I owe John Piper more than I can possibly express, and so it is most necessary for me to preface any disagreement with him in terms of highest respect. And that is what I do here, right at the top, lest anyone miss it.
§
This is an odd kind of disagreement, because I actually agreed with an awful lot of the article I will be interacting with. The disagreement arises because he expends a great deal of energy critiquing a position that I would also oppose, but which I think he believes to be somehow inherent in any kind of mere Christendom project. More on this below.
§
Before getting started, let me pay some faux-respexx an opinion-hit-piece on a church in Boulder, written by someone who should clearly not be taken as a reliable guide in the discussion that follows. His take was so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. He writes: “In their response, planters Chase Davis and Matt Patrick denied being Christian Nationalists. But The Well pastors love quoting John Piper, who has written: ‘. . . the day is coming when the state and the church will merge, and the state will be perfectly and totally Christianized . . . The age of tolerance and pluralism will be over.’” They denied being Christian nationalists, people, but we know this is false, because they love Piper, who actually teaches that there won’t be any unbelief after the Second Coming.
§
Given the nature of the case, I decided to respond with a series of stand-alone paragraphs. This might seem a bit like driving across a big city during rush hour, with a lot of stop and go, but sometimes that’s what you have to do. I trust it will make sense. I will only go when the lights are green.
§
John states a number of wonderful and true things, but does so in an odd context. He writes as though the question were whether or not we should “use the sword in the explicit aim of advancing the spiritual rule of Christ” (emphasis mine), when the real question is quite different. He uses words like advancing or establishing a lot. But the real question is this. What do we do when the Christian church refuses to use carnal weapons in order to throw down the citadels of unbelief, and instead uses the mighty weapons of Word and water, bread and wine? Now suppose the kingdom is advanced in exactly the way that John thinks it should be advanced, which is to say, without any recourse to the sword. Suppose the people of a nation consequently believe, and suppose that their princes believe, and suppose their kingdom is flourishing as a result. Now, what do they do with their swords? They already have them. And they still have criminals. They still have borders. Can they find any instruction in the Word to guide them on what to do with the swords?
§
John says right at the beginning that God intends to accomplish His saving purpose “without reliance on” the magistrates to—among other things—”defend” the “Christian religion as such.” Honest question. Was it therefore a sin for Frederick the Elector of Saxony to defend Luther from the emperor and from the pope? Was that defense something the New Testament opposed? And if it was not a sin, shouldn’t we say that God was utilizing Frederick rather than saying that He was “relying” on him? God in His providential sovereignty uses instruments all the time without being in the least dependent upon them.
§
When it comes to engagement with the broader culture outside the church, John has been notably vocal in two areas—in the pro-life cause, and on the issue of ethnic relations. In this article he gives a good defense of a certain range of pro-life advocacy, but no defense at all that would justify his concerns about ethnic equity in the culture outside the church. His position is that Christians should not seek to use the force of law (the sword) in order to establish or advance any measures that are distinctively Christian. But some areas of the pro-life cause are distinctively Christian and the whole concept of “neither Jew nor Greek” is an area where a distinctively Christian ethos has already conquered the world.
§
One pro-life doctrine that is distinctively Christian is the idea that a fertilized human egg is a human being who bears the image of God, and is someone who will live forever. An argument can be made—through natural law or because of the Noahic covenant—that a third trimester child is in fact “a baby,” and so a Christian could urge protection of this life without appeal to anything that is explicitly Christian. But this is not the case with abortifacients. The case against a morning after pill would need to be almost entirely theological. We can make the case, but under John’s rubric can we impose it on unbelievers who are not convinced by the results of our Bible study?
§
John allows that Christians can vote with biblically-informed consciences, and that Christians may serve as magistrates while doing the same thing. He also says that Christians “may gladly say publicly which particular laws they support and oppose for Christian reasons.” But he distinguishes this from an explicitly Christian act of government. So what he takes away from the Christian activist with one hand, he gives back with the other. Suppose there were a referendum that would ban a particular abortifacient, and let us say further that Christians turned out en masse to vote for the ban, and let us say the measure carried. Exit polls revealed that the victory was won because of the decisive involvement of the evangelical voting block, who all turned out because of their Christian reasons. Is this somehow not an explicitly Christian act of government because the government got the right answer on the math test, but refused to show its work?
§
The other area where John has been publicly engaged has been on the subject of race relations. I would invite anyone who is interested in pursuing this issue further to conduct the following exercise. Sit down and read John’s article on the kingdom “not being of this world,” and then right after that read Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail. Here is a pertinent quote from the latter. “In the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro, I have watched white churchmen stand on the sideline and mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities. In the midst of a mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial and economic injustice, I have heard many ministers say: ‘Those are social issues, with which the gospel has no real concern.'”
§
Regardless of how John himself would have responded to such a situation in Birmingham, there is no doubt that if any ministers had wanted to “sit out” the civil rights battle, and also to defend themselves against King’s jibe, John’s article would provide them with a defense that was more than adequate. Where people have to sit on the bus is not an explicitly Christian issue and is no part of the Noahic covenant. Incidentally, I have not changed my dim views about King’s larger project, but I make this argument because John hasn’t changed his views on it either. But given this article, he needs to change something. His article gives Christians permission to do exactly what King was objecting to.
§
I can understand someone saying that laws against murder, theft, and rape are laws that could be justified without reference to Christian revelation. I myself have no problem with recourse to that revelation, but I also understand that the Code of Hammurabi did not have scriptural footnotes. But the ideal of ethnic equity in a society is an ideal that is explicitly Christian. It draws its inspiration from the New Testament’s teaching on how the church should be constituted, and apart from the influence and example of Christianity, there is nothing more ordinary and carnal than the Malays marginalizing the Chinese, the Chinese marginalizing the Uighurs, the Americans marginalizing the Nez Perce, everybody marginalizing the Gypsies, and so forth. Apart from Christ, this is how human societies have always operated. Exclude the prospect of Christians bringing an authoritative Word from God, and you have to allow for the rise and maintenance of official discrimination. As long as it doesn’t turn to murder, as with the Turks and Armenians, or Germans and Jews, the Christian has nothing to say about the thoughtful gesture of making sure blacks have their own drinking fountains. If the unbelievers want to sort themselves out according to skin color, that is not the gospel’s concern—at least according to the logic of this article.
§
John says, “The civil government may rightly pass laws that make the spread of the Christian faith (and other faiths) easier (for example, laws protecting free speech and free assembly). That is not what the New Testament opposes.” So John says the government may pass laws that protect free speech and free assembly. May? They may do this, okay, got it. But must they? Is John saying that God doesn’t care whether they do or not? And so is freedom of speech a right or a privilege? It appears from the way he has framed this question that John believes that we are not endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights. He would certainly say that we have the right and obligation to preach the gospel (whatever the government might say about it), but do we have the obligation to remain silent on other issues not pertaining to the gospel, if the government has not granted us the privilege of speaking?
§
In the previous quote, and in other places, John says that the New Testament “opposes” things that the New Testament doesn’t talk about directly at all. But these conclusions of John’s are derived from his systematic (and pietistic) theology of what the New Testament must be all about, and not from the New Testament directly or exegetically. The New Testament nowhere says, for example, that it would be a “sin for the magistrate to treat Christian ministers with any special consideration.” And on top of everything else, it seems really strange to categorize special kindness to Christian missionaries as a sin, and something the New Testament opposes.
§
Someone will respond that our mere Christendom project is also a matter of systematic derivation, and not derived from any direct teaching of the New Testament. Now it is true that we have a systematic framework for understanding all of these things, but it is false to say that there is no direct teaching on it. Jesus expressly says that He has all authority in heaven and on earth (Matt. 28:18-20). He says that, as a consequence, we are to disciple all. the nations. We are to baptize them all. We are also to teach them all to obey everything that Christ has commanded. One of the things He commanded was this last command, and so the Great Commission is consequently ongoing and perpetual. So our understanding of these marching orders is not derived from our systematic theology. Rather, our systematic theology is built on this cornerstone of this express command. Jesus did not say, “and teach them to avoid any express mention of me in all of their doings.”
§
John’s article says that Christians must not use the sword to “threaten the punishment, or withhold the freedoms, of persons who do not confess Christ as Lord.” Okay. But suppose there were a Christian prince who intended to use the sword to protect the freedoms of persons who do not confess Christ as Lord. Take your average unbeliever. He is far more likely to have his freedoms ransacked by the current Bolsheviks running the show than by me. May no one defend him? May no one defend him in the name of Christ?
§
I understand John’s antipathy toward Christian persecutors. I share the antipathy. But what I don’t understand is his resistance toward a Christian defense of the persecuted. That seems like something that is strikingly different. I see John’s article as arguing that a Christian prince could undertake on behalf of a persecuted minority in a neighboring country, using the sword, and he could do it because he himself was a Christian. But he would need to avoid giving Christ the glory in any formal or official way. If he were to transgress this (arbitrary) boundary and say that the intervention was a formal Christian undertaking, the New Testament would oppose him, and he would be in sin. And why would he be in sin for thanking Christ for the success of their mission to deliver the beleaguered? Because he did a righteous thing in the name of Christ. But given John Piper’s lifelong emphasis on giving glory to Christ in all things, this seems just plain weird.