Rather than focusing on Christ’s death, burial and resurrection as testified by a multitude of reliable witnesses and written in advance throughout the Scriptures, many Christians today have chosen to proclaim a different gospel entirely. This new and improved gospel is The Story of Us. This story is one that is perceived to be much more credible and effective than the story of Jesus, because, unlike the story of Jesus, it can’t be refuted. 

In her book, Spirituality for Dummies, Sharon Janis writes, “In a nutshell, spirituality relates to your own personal experience and relationship with the divine…Dogma can muddy the waters of a spiritual path.”1 Similarly, in his book Conversations with God, Neale Donald Walsch writes that “leaders, ministers, books, and even the Bible itself are not authoritative sources.” In fact, he claims that God specifically directs us to, “Listen to your feelings…Listen to your experience. Whenever any one of these differ from what you’ve been told by your teachers, or read in your books, forget the words. Words are the least reliable purveyor of truth.”2 Madonna apparently agrees with this advice. In her song, “Bedtime Story,” she sings, “Words are useless, especially sentences. They don’t stand for anything. How could they explain how I feel?”
Of course, if words are so useless and unreliable, perhaps we could ask why Madonna and Neale Donald Walsh felt compelled to use so many of them. But the more important question to ask is why so many people in our day are attracted to the view that feelings and experiences are more important than words and ideas. Taken to the extreme, this is actually a recipe for anarchy. As just one example, if the words of various “traffic laws” begin to be thought of as “useless” and drivers end up focusing more on their own internal feelings (such as “the need for speed”), then a simple trip to the grocery store will increasingly become hazardous to your health.
The preference for feelings and experiences over words and ideas is ubiquitous in our day, even in the sphere of American Christianity. Doctrine is presented as cold, dull, and divisive—what we really need is an authentic “personal relationship with Jesus.” Unfortunately, few seem to have noticed how similar this is to the “spiritual-but-not-religious” approach of writers like Sharon Janis and Neale Donald Walsch. At the end of the day, spirituality relates to our own personal experience, which is why it holds our interest. Dogma, on the other hand, is rooted in the beliefs and ideas of other people, which is inherently more complicated and definitely less captivating.
If you think about it, those who suggest that doctrine is cold, or that “dogma muddies the water of true spirituality” are actually guilty of spreading their own doctrines and dogmas. Curiously, it’s a kind of “anti-dogmatic” dogma, but at the end of the day, it’s dogma just the same—words and ideas are being employed in order to affect the way we think. So while it’s common to hear, even in conservative Christian circles that “true Christianity isn’t a bunch of doctrines, it’s a personal relationship with Jesus,” perhaps we should follow up that assertion with a few questions, such as: “Who is Jesus?” “Was he a man, an angel, or God incarnate?” “Is he still alive?” “Did he actually atone for sin or not?” All these doctrinal questions simply can’t be avoided.
Nearly a century ago, J. Gresham Machen observed that “What many men despise today as ‘doctrine’ the New Testament calls the gospel.”3 His point was that the gospel, which lies at the very heart of our faith, is itself an announcement of a particular set of facts. In fact, the word “gospel” (Gk. euangelion) simply refers to the announcement or proclamation of “good news.” Paul famously gives a succinct summary of the gospel message in 1st Corinthians 15:
I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, 2 and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word that I preached to you—otherwise you believed in vain. 3 For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, 4 that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, 5 and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. 6 Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. 7 Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. 8 Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me… 14 And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain.
We should pay close attention to the specific “words” and “sentences” employed in this important passage, since it happens to convey the beliefs and ideas of the earliest Christians. Specifically, Paul decided to unpack the main tenets of the gospel, which he calls the thing of “first importance.” He’s not attempting to generate religious experiences or to inspire certain feelings but is simply reminding the Corinthians of a particular series of events that had recently transpired. These events had to do with Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection, which had been announced centuries in advance throughout the Hebrew Scriptures. And he concludes by saying that if Christ was not actually raised from the dead, then Christianity is a waste of time—“your faith is in vain.”
So, according to the very clear words of 1st Corinthians 15, Paul didn’t think of the gospel as a spiritual tool for lifting you up when life gets you down. He didn’t provide us with tips and instructions to deepen our relationship with the divine or suggest that we follow our hearts wherever they happen to lead us. No, the thing of first importance was that Jesus died for our sins, that he died and was buried, and that he rose again on the third day, in accordance with the Scriptures. And, of course, all this is dogma.
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My family occasionally attended a local Nazarene church, and it was at their Vacation Bible School in 1980 that I first responded to the Gospel and committed my young heart to Jesus. But our participation in the life of the church was uneven, and I did not grow up in the conventionally Christian home that my own children would come to know decades later.

You’re getting to know some new Christian friends at a small group you just started attending. People are trading testimonies of how they came to faith. The next guy’s up, and he starts with, “I was raised in a Christian home.” Well, now you know it’s gonna get good. The false starts, the flimsy profession in adolescence, the hypocritical teen years filled with make-out sessions and secular music, the slide into the organized crime underworld by age 22, repentance and true faith at 27 to the tearful strains of Love Comes True—it’s all going to be there.
Well, that’s not me. Growing up, my mother was a believer—I think she was converted when I was a preschooler—and my dad took some years of his early adulthood to come to terms with the reality that the faithful Lutheranism of his upbringing was not his own. My family occasionally attended a local Nazarene church, and it was at their Vacation Bible School in 1980 that I first responded to the Gospel and committed my young heart to Jesus. But our participation in the life of the church was uneven, and I did not grow up in the conventionally Christian home that my own children would come to know decades later.
That little boy responded to his new faith by wanting to read his Bible, which was regrettably a verse-per-paragraph King James edition. Mom encouraged me in my faith, discipling me into the moderately fundamentalist Dispensationalism that, in the early 80s, had not yet begun its eventual decline. I recall enthusiastically reading Hal Lindsey and Salem Kirban and unironically consuming Chick Tracts. But tell me when God has ever been pleased not to allow his church to be, in some parts, a gloriously redeemed tire fire.
My family didn’t hold together. Substance abuse, mental illness, and a crumbling marriage culminated in my parents getting divorced in 1990—and me getting married that same year. My new wife and I promptly left our homes in Colorado and moved to Central Florida for college and a new life together away from our difficult families of origin. Church had not been a meaningful part of our lives in our teen years, and was also absent from the first year of our marriage. On a random August day in 1991, my wife pointed out a Nazarene church right next to the university, and said, “Wasn’t that the kind of church your family used to go to? We should visit there.”
We did. She was converted several weeks later, and my faith, which had been asleep, slowly woke back up over the coming months. We were loved and discipled by the healthy, caring brothers and sisters there—some of whom remain friends 30 years later. I discovered I had a mind for theology, and tried to understand what everyone meant by “Wesleyan Arminianism” and why this “Calvinism” thing I heard about was so bad. “Calvinism” was a system affirmed by “Baptists,” whose primary tenet was the pernicious “Once Saved, Always Saved” doctrine that could never possibly lead to holy living.
We attended the “College and Career” Sunday School class taught by a member of the church board who was around my father’s age. He and his wife took an interest in us and invested in us, as committed middle-aged folks tend to do with young couples in the church.
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Written by Ben C. Dunson |
Friday, July 21, 2023
Four unique ways in which Proverbs provides wisdom for political rule: 1) the way in which good government–contrary to the liberal dream of moral neutrality–is wise government, 2) the nature of true social justice, 3) the nature of a virtuous, healthy nation and what is necessary to maintain it, and 4) the necessary moral competency of rulers at all levels of government.

Yoram Hazony has risen to prominence as a political philosopher and commentator. My first encounter with him, however, was through his book God and Politics in Esther, which is a fascinating reading of the biblical book of Esther. Most Christian interpretations of Esther (that I am familiar with anyway) would see the central theme of the book as God’s hidden providence: God’s name does not appear, and yet the circumstances that lead to Esther’s triumph over the enemies of God’s people are nothing short of miraculous.
Hazony, however, takes a very different approach. He contends that Esther seems
to bypass issues of theology and religious observance to cope with the more burning issue of the actual physical survival of the Jews. For this reason, the book of Esther deals first and foremost with the problem of a Jewish politics in exile: how the Jews, deprived of every sovereign institution of power, may nevertheless participate in, and in the last resort make use of, the authority of an alien government to ensure their own vital interests, and in this case their lives. Esther offers its readers a choice between two antithetical conditions – the one being a nightmare of impotence . . . and the other, in which Mordechai the Jew rises to a position of great power with the ability to act in defense of the Jews . . . The nature of this utterly political choice – and how it is to be made in practice – is the principal concern and teaching of the book of Esther. (p. 3)
I think the hidden providence of God is a more important theme in Esther than Hazony does. However, his approach to the book sparked my interest and got me wondering what it might look like to study other books of the Bible to see what could be gleaned from them regarding political action.
In this article, I will focus on Proverbs. I do this because Proverbs often explicitly addresses what we would today call politics: many of its aphorisms are unambiguously about what governing officials should be like and how they must rule. In doing so it addresses politics at its most basic and fundamental level.
This may initially strike readers as a strange thing to say. More often than not Proverbs is read by Christians as a series of isolated wisdom statements meant to illuminate the path of their own personal piety. The book is read, in other words, individualistically.
The opening verses of the book (1:1–2), however, point us in a very different direction:
The proverbs of Solomon, son of David, king of Israel: To know wisdom and instruction, to understand words of insight, to receive instruction in wise dealing, in righteousness, justice, and equity . . . .
Two things stand out: Proverbs is written by a political officer (the king) and is about much more than personal piety: it is about wise governance, righteousness, justice, and equity. These are the fundamental issues of government, thus, of politics. This is not to say that Proverbs isn’t relevant for one’s personal spirituality; it certainly is, but its opening framing points in a different direction, the direction of political order.
This focus is consistent throughout the book (a few examples will suffice):
Proverbs 16:12: “It is an abomination to kings to do evil, for the throne is established by righteousness.”
Proverbs 25:2: “It is the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings is to search things out.”
Proverbs 29:12: “If a ruler listens to falsehood, all his officials will be wicked.”
These are the central realities of statecraft: how kings are to rule and the consequences that follow if they rule either well or badly.
In this article I will focus on four unique ways in which Proverbs provides wisdom for political rule: 1) the way in which good government–contrary to the liberal dream of moral neutrality–is wise government, 2) the nature of true social justice, 3) the nature of a virtuous, healthy nation and what is necessary to maintain it, and 4) the necessary moral competency of rulers at all levels of government.
Good Government is Wise Government
John Stuart Mill famously built his theory of liberal political order on the notion that the state should stay out of the business of arbitrating competing moral visions: “Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest” (On Liberty [Hackett, 1978], p. 12). What “gains the most” for mankind should be the sole business of the state, ensuring that no moral or religious system be imposed on anyone who does not adhere to it personally. Many, if not most, people living in democratic states today would agree, or at least claim to agree. “At the heart of liberty,” Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, “is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” The state, we are told, is to stay out of moral matters. Those are for the individual to decide in whatever way the zer/ze/zim decides. I’m under no illusion that tolerant liberals are indeed as tolerant as they claim to be (“bake the cake, bigot”), but governmental tolerance of any and every morality is what most claim they support.
Proverbs will have none of that. Good government, Proverbs 8:15–16, says, is founded on true wisdom: “By me kings reign, and rulers decree what is just; by me princes rule, and nobles, all who govern justly.” There is no such thing as a morally neutral government. A ruler either rules wisely, which will lead to just laws, or he rules unwisely, which leads to the flourishing of wickedness and injustice.
Rulers, Proverbs 20:8 tells us, are obligated to rule in favor of what is just and true: “A king who sits on the throne of judgment winnows all evil with his eyes.” The apostle Paul agrees (Romans 13:4): “For [the governing authority] is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer.” “A wise king winnows the wicked and drives the wheel over them” (Proverbs 20:26). The civil magistrate who would fain neutrality regarding good and evil is the epitome of foolishness and wickedness. A ruler is to bring down the wicked. The opposite is not blessed neutrality, but societal devastation and destruction: “Like a roaring lion or a charging bear is a wicked ruler over a poor people.
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