The comments here are pursuing the question of what it means to declare something in the name of Jesus, particularly when it comes to convoluted political questions. Here are some additional thoughts on that thorny question.
First, the job of a minister is to declare “thus saith the Lord,” and not “it seems to me.” There are times when an ordained minister should say “it seems to me,” as when he and his wife are discussing whether or not the church picnic is going to be rained out. A minister does not have the authority to go around being personally dogmatic. The Jesus thing is not a personal trump card to enable him to win all his arguments.
At the same time, the apostle Peter tells us that the one who speaks should speak as the very oracles of God (1 Pet. 4:11). The Bible is authoritative on everything it addresses, as Van Til said, and it addresses everything. Some issues that are biblically-based are pretty obvious to most Christians, like a mountain range through the middle of a country. Other things are every bit as much in that country, but not as obvious, say an individual buttercup, and many Christians might deny it.
At the same time, there is no such thing as Scripture “raw” and uninterpreted. The Bible doesn’t read itself, preach itself, or interpret itself. This must be done by men, and they should seek to do it with authority, and not like the scribes. The Church grows in its understanding over time, and there are many things we take for granted now, but which had to be defended at one point contra mundum. New truths, that need to be broken forth out of God’s Word, are always going to be advanced by lonely and faithful pioneers, or, as their contemporaries call them, nutjobs.
When a minister declares the will of God, he must have the authority the Word of God to do so. What he says must be in the text, or be taken from the text by good and necessary consequence, as the Westminster Confession puts it. But in order to admonish, exhort, or rebuke concerning sin, at least one of the premises must be taken from the world, and not from the Scriptures. In order to apply the Scriptures at all, the world must be interpreted as well as the Scriptures. Otherwise, we will be left to fulminate against sins that no one in particular is committing.
Here are a handful of issues. Should a minister be allowed to say that murder is wrong, adultery wrong, and theft wrong. Absolutely — that’s an easy one. But what should a preacher be able to say — in “thus saith the Lord” mode — when addressing vaccines that were developed two decades ago from the bodies of aborted babies? What should his stance be when a parishioner has not committed sexual uncleanness in the sense of actual illicit intercourse, but he is wearing silk underwear, wearing eye make-up, and getting hormone shots? And what if a government is surreptitiously funding its operations by devouring widows’ houses through quantitative easing? The answer is to make sure of your facts, do your homework, and let her rip.
Sinful men do not like it when their sins are tagged, and so they will accuse you of going beyond what is written (1 Cor. 4:6). But one of the fundamental sins is the sin of worldliness — the lust of flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life. How many different ways can that be manifested? Can a preacher identify any of them? Yes, he must do so, if he wants to be faithful. But he must also be able to distinguish things that are worldly in one era and adiaphora in another. He also has to be able to do this while identifying as sin certain activities that would be sinful in any era — even although the externals of that sin must vary. Theft through computer hacking is theft, even though Moses never heard of computers, and did not have them in mind when he read “Thou shalt not steal.”
“But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil” (Heb. 5:14, ESV).
Every Christian knows that certain things are good and certain things evil. God’s law is written on our hearts — that is one of the characteristics of the new covenant. But there are other distinctions, finer distinctions, between good and evil, that are to be made by the mature, and the immature cannot see them. We have to be careful here, because legalists see things in the text too, and the mature cannot see what they are talking about. But this difficulty — and it is a difficulty — doesn’t let us off the responsibility to make the right judgment calls, not the wrong ones.
So to bring this back to the point of discussion. Is inflation a sin? Absolutely — a grievous one. Jesus didn’t say that it was not okay to devour widows’ houses if you were a Pharisee, but quite alright if you were a Keynesian. Having said this, there are two basic possibilities. One is that I will be justly condemned as a legalist, legislating where the Holy Spirit has not spoken, or I am railed against by those who don’t want the Church to grow up into a mature discernment and wise application of the Word of God.