My response to chapter 6 won’t be that long because I agreed with a great deal of it. Jason does a good job nailing those who have jumbled up their Christian faith with their heartland, red state patriotism. When that particular jumble gets knocked, we should just let matters unfold. The United States does not carry “redemptive significance.” Amen.
But there is still a difference in the background, not surprisingly. The United States does carry redemptive significance in one sense — in the sense that sinners in need of redemption carry redemptive significance. We are a sinful nation, like all the nations. We therefore need salvation. But needing salvation (a salvation which is promised, incidentally) is a far cry from being a savior.
Jason made one curious comment about “the Babylonian fixation with free markets and military aggression” (p. 66), a comment I might have to pursue later. The Bible does have a great deal to say about the tyranny of militarism. It has precious little to say about the tyranny of “free markets,” because tyranny is found in the opposite of free markets, which is to say, regulated markets and coerced transactions. Slavery is slavery but, I would go on to add, freedom is not slavery. As I write this, our solons in Washington are debating what your jail term should be if you fail to buy the designated health insurance. When they arrive to haul you off to the Big House, that will not be an instance of Babylonian free markets getting you.
But then Jason rebukes the outside world in a fashion that I had not believed consistent with the stance he is urging.
“In fact, our collective blind spots often keep us from recognizing in ourselves the same faults that we criticize in other cultures (Jesus spoke about this, saying that it is somewhat disingenuous to lament the speck in another’s eye while ignoring the plank in one’s own, Matt. 7:1-6)” (p. 71).
What do the words of Jesus have to do with cultures outside the church? When Jesus said not to do that, wasn’t He talking to His baptized disciples within the church?
“We can wonder with great sanctimony how antebellum Southerners could claim to be disciples of Jesus while being owners of slaves, but when a Fortune 500 company moves its manufacturing operations to sweatshops in Malaysia so it can pay the workers $.09 an hour without having to worry about labor laws to protect them from oppression, we don’t call that ‘slave-owning,’ we call it ‘smart business.’ We watch World War II documentaries and wonder how the German population could sit back passively as Jews were slaughtered by the train-full, while feeling no guilt over the tens of thousands of innocent men, women, and children who have been killed while we liberate Iraq. Though the world and its lusts may take a different form in our country than in those ‘heathen lands afar,’ they are still alive, well, and largely characteristic even of a free and democratic society such as our own” (p. 71).
But this is prophetic indignation on the cheap. If you don’t have anything to say to the nations, then don’t say it. It you don’t have anything to say to the nations, don’t spend time telling us what you would say. And if you do have something to say, then tell them how their sins displease God, and tell to repent and believe. Tell them to kiss the Son lest He be angry. But that is verging on the edge of a transformational impulse.
Cash this out. Jason has said a number of things in the quote above about the other kingdom that amount to a stinging rebuke. But is it really a stinging rebuke? Every one of those things is the kind of thing that Christian pastors have to deal with, because their members live out six days of every week in that other kingdom. And life in that other kingdom brings more obligations with it than the obligation to put your trash out by the curb on the right day. In that other kingdom, Christians are board members of said Fortune 500 companies, and they vote on whether to move the factory or not. They are in the reserves and they get called up to go to Iraq. What do they do? One thing they should not have to put up with is their pastors rebuking them for being good “German Christians” while at the same time telling them to go ahead.
Jason said earlier in the book that believers are to undertake these tasks in a different way, but in the dilemmas outlined above a different way entails a different direction. We are talking about more than putting the trash by the curb with a cheerful disposition as opposed to a grumpy one. Now, does Jesus have opinions about such directions? If He does, the Christians involved should do what they can to make it go that direction — which is transformational. But if Jesus has no opinion about it, then His pastors shouldn’t preach about it or write about it.
We can’t have it both ways. We can’t halt between two opinions.