Rodney Clapp says a number of structurally admirable things in his conclusion, but he can’t get them to add up.
He states, rightly, that baptism is a political act (p. 121). He says, also rightly, “for the baptized, nothing can be more basic or more significant than their baptism” (p. 122). Batting a thousand, he then says, “If we take seriously our baptisms and the Christian tradition, we are not first and foremost Americans, but Christians” (p. 123). Amen, and amen again. Many of my fellow Americans are of their father the devil, and many Nigerians are sons of our father Abraham, and brothers together with me.
It would have been nice if Clapp had kept this up, but alas, he did not. The way he messes it up is this: he begins by using an apt illustration of our layered loyalties.
“In sum, asked how I might suppose a baptized Christian could also be an American patriot, I would reply: in the same way one is a baptized Christian and strives to be a loyal mature son to his elders. The commitment of baptism is comprehensive or basic, and when push comes to shove, overrules particular commitments to one’s parents and one’s nation” (p. 126).
This is dead on. Go, team, go. We must obey God rather than men. But then . . . this.
“Are we then also and necessarily committed to a theocratic nation-state or, in this particular case, to a Christian America? On the contrary, if we are committed to the church as a public, we will be wary of any other publics or public bodies that would assume the church’s mission . . . Yearning and striving for a Christian America does not serve the church. Instead, it presumes on the church’s mission and dismisses the church as itself a public” (p. 128).
There are multiple confusions here, hand-packed in, like a quart of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream.
First, America as Christian is not synonymous with America as Church. The call for a Christian America is not a call for Supreme Court justices to start preaching the gospel, conducting baptisms and administering the Supper. The call for a Christian America is a call for Supreme Court justices to stop authorizing the dismemberment of babies in utero, and to repent in this way because Jesus Christ requires it. Our judicial system is summoned to cease and desist in all their on-going efforts to declare the anus to be a sex organ.
Second, the existence of the Church as a public place does not threaten in any way the existence of the magistrate, occupying a different public place, with differing responsibilities. Under Christ, the church is the ministry of grace and truth, the civil magistrate is the ministry of justice, and the family is the ministry of health, education, and welfare. Christ is Lord, and He has three cabinet positions, and the responsibilities of each are specific and defined for us in the Scriptures.
And third, the central confusion here is one that follows on from his earlier illustration of a loyal son, admonishing or rebuking his parents because a higher loyalty to Christ demands it. This is a fine illustration. But why, when we come to the behavior of the nation-state, does Clapp insist a priori that we ought to deliver these rebukes with the fervent and orthodox hope that nobody will ever listen to us? It is as though he says that a loyal son may rebuke his father for drunken abuse of his mother, but then, when someone (a bright sophomore perhaps?) raises the question of whether or not Clapp wants to see his father actually listen to the advice and heed it, to then to have Clapp say, “No, no, actually. That is the last thing we should want. For the father to heed the voice of his son in this instance would displace the Church as a public place.” What kind of sense does that make? None at all, actually.
If American Christians speak to their nation as Christians, as citizens of a higher and greater city, as believers with their true priorities intact, what happens when somebody actually listens? What do we do then? Judging from what Clapp has argued for thus far, I think the answer would be to panic.
One last thing, which will take us back to a few things Clapp said earlier in the book. The problem with authoritative declaration from the Church, in the tradition of John Knox, is that the Bible says a lot of things about a lot of things. If you want “generic biblical insights nurtured by interaction with the Christian tradition,” you could probably find yourself giving all kinds of cutting edge input to the magistrate on greenhouse gases, not to mention every other kind of leftist gas. But if the Church has the authority to speak specifically, from the whole Bible, and believing Christians start doing this, there will be no end of trouble.
That Clapp would not want this at all can be seen from just a couple comments he made in passing earlier in the book. The more I study and reflect on the malaise that is afflicting our culture, the more I am convinced that it is all about sex. The Bible is extraordinarily clear on the subject, and advocates of the mushy-center-left wing of Christendom is exerting tremendous energy to make it obscure. Consider this:
“The currently most liable scapegoat is the homosexual . . . There are honest and not simply homophobic arguments made by some on behalf of the tradition as it has long stood on same-sex behavior. That patently acknowledged, the actions of too many on the religious and ‘traditional’ right are bald attempts at scapegoating a vulnerable portion of the American population” (p. 91).
Clapp is going out on a ledge here — he is actually acknowledging that some defenders of the biblical, prophetic and apostolic position on homosexual acts are not homophobic. Whoa, big guy. And where he lives and probably has to give an account of himself, that statement probably makes him a flaming right-winger.
Here is another one, on women’s roles in society.
“So long as violent action is considered the final and ultimate guarantor of honor and its security . . . and so long as the average male has superior upper-body strength to that of the average female, honor in its supreme exemplification will be masculine. Such patriarchalism made some kind of sense in an earlier world that thought the female to be, literally and biologically, a defective male. In a world that knows different and that sees women lead effectively every day, in all manner of roles, masculinized honor seems (because it is) arbitrary” (p. 113).
Here is a question for everybody. Did the apostle Paul think that women were defective males? Did he keep them out of the ministry because he didn’t think they had the requisite upper-body strength? Was Paul in the grip of false definitions of honor, based on the brittle masculinity of muscle-bound males?
In short, given some of the political positions that Clapp has been clearly eating out of a zeitgeist-can with a spoon, he cannot afford to have some prophet barging in with a few hot words from Jehovah on our great new idea of homo-marriage. That would be off-putting. It would probably not conclude with constructive dialogue.