The Left’s Convenient Scapegoat
The notion that white evangelicals as a group are more desirous of political power than other religious groups is simply a myth. So why all the attention to white evangelicals instead of other politically active religious and non-religious groups? The shock of Trump’s victory in 2016 sent much of the media and academia looking for a scapegoat to explain that electoral win. The high percentage of white evangelicals who supported Trump made them a natural candidate.
Once again, the topic of Christian nationalism is all the rage. It has become on the left what woke is on the right—a way to tar one’s ideological opponents. “Christian nationalism” can mean just about anything negative one wants it to mean. However, before I deconstruct this controversy let me be up front. I think it was a mistake, and not a small amount of hypocrisy, for Christians to support Donald Trump. That mistake is compounded by an almost blind loyalty that many Christians continue to give him. My criticism of how Christian nationalism is used should not be confused with a feeble attempt to defend Christian activism in all its forms.
Furthermore, let me assert that Christian nationalism does exist. I do not know the extent of the problem, but I have seen disturbing comments on social media advocating for a Christian state that treats those of other religions as second-class citizens. Often such individuals also make arguments supporting notions of a white ethnostate. I do not know the extent of such sentiment, and that is part of the problem, but it is a mistake to assume that Christian nationalism is a total myth.
I recently learned that the term Christian nationalism may have emerged in 2006 in a book titled Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism. But it did not get much attention until 2016.
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Chapter One: Believing The Bible
If you are in Christ, I am your brother. One day we will meet in glory and we will both be right and wrong about various firmly held beliefs. Keep your open-hand items and give grace in abundance to those who don’t currently hold your conclusions. Their tertiary beliefs will adjust over time, and so will yours. The Christian life is one of transformation that doesn’t stop until our breathing does. If you are not transforming in any way, you are drifting. And nobody ever drifted their way to holiness.
That sounds a bit presumptuous, doesn’t it? In Christian debate, it is not uncommon to hear someone give reasons why their view is the biblical view, inferring that the opponent is unbiblical. This book opens with a chapter that says that the first step to accepting the supernatural realm as defined by the Bible is to be faithful to what God’s word says. That is true in all things, and allow me to begin by saying that everything the Bible reveals is perceived in its own time. I have read through the Bible several times and each time I come away with insights that I hadn’t considered before.
Accepting the supernatural view is the sort of thing that will challenge some of our notions, and it may need to be accepted gradually. And even as grace can be shown to someone accepting it in smaller bites, grace by those who are more knowledgable than me can be shown to those who are considering it with a healthy amount of skepticism.
In my church tradition, there are “open hand” and “closed hand” beliefs. Closed hand beliefs are those that one must believe if they are to be a Christian. Open hand beliefs are ones that you can hold to, but these are not ones that Christians should use to invalidate the Christianity of others. A closed hand issue would include a belief in the trinity or that Jesus rose bodily from the dead. An open hand issue would include most eschatological views or what mode of baptism is proper. You can believe you are right and your brother in sister is wrong. You can discuss it and debate it together. But it is inappropriate for either of you to declare the other reprobate just because they think that many of the predictions Jesus gave in the Olivet Discourse were fulfilled in the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70.
I say all this to confirm to you that your acceptance of the concepts put forward is not salvific. You may disagree, you may agree but to a different extent. That’s OK. If you are in Christ, I am your brother. One day we will meet in glory and we will both be right and wrong about various firmly held beliefs. Keep your open-hand items and give grace in abundance to those who don’t currently hold your conclusions. Their tertiary beliefs will adjust over time, and so will yours. The Christian life is one of transformation that doesn’t stop until our breathing does. If you are not transforming in any way, you are drifting.
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The Regulative Principle of Worship
Without the regulative principle, we are at the mercy of “worship leaders” and bullying pastors who charge noncompliant worshipers with displeasing God unless they participate according to a certain pattern and manner. To obey when it is a matter of God’s express prescription is true liberty; anything else is bondage and legalism.
What is the regulative principle of worship? Put simply, the regulative principle states that the corporate worship of God is to be founded on specific directives of Scripture. Put another way, it states that nothing ought to be introduced into gathered worship unless there is a specific warrant of Scripture.
Let us be clear: we worship God in “all of life”—when fishing, playing golf, eating breakfast, or driving a car. Paul makes this very clear: “I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect” (Rom. 12:1–2).
Because of this, some have argued that there is no special set of rules for gathered worship. There’s just worship. But this ignores some very important issues. True, there is a regulative principle (a set of general rules) for what we might call “all of life” worship. Everything we do must have in view the glory of God. “So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Cor. 10:31). We might call this a general regulative principle. But is there a more specific application of this principle for gathered worship? The Reformers (John Calvin especially) and the Puritans answered yes. God is especially concerned as to the question of how we worship in public gatherings.
Typical by way of formulation are the words of Calvin: “God disapproves of all modes of worship not expressly sanctioned by his Word,” and the Second London Baptist Confession of 1689: “The acceptable way of worshiping the true God, is instituted by himself, and so limited by his own revealed will, that he may not be worshiped according to the imagination and devices of men, nor the suggestions of Satan, under any visible representations, or any other way not prescribed in the Holy Scriptures.”
The Westminster Assembly
When the Westminster Assembly gathered, its primary directive was to answer this very question. It soon began to address other issues, but it was the issue of worship that dominated its initial agenda. It would later publish a Directory for the Public Worship of God. The term directory is itself important; it is not a Book of Common Prayer as the Anglicans had. They were very clear that the directory functioned in a very different way.
The very first chapter of the Westminster Confession of Faith is about Scripture. It was a way of saying that before we can say anything about God or humanity or sin or the church, or worship, we need some basis of authority. And that sole authority is the Word of God. All of Scripture is a product of God’s outbreathing (2 Tim. 3:16–17). Men spoke as they were driven along by the Holy Spirit (2 Peter 1:21). For the Westminster tradition, then, we begin with Scripture.
It is in this opening chapter on Scripture as the foundation of all knowledge that the regulative principle appears:
The whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for his own glory, man’s salvation, faith and life, is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture: unto which nothing at any time is to be added, whether by new revelations of the Spirit, or traditions of men. Nevertheless, we acknowledge the inward illumination of the Spirit of God to be necessary for the saving understanding of such things as are revealed in the Word: and that there are some circumstances concerning the worship of God, and government of the Church, common to human actions and societies, which are to be ordered by the light of nature, and Christian prudence, according to the general rules of the Word, which are always to be observed. (WCF 1.6)
The point being made is that Scripture lays down certain principles about two particular issues (there are others): the form of church government and public worship. The same principle appears again in the chapter on worship:
The light of nature shows that there is a God, who has lordship and sovereignty over all, is good, and does good unto all, and is therefore to be feared, loved, praised, called upon, trusted in, and served, with all the heart, and with all the soul, and with all the might. But the acceptable way of worshipping the true God is instituted by Himself, and so limited by His own revealed will, that He may not be worshipped according to the imaginations and devices of men, or the suggestions of Satan, under any visible representation, or any other way not prescribed in the holy Scripture. (WCF 21.1)
The point is that Scripture (that is, God Himself, since Scripture is God’s Word) prescribes how we worship God. The word prescribe carries the idea of authority. When you go to the drugstore and you need some medicine that isn’t an “over the counter” drug, you need a prescription—it used to be a piece of paper signed by the doctor (these days it is usually done electronically).
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My Coldest Night and Warmest Truth
People often tell me not to let the death of my brother define me. While I would not have his death be the only thing someone knows about me, it is inevitable that it had changed me. That cold night was one where I experienced something I would not wish on my worst enemy. But there was something else that night.
As Michaela finished up her high school courses, she had to write an essay on an especially significant time in her life. She chose to write about the night her brother died. I asked if I could share it here and she was willing to have me to do so. I hope it will encourage you as it encouraged me.
The night my brother died was a cold one. So cold it was that I refused to go out with my mother for our nightly walk. Instead, we stayed inside with my father. He was sitting on the floor with a bucket of smelly beige paint, while my mom and I were chattering excitedly about my brother’s upcoming trip home with his fiancée.
Then Mom got that text.
I remember her face paling as she stood up, her phone clutched in her hands. My brother had collapsed unexpectedly and inexplicably while he and his friends were playing a game of kickball at college. I remember the panic rising inside me as I watched her pace, calling my dad to come sit on the couch. Hours seemed to pass as we waited. Then my dad’s phone rang. We all stared at my dad’s phone for a moment, the rhythmic ringtone crashing through the silence in a wave of noise. My dad picked up the phone and answered in a trembling voice.
Nick’s heart had stopped, and both the students present and the paramedics had been unable to resuscitate him.
He was dead.
I remember screaming as my dad spat out the words, his shocked voice breaking. I flung myself from the chair I’d been sitting in, my feet carrying me from the living room and into the kitchen before I collapsed on the cold floorboards, begging someone to tell me it wasn’t true. My mother’s equally anguished screams echoed through the hallways as she too ran from the room. Soon after, I crawled back to my father—who sat unmoving on the couch—my entire body shaking. Why, why I wondered as I sobbed, horror buzzing through the air of my small home like an electric current.
“How could God have done this?” I cried. “How could this have been His will?”
When I heard my pastor would be driving to our house, I stood outside in the freezing night air and waited, my shaking arms wrapped around myself to conserve what little warmth I had left. My mother tried to get me to come inside—but I didn’t. The night air was fresh, the sky appearing pitch black and remarkably clear from our home in the city. Our pastor eventually arrived, alarmed to find me standing out in the cold, my breath billowing around me.
“My parents need you.” I croaked when he hugged me tight.
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