anxiety, and fear are common human maladies (Philippians 4:6–7; Hebrews 13:6; James 1:5–8). And of course, some anxiety is good (2 Corinthians 11:28), and some fears are real (Luke 12:5). We all fall somewhere on a spectrum with many kinds of mental distress, so discerning what’s “normal” and “abnormal” can be tricky. A good place to start is talking with your pastor, if possible, and/or trusted, wise counselors (particularly those with some familiarity with scrupulosity). When your own thoughts are a trap, you cannot just think your way out of it. You need the help of others, ideally professionals.

And if you feel tormented by scrupulosity’s obsessive ruminations, and tempted by the psychological comfort that apostasy seems to offer: take the leap. In the face of that choice, pray for the grace of faith to be given to you in abundance. And then throw the whole kit and caboodle, every means of grace, at this thing: prayer, Scripture, saints around you, ancient saints, SSRIs, cognitive behavioral therapy, all of it.

I also say this: dare to hope that you will be okay again one day, that you will again find “joy and peace in believing” (Romans 15:13). God, as it happens, is patient. He is also analogically, though not univocally, good and loving. And the ways in which his patience and goodness and love are not univocally identical to ours, his are more so. Always more, not less.