ACE Journal (Fall 2021)

Inhabiting the City of Man,

BEING THE CIT Y OF GOD CULTURAL ENGAGEMENT, LISTENING, AND PUBLIC THEOLOGY D.A. Horton

POSTURES OF POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT: COMMON TEMPTATIONS FOR PUBLIC THEOLOGY Benjamin K. Forrest

A CHRISTIAN VIEW OF GOVERNMENT Gai Ferdon Zane A. Richer

THE VALUE OF AFFLICTION

THREE TRADITIONS IN AMERICAN POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT: FINANCE, VIRTUE, AND INSTITUTION Carey Roberts

Emily Page

Volu me 6 • Is s ue 1 Fall 2021

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Fall 2021 Mark D. Allen, Executive Editor Benjamin K. Forrest, Managing Editor Jack Carson, Associate Editor Seth Pryor, Assistant to the Managing Editor Zane Richer, Assistant to the Managing Editor

Joshua Rice, Creative Director Ashley Holloway, Marketing Director Seth Bingham, Marketing Manager Zach Hayes, Project Coordinator Annie Shelmerdine, Senior Designer Deanna Sattler, Designer Dave Parker, Promotional Writer

/LibertyUACE | @LibertyUACE | envelope ACE@liberty.edu | location-arrow Liberty.edu/ACE

Inhabiting the City of Man, Being the City of God 6, no. 1 (Fall 2021): A publication of Liberty University Center for Apologetics & Cultural Engagement

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THE CITY OF GOD AND THE CITY OF MAN

APPLIED THEOLOGY IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIETAL CONTEXTS

BUILT ON THE ROCK OF FAITH: MODELS OF FAITH IN TURBULENT TIMES

Dennis R. McDonald

John S. Knox

JOINING THE JOURNEY WITH STUDENTS: INTERDISCIPLINARY ENGAGEMENT FROM AVIATION AND DIVINITY

Mark D. Allen

Claudia Dempsey Julie Speakes

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Contents

8 The City of God and the City of Man Mark D. Allen, Director of the Center for Apologetics & Cultural Engagement and Professor of Biblical Studies, John W. Rawlings School of Divinity, Liberty University

34 Cultural Engagement, Listening, and Public Theology D.A. Horton, Assistant Professor and Program Director for Intercultural Studies, California Baptist University

12 Postures of Political Engagement: Common Temptations for Public Theology

37 The Lessons of History: Conservative Feminism, Christian Witness, and Compromise

Benjamin K. Forrest, Professor of Christian Education and Associate Dean for the College of Arts & Sciences, Liberty University

Mary Macdonald Ogden, Instructor of History, College of Arts & Sciences, Liberty University

20 The City of God and American Greatness: Keeping an Eternal Perspective in Turbulent Times Timothy Yonts, Instructor of Ethics, College of Arts & Sciences, Liberty University

24 Applied Theology in Contemporary Societal Contexts Dennis R. McDonald, Instructor of Theology, John W. Rawlings School of Divinity, Liberty University

30 Three Traditions in American Political Engagement: Finance, Virtue, and Institution Carey Roberts, Online Dean and Professor of History, College of Arts & Sciences, Liberty University

42 A Christian View of Government Gai Ferdon, Professor of Government, Helms School of Government, Liberty University Zane A. Richer, Graduate Student, Helms School of Government, Liberty University

45 Between 1619 and the Millennium: American Exceptionalism and the Legacy of Slavery Jason Ross, Associate Professor and Department Chair, Helms School of Government, Liberty University

50 Built on the Rock of Faith: Models of Faith in Turbulent Times John S. Knox, Associate Professor of Sociology, School of Behavioral Sciences, Liberty University

54 The Value of Affliction Emily Page, Alumna, Liberty University

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INTERDISCIPLINARY ESSAYS

BOOK REVIEWS

57 Joining the Journey with Students: Interdisciplinary Engagement from Aviation and Divinity

66 Politics After Christendom: Political Theology in a Fractured World

Claudia Dempsey, Online Chair, John W. Rawlings School of Divinity, Liberty University Julie Speakes, Online Dean, School of Aviation, Liberty University

59 Creative Image-Bearers and the AI Horizon: Interdisciplinary Engagement from Christian Ethics and Engineering

Dennis Nicholson, Student Fellow, Center for Apologetics & Cultural Engagement, Liberty University

67 The Political Disciple: A Theology for Public Life Hunter Brown, Student Fellow, Center for Apologetics & Cultural Engagement, Liberty University

Jason Glen, Instructor of Ethics and Interdisciplinary Studies, College of Arts & Sciences, Liberty University

68 Letters to a Birmingham Jail: A Response to the Words and Dreams of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Hector Medina, Professor of Mechanical Engineering, School of Engineering, Liberty University

Kayla Hamlin, Student Fellow, Center for Apologetics & Cultural Engagement, Liberty University

63 Humility in Christian Cultural Interaction: Interdisciplinary Engagement Through Music and Language Learning Robert Morehouse, Professor of Arabic, Liberty University Katherine Morehouse, Professor of Ethnomusicology and Chair, Department of Multi-Ethnic Music Studies, Liberty University

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5 0 YE AR S OF TRAINING CHAMPIONS FOR CHRIST SINCE 1971, Liberty University has had one mission — a mission that has defined our purpose and directed our steps. This fall, we invite you to join us in that mission as we celebrate 50 Years of Training Champions for Christ.

Over the last 50 years, Liberty has created a diverse, faithful, and global community of Champions for Christ.

Our 50th Anniversary celebrates this rich heritage by tracing the legacy of its

champions and their influence upon the world as they bring Liberty's mission to life.

It all started with a mountain and one man's audacious vision of a world-class university that would impact thousands of lives for Christ. The story of Liberty University is one of prayers answered, miracles witnessed, and dreams realized.

It is a story of unwavering faith and a God who can move mountains.

Visit Liberty.edu/50 for details and upcoming events and order your copy of Liberty’s 50th Anniversary commemorative book at Liberty.edu/50thBook.

Training Champions for Christ since 1971

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Editorial

Mark D. Allen Director of the Center for Apologetics & Cultural Engagement, Professor of Biblical Studies, John W. Rawlings School of Divinity, Liberty University

The City of God and the City of Man The unimaginable happened. It was dream crushing.

They had placed their hope in the grand wedding between the Empire and Christianity. This marriage of imperial power and a transcendent God captured the imaginations of those who imbibed the lure of its unlimited potential for peace, prosperity, and triumph.

According to these enthusiasts, in this coupling of the Empire and Christianity, eternal virtue and justice were destined to overtake the world, bringing about God’s reign on earth. This was Christian nationalism at its highest levels of hope, enthusiasm, and triumphalism.

But when Rome fell, disappointment, fear, and confusion rushed in.

Jerome, the Christian translator of the Latin Vulgate, mourned the lost optimism of so many who had hoped in the merger between Christianity and Empire. He wrote, “When the brightest light of the world was extinguished, when the very head of the Roman Empire was severed, the entire world perished in a single city.”1 He, and many other Christians, sobbed over the crushing disillusionment.

In his day, St. Augustine too had been swept up in the infectious and euphoric triumphalism that predated Rome’s fall. In one particular sermon, he celebrated Christianity’s victory in the Roman world. Once a persecuted religion, now Christianity reigned with imperial expansiveness and, according to Augustine, in fulfillment of scriptural prophecy: The promises and prophecies of the Scriptures are being fulfilled, it is wonderful; let them sit up and note the marvelous things that are happening before their eyes, the whole human race streaming together.

To honor the Crucified. Let the few who have so far remained aloof hear the strepitus mundi, the world’s roar acclaiming the victory of Christianity.2 Indeed, some remained aloof. Not all were caught up in the enthusiasm of the “world’s roar.” Some Christians were uneasy and opposed to the “Christians’

wholesale assimilation of pagan Roman culture and lifestyles.”3 Further, many Roman traditionalists resisted the incursion of Christianity into Roman imperial domains. For them, continued Roman greatness depended on resurgent dominance of Roman religion and culture. This new religion threatened the sustained worldwide progress brought about through the expansion of the Empire. Roman-styled pluralism pushed back on Christianity.

Augustine’s hope in the merger between Christianity and the Empire dissipated in a few short years. Perhaps his enthusiasm cooled because Christian bishops had very little actual clout in everyday Roman affairs since “they had to reckon with a deeply entrenched tradition of resistance, often by officials who were still pagan in their allegiance.”4 Ultimately, with the sack of the Rome on Aug. 24, 410 AD, Augustine was compelled to reimagine more thoroughly Christianity’s relationship to government and society.

His deeply reflective response was quite different than Jerome’s overreaction.

After the sack of the city, Roman traditionalists accused Christianity of causing Rome’s fall. Many probing questions about the relationship between Christianity and the Empire arose at the time, but the inquiry that occupied Augustine the most was sent to him in a letter, around 411 or 412, from a friend and an imperial official named Marcellinus. Marcellinus noted a very specific objection from an “illustrious lord” named Volusian. In Marcellinus’s own words, the following is Volusian’s objection to Christianity’s relevance and practicality in the public square: Moreover, the preaching and teaching of Christ is in no way compatible with the practices of the state, since, as many say, it is clear that it is His commandment that we should repay no one with evil for evil, that we should offer the other cheek to one who strikes us, give our coat to one who insists on taking our cloak, and go twice the distance with someone who wants to force us to go with him. He states that all these are contrary to the practices of the state.5

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For Volusian, Christianity just doesn’t work in the real world.

Augustine responded with a grand defense of Christianity in The City of God. It took him from 413 to 425 to write. He refers to it as “a massive work, and arduous” and regarded it as a promise kept and a payment of a debt to his friend Marcellinus, who was falsely accused and tragically executed in 413.6 In writing The City of God for his beloved Marcellinus, Augustine asserted that he took up the primary “task of defending the most glorious city of God.”7 In the preface to The City of God, he states his purpose clearly and succinctly: “I have undertaken to defend [the city of God] against those who prefer their own gods to its founder.”8 As a secondary accomplishment of the book, Augustine sets out a way for Christians to inhabit public spaces.

In the book, Augustine contrasts two cities: the heavenly city9 and the earthly city. The most significant difference in the two cities is discovered in what they love. Augustine writes, “Two loves have made the two cities. Love of self, even to the point of contempt for God, made the earthly city; and love of God, even to the point of contempt for self, made the heavenly city.”10 These cities are what they love.

It may be tempting to believe that because the many institutions of life, such as civil governments, businesses, or families, deal with very temporal concerns, they are only part of the City of Man. However, this would

be to misunderstand the distinction which Augustine is making. According to him, while all of these institutions inhabit the same saeculum, they do not necessarily belong to one city or the other. Rather, each institution can participate in either city, depending on the attitudes and orientations of its members, and the nature of its structures. For instance, a government which seeks to dominate its population, stifle the church, amass fortunes for itself at the expense of its people, and orient itself inwardly, viewing man as the measure of all things, would be squarely situated in the City of Man, whereas a government which loves justice, protects its people, seeks the common good, and orients itself towards God as the end of all being participates more in the City of God. According to Augustine, these two cities intersect but can be distinguished. He explains that “In this world, in fact these two cities, remain intermixed and intermingled with each other until they are finally separated at the last judgment.”11 The two cities relate but cannot be collapsed into one entity. In Books XIXXII of The City of God, he sets out what he thinks should be said “about the origin, the course, and the appointed end of the two cities.”12 First, as to the origins of the two cities (Books XIXIV), the City of Man originated in pride while the City of God was birthed in humility. The earthly city is self-centered, wrapped up in itself; it is selfdependent and glories in itself. The heavenly city is oriented toward God and others; it depends on

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God and directs praise to Him. Human reason alone provides the operational basis for the City of Man. In the City of God, autonomous human reason is insufficient; rather, human reason functions within the Scriptural revelation and submits to the authority of God. Second, as for the course of the two cities in this world (Books XV–XVIII), all people are born fallen into the City of Man, but some are chosen by God’s grace for redemption in the City of God. In their temporal journeys, the social fabric of the two cities is very different. The lust for domination in the City of Man results in “lawsuits, wars, and conflicts;” the City of God rejoices in “the common and immutable good.”13 The earthly city scrambles and fights for the limited goods of this world; the heavenly city shares the limitless bounty of God himself. “Conflict and competition” mark one city; “unity and harmony” the other.

A caveat: those of the City of God are on a journey; they have not arrived yet. Thus, the idealized picture of peace and harmony in the City of God presented in the previous paragraph must be chastened by the reality of internal conflicts until the completed redemption of body and soul in the new heaven and new earth.

Further, the goods and peace, though tempered and temporal, enjoyed by those in the City of Man are real and substantial, given to them through God’s grace.

Third, the two cities have two distinct final destinies (Books XIX-XXII). Those of the earthly city look for happiness only within the goods of this world. The members of the City of God are happy in hope; that is, they see within and beyond the goods of this world to the future apprehension of God. They look forward to the eternal beatific vision of God and the perfect mending of the social fabric that is to come in the new heaven and new earth. In the end, God alone will reveal who is in which city. Those who sought their own happiness solely in the achievements and pleasures of this world will be resurrected to eternal, embodied punishment. In stark contrast, those who used the goods of this world to love God and love others in God will be resurrected to eternal, embodied life within an eternal home characterized by authentic, communal peace and endless, personal satisfaction in God. Two cities. Different beginnings. Different journeys.

Different destinies.

But the questions remains: how do the two cities relate now? If the wedding of Empire and Christianity was

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always destined to failure, how do the two entities interact with one another? More specifically, how does being a being a citizen of the heavenly city shape one’s perspective on the earthly city? How, then, does citizenship in the City of God affect how we inhabit the City of Man today?

1. Citizens of the City of God do not put their ultimate hope in the earthly city.

They are eschatological beings, happy in the hope of the full manifestation of the heavenly city in the new heaven and new earth. Only when Jesus Christ returns in judgment will the heavenly city be revealed in all its glory and the earthly city be brought to eternal ruin.

2. Citizens of the City of God take a realistic view of how much actual good can be accomplished in the City of Man. The City of God must not coopt the City of Man or collapse the two into one missional entity hoping to bring about the fullness of the Kingdom of God through its partnership with the earthly city. Or, from another perspective, an earthly nation can never so absorb the heavenly city that that nation becomes a primary advancer of the Kingdom of God. Members of the City of God must have a chastened view of just how much true good can be accomplished in, with, and through the earthly city.

3. Citizens of the City of God do not seek to dominate the earthly city.

The very lust to dominate is the insidious urge that twists and corrupts the earthly city into what it is.

Individual citizens of the City of God should be cautious about taking positions of power. “Augustine counsels people not to pursue high position, unless it is done under the compulsion of love or for the sake of promoting the well-being of the people.”14 We serve as leaders not to gain the upper hand in a culture war but to care for the well-being of others. As UVA sociologist James Davidson Hunter puts it, citizens of the heavenly city rather than “seizing power” seek to be a “faithful presence” in the earthly city.15

4. Citizens of the City of God work for the common good and peace of the earthly city.

Realistic expectations and skepticism toward power should not cause heavenly citizens to totally pull back from engagement in the public square. The earthly city can bring about real goods like a penultimate kind of peace that is preferred to civil conflicts and international wars. “The earthly city can, then, achieve limited goods, even if not the greatest goods for which

humankind was created. And citizens of the Heavenly City can help foster those goods in the many different earthly cities in which they find themselves.”16 “Even the most disordered persons and institutions do not fall outside of the providence of God.”17 “It is within the interest of the ‘pilgrims’ of the city of God to seek the welfare of the earthly city, just as the Israelites in exile were admonished to seek the welfare of Babylon — for ‘in its welfare you will find your welfare’ (Jeremiah 29:7 ESV).”18 Augustine ends his magisterial work not with a crushing loss but with a happy hope, a vision of eternal rest: “There we shall be still and see, see and love, love and praise. Behold what will be in the end without end!

For what else is our end but to reach the kingdom that has no end!”19

Letter 126,2. The translation is from J. N. D. Kelly, Jerome: His Life, Writings, and Controversies (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 304.

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2 Quoted in Robert a Markus’s Christianity and the Secular (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press: 2006), 31.

3 Robert Marcus, Christianity and the Secular, 33.

4 Robert Marcus, Christianity and the Secular, 34.

5 Letter, 136.2.

6 The City of God, I, Preface 7 Ibid.

8 Ibid.

9 Augustine does not always equate the city of God with the church because there are some in the (institutional) church who are not true members of the church or the city of God and there are some in the earthly city who are predestined to membership in the true church and the city of God. Yet, sometimes Augustine speaks of the city of God as if it were equivalent to the church.

10 See James K. A. Smith’s You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2016).

11 The City of God, I.35 12 Much in the following several paragraphs depends on William Babcock’s introduction to the New City Press translation of Saint Augustine’s The City of God, part I, vol. 6 of THE WORKS OF SAINT AUGUSTINE: A Translation for the 21st Century, trans. William Babcock (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2012), ix - xlvi 13 The City of God, part I, vol. 6 of THE WORKS OF SAINT AUGUSTINE: A Translation for the 21st Century, xxxii.

14 Kristen Deede Johnson, Theology Political Theory, and Pluralism: Beyond Tolerance and Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 163.

15 James Davidson Hunter, To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, & Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 95.

16 Kristen Deede Johnson, Theology Political Theory, and Pluralism, 169.

17 Ibid.

18 James K. A. Smith, Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology, vol.

3, Cultural Liturgies (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2017), 219.

19 The City of God, XXII, 30

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Faculty Contribution

Benjamin K. Forrest Professor of Christian Education and Associate Dean College of Arts & Sciences, Liberty University

POSTURES OF POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT: COMMON TEMPTATIONS FOR PUBLIC THEOLOGY “Know thyself ” is common advice, yet at least one philosopher cautions against such self-help. 1His reasons for caution are summarized in a line from Gide’s Autumn Leaves: “A caterpillar who seeks to know himself would never become a butterfly.” Is knowing oneself a limitation or a frontier? First, our fallenness knows itself through the lens of our best interests. We know ourselves but love ourselves deeply, and thus our knowledge is imperfectly flavored by our best intentions rather than our daily actions. “I know myself as loving,” says everyone walking in the shoes of Ebenezer Scrooge. Yet, without the chains of our rose-colored glasses, we readily see the fallacy of this claim in those around us. Second to this is the individual who knows him/herself to be what they are, but in knowing this they never grow beyond the current real estate of life that they now occupy. They are to remain a caterpillar, never reaching the potential of their metamorphosis. Where they are now is where they will be tomorrow and throughout the next decade.

They know themselves but fail to recognize that this knowledge can mature. On the other hand the knowledge of oneself can be a frontier that leads people to new horizons, new understanding, and, theologically speaking, toward sanctification.

It is this third type of knowledge that I hope to elucidate here — the type of knowledge that leads toward sanctification. Particularly, my aim is that Christians will know themselves and their common temptations for public theology and political engagement. Such terms as “public theology” and “political engagement” sound like official jargon of the intelligentsia — my intended meaning here, however, is all forms of our daily interactions in the world.

The world in which we live is by nature a political world. Put simply, this means that the city — the polis — is governed by people, and our engagement and interaction in the sphere of the city is political.

Thus, my intent is not simply to speak to those with official-sounding titles whose daily work is within or even tangential to this system; it is far more inclusive.

My intent is to explore common temptations and a Gospel challenge to these temptations faced by a variety of people and professional engagement within our political age. While the points that follow may not prick the heart of every reader, my hope is to be inclusive enough that at least one of these temptations challenges the practices of believers everywhere as we steward our daily interactions in the world.

Postures of Political Engagement, Temptation 1: Defeatism The public square has changed, and most likely, it will continue to transform in the coming years. Yet, the call for Christ’s disciples to be salt still remains intact (Matthew 5:13). In the time of the Reformers, to be salt meant to set forth on a lonely road walking against the current of Christendom and the authority of the Roman Catholic Church. Saltiness was also important for the Puritans who inherited the charge from these Reformers. The cultural context had changed, but the charge had not — add Gospel-laden flavor to your world for the making of disciples (Matthew 28:1920). Similarly, Christians in early America had been admonished by Christ to be salt in a “New World.”

The context for their saltiness changed, but the task to integrate in society in a pleasing and flavorful way had not. No longer was the battle between religious freedom and the Church — as in the times of the Reformers. Instead, the public battle was between the visions for flourishing for the future of a nascent country. Of those setting about to live out in the public square the manner of Christ’s admonition to be salt — some succeed while others falter. However, despite the faults of sinful men and women, the flavor of those who have gone before has left a legacy and example. To this, however, it is clear that saltiness cannot exist where defeatism reigns. “But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out

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and trampled underfoot” (Matthew 5:13). Faithfully carrying our task for engaging theologically within the public square precludes submitting to the temptation of defeatism. To accept defeat is to lose our saltiness and our use in the world.

and keep us from this temptation as it allows our salt to give flavor to our world.

Christians are an eschatological people. Each Christian is on a journey toward a heavenly and eternal reward as we strive toward the Celestial City, the City of God. We are eschatological because we know this world is not our home (Hebrews 13:14), that we are sojourners and aliens (1 Peter 2:11), and that we can be assured of our hope (1 John 5:13). Each of these phrases reminds us of the reality of our destination. Such an eschatological posture reminds us that the victory has been secured — perhaps not in this lifetime, but for sure at the end of the age, and on that day, there will be great rejoicing because we will see, face-to-face, our living hope (c.f., 1 Peter 1:3-6). As Christians look around to view their world, it is easy to see how the Garden-fall has compounded throughout history. The paganism of today is a natural byproduct of a people born estranged to God. Yet, we are not without hope and the only thing that has been ultimately defeated was death at the resurrection of Christ (1 Corinthians 15:55ff). Our engagement must ruminate not on the paganism of our culture but on the hope we have in a resurrected Christ as we look forward to His imminent return when death will be no more, every tear will be wiped away, and the lambs will lie down with the wolves (Revelation 21:4; Isaiah 11:6).

In addition to salt, Christ followers are to be light in a dark world (Matthew 5:14). Lights, lamps, and lanterns are not meant to be lit and subsequently hid.

Instead they are to be placed where they can give the most light to a room. As a Christian, to be a light means to engage faithfully in this world and to reflect the light of Christ (John 8:12; 1:9-10) to those who have eyes to see (Mark 8:18; Psalm 119:18). Yet, a common temptation is to hoard this light and savor it within the confines and safety of our homes and our churches. The temptation here is to escape from the darkness of the world and only enjoy our light in the presence of other candles. Such a temptation can stem from two directions: the first is fear, and the second is apathy.

The antidote for defeatism is to remember the hope that is “an anchor for the soul” (Hebrews 6:19). For those tempted to walk in despair and defeat due to the quickening pace of the secularization of our country — remember the hope we have in Christ and how this story ends. Filling our minds with and preaching to our hearts the reality of what is to come will guard us

Postures of Political Engagement, Temptation 2: Escapism

Fear is understandable, for it is a normative experience in this world. When we find something to fear, we tend to avoid it. Many avoid sharks, snakes, spiders, and enclosed spaces. There are reasons for such fear, albeit few ever come to personally know these reasons.

Therefore, fear, as a motivation for escapism, is also understandable. Holiness is of great significance in the life of believers and is an expectation placed upon us by our Creator. As Hebrews says, “Strive for peace with everyone, and for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord” (12:14). If without holiness we will not see the Lord, then there is a righteous fear directed at the sin that so easily entangles (12:1-2).2 Fear, therefore, keeps people in places where they feel safe and secure from the potential traps and snares of evil.

There is a measure of wisdom in this, but it must be held in tension with the biblical assumption that we are

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going about a life in the world and not of the world.

This wisdom to avoid the potential filth of the world should not keep us from our calling to be light in the darkness of the world. Christians must guard against the temptation to fearfully escape and walk with the great cloud of witnesses who have modeled faithfulness to us despite “jeers and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. They were put to death by stoning; they were sawed in two; they were killed by the sword.

They went about in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, persecuted and mistreated” (Hebrews 11:36-37). Their example to us models faithfulness in a pagan world and should do so for us in this world — which is far (so far) from the challenging contexts of these.

light, syncretism attempts to make peace with the systems of the world by finding common ground.

Common ground rooted in common grace and natural law are shared borders that can create harmony in the world, and this is to be desired as far as it can be achieved.3 However, harmony can only be found when the world recognizes the value of the natural law. For instance, Christians and non-Christians can get along politically (even if they disagree) when each neighbor values the other’s right to freedom and justice. Here these two neighbors, even with different worldviews, agree that freedom and justice (albeit defined differently based on each’s worldview) are not given by men to each other but are written on the hearts of man.

The second subset of escapism is the temptation of apathy. While anything but good, apathy surely sounds better than simple slothful unlovingness, which is what it is. Springing up from the roots of sloth and lovelessness, this union forms the bitter fruit that often feeds our escapism. It is not only because we fear but also because we are unmoved by the concerns and plights of others. In apathy, we flee from the public forum, failing to champion just causes — or we fail to stand against that which is starkly antagonistic to the things of God. Apathetic escapism stands in contrast to the type of light we are to be in and for the world. Our light is to give off a radiant blessing to those stumbling in the darkness. Those who have grown accustomed to the darkness will not understand or appreciate this sight that comes from light. Their eyes have learned to see in the darkness, and light brings squinting pain and a desire to return to the darkness. They may never learn to appreciate the potential of sight in the light.

Others, however, who recognize their flailing attempts at walking around in the darkness will see the glow of those shining on a hill from far off and start walking towards it — recognizing that with it comes clarity, which ultimately brings understanding and hope.

At least one aspect of the temptation here is the direction of proselytization. When Christians and non-Christians engage each other in the public square, our charge is to point them to Christ in a way that shows His glory and goodness — inviting them into ultimate freedom which finds peace with God through Christ. Yet, when the proselytization happens in the other direction, the news that is shared is not a good gospel. Thus, syncretism attempts to make peace with the world by diluting the distinctive elements of the Gospel for a culturally palatable version. This challenge to the good news of Christ has happened in every culture throughout the history of the Church.

It is not new, but the forms it has taken in the last decade and the one(s) to come are certainly culturally and contextually driven.

The antidote to escapism is to “walk in the light” (1 John 1:7; Ephesians 5:7-8). Here our walking takes our light with us. We get the privilege of sharing and spreading this light for all those on the journey of life.

The more we walk publicly, letting our light shine faithfully, the more that the world has a chance to see what hope comes from living in the light (c.f., 1 John 1:5-10).

Postures of Political Engagement, Temptation 3: Syncretism The temptation of syncretism takes faith in the public square in a different direction. Instead of internalizing defeat and/or escaping from our charge to be salt and

Exploring the temptation of syncretism could take several routes. However, my intent here is to briefly raise awareness of one path in this direction — empathy. As with all virtues, empathy has the potential to encourage flourishing or, in a disordered form, serve as a host for syncretism. And, like all parasites, syncretism needs a host in which to live; it takes a bit of this and bit of that, bringing these foreign substances into a new context trying to disguise itself within the identity of the original host. This is often exemplified in the Old Testament as the Israelites borrowed from the faiths around them, bringing these pagan worship practices into Yahweh worship. What the broader Israelite community began to believe was that this new, adulterated form of worship was in fact “right worship.”4 Yet, in reality it was a parasitic worship that had no longer remained true to its original form or identity.5 In the American zeitgeist, empathy has become a virtue hoisted to the pinnacle of our secular moral order. Popularly speaking, empathy is a kind, emotive response to identify with those in need or pain.

As we are repeatedly told, “[Homogeneity results in] an

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empathy deficit, and it’s at the root of many of our biggest problems.”6 Empathy, therefore, is seen as one of the great tools for redeeming what sin has broken.

Culture does not, perhaps, think in these terms of sin, but even secular culture can recognize the fruit of sin without understanding its ultimate root. An example here is helpful. In order to fight against the sins of injustice, the world has sought to cultivate empathy as an ethical tool to remove judgement, which is deemed to be one of the roots that bears the fruit of injustice.

On the surface this could seem good and reasonable, for few have palatable categories for judgement.

However, for a society to be just we must be able to judge. We cannot name injustice without standing against it in a posture of judging it incompatible with justice. Simply accepting all the habits, proclivities, and desires of our neighbors as amoral (or more preferably as good) does not comport with clear and logical thinking. Yet, empathy has been creatively attached to this interaction. It is easy to stand in judgement against something when one does not understand it, and so empathy can become a pathway for syncretism because empathy, in this day and age, requires that we put ourselves into the shoes of those experiencing and wrestling with various ethical dilemmas. Such posturing inside the shoes of others sounds good and brings a level of increased understanding to the wearers of these shoes. Simply put, it seems consistent with Paul’s admonition to “weep with those who weep” (Romans 12:15) and could harken even further back to The Teacher’s recognition that there is “a time to weep and a time to laugh” (Ecclesiastes 3:4). However, while I would certainly not got so far as to say that empathy is sin, its upward ascendancy to the pinnacle of our virtue summit should be questioned (or at least inspected closely).7 Standpoint empathy can blind the posturer to ethical equivocation. And here is how: Our culture believes truth is relative, making room for each person to claim their own “truth.”

Perhaps this is a natural evolution for a pluralistic world where vast numbers of individuals claim truths that are ultimately contradictory. Christians must not accept such relativism, but we recognize how it has naturally become a part of the world. Christians, in large part, have stood theoretically and theologically against relativism, but empathy has, in many ways, become the pathway for the rise in neo-relativism via syncretism leading to ethical capitulation. Two points are valuable here. Empathy certainly does not always lead to the destination of syncretism, but it is worth noting that many of those traveling toward heterodoxy started on their journey via the empathetic way. First, let me ask, what happens when a believer mentally conditions themselves to think and experience that

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which a nonbeliever experiences and thinks? Do they give up (mentally, imaginatively, etc.) their theology of sin, their understanding of the great battle in the heavenly realms between the spiritual forces, their identification of being buried with Christ in the likeness of his death that we might be raised with him in the likeness of his resurrection? To put ourselves, mentally or imaginatively, into the experiences of those who do not understand the offer of Christ and the peace with God through the atonement locates believers in a posture that is inherently darkened.

For some this will lead to the compassionate desire to pull these friends and acquaintances from the slough of despond like Help did for Christian in Pilgrim’s Progress. For others, to identify, even briefly, with those estranged from God can lead believers to question their biblical ethic. As we put on the feelings of the unregenerate, we become more prone to understand their desires and thus begin to make excuses for these desires and behaviors (because we feel as they feel). As we leave this imagined location and return to our own experiences and theological location we often bring with us convictions adopted through our imaginative empathy. While it is also true that such empathetic and imaginative location can also remind individuals of the glory of living and walking in the light, there is a noteworthy temptation faced by many to remember the feelings of desire, sin, and understanding which can lead to an acquiescence with the social moorings of the world.

A second concern I have with empathy in its current idealized form is that while it takes on the pain of others, it does not necessarily commit to assisting people out of their pain. In his work Against Empathy, Paul Bloom makes the case for what he calls rational

compassion, an antidote against the potential ethical misuses of empathy.8 As a secular psychologist, his book is aimed at a similar audience. But his call to compassion as a replacement, I think, is astute.

Christians should make the case for Christlike compassion vis-à-vis Mark 6:34 when Jesus “saw the large crowd, He had compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd” (c.f., Matthew 9:36). Christlike compassion is more than empathy because it draws those in pain from their location of suffering into the hope we have now in redemption or the eschatological hope we have for eternity. Empathy, however, is often happy to identify with the pain of others, joining others in their pain, and decrying the many injustices of the root causes for this pain. Such posturing can be encouraging for those weeping, but eventually weeping should be replaced with joy as the dawn of the morning breaks (Psalm 30:5).

Yet empathy is not committed to such redemption, whereas compassion must necessarily be concerned with a redeemed end. Compassion can stand against and denounce injustice, but it seeks to bring people from a location of hurt and pain to one of healing and restoration.

Postures of Political Engagement, Temptation 4: Pugilism I have two types of pugilists in mind here. Interestingly, each finds this temptation from opposite ends of their public theology and engagement. The first is the boxer.

This pugilist is fairly recognizable in that they are ready to do battle for rights and wrongs at any given time. Paul was clear that “our battle is not against flesh and blood,” but against rulers and authorities of the spiritual world. He then turns to encourage believers

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to put on armor that they might “stand against the devil’s schemes” (Ephesians 6:12-13). Willingness to fight is not wrong, and much of the thesis of this article is that fighting the right fight is wise. But the boxer is out looking for a fight, and this fight tends to forget the admonition to do all things in love (1 Corinthians 16:14).

publish surgical manuals on how to remove dust from others’ eyes. Here, condescension is clothed as virtuous concern and enjoyed as if it justifies one’s own lack of honest self-reflection and willingness to perform heart and eye surgery.9

The second politically engaged pugilist is the fencer.

They fight from a distance and are intent on cutting and wounding not with confrontational animosity that bludgeons, but are content to prick, slice, and cut. This pugilist often does far more damage with their words (and from a keyboard?) than the boxer could ever do in their arenas of engagement. Just as the boxer has the temptation to forget the admonition of love, the fencer tends to clothe their pugilism in a veil of virtue.

They are virtuous fencers fighting against the ignorant masses. Some of these that find this temptation readily recognize it as such. They know they cut with words, and they tend to carry a social following where this type of fighting occurs regularly. More subversive than these is the category of stealth fencers who do not overtly use social media as an attack on others. They do not berate, call out, or intentionally cancel those who disagree with them. They are far stealthier than this. Instead, their approach to pugilism is the subtlety of shame. They use their words to discredit their foes under the guise of helping others to see their specks and logs in their eyes. On many occasions, readers end up seeing what has been pointed out, but sadly many of these never perform personal eye surgery before they

To know thyself, in a Christian sense, is not to find understanding and then place it on a shelf to gather dust. Instead, it is pressing on in the race that is set before us (Hebrews 12:1-2). This knowledge for the Christian should compel us toward consecration and sanctification that we might day-by-day look less like ourselves and more like Christ. While on this side of glorification, we will remain ourselves, and this is to be desired. The sanctification process is not a docetic doctrine that claims that the flesh is bad, and the spirit is good. Sanctification recognizes that all creation was good (Genesis 1:31) yet tarnished in a way that required redemption. However, this redemption is progressive and does not find its culmination this side of death. To know thyself in the Christian sense is to see where our individual faults and foibles lie and to then plan for how we might grow beyond these. Kierkegaard offers help here, saying, “Paganism required: Know yourself. Christianity declares: No, that is provisional — know yourself — and look at yourself in the mirror of the Word in order to know yourself properly. No true self-knowledge without God-knowledge or [without standing] before God.

The Sanctified Frontier

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To stand before the mirror means to stand before God.”10 This journey requires intentional inspection, introspection, and consideration regarding how we have been taken captive by the glittering vices of our culture. All Christians engage in their world, and all face a myriad of temptations in their engagement. Let us consider closely our own temptations and rightly display the humility modeled by Christ as we confess these temptations and guard our theological praxis from our sin-saturated hearts. Knowing ourselves — our own proclivities — helps us to see with clarity how we might avoid the aforementioned temptations and faithfully engage publicly and politically in ways that are honoring and consistent with our calling to be salt, light, set apart, loving, and humble within this world.

1 Bence Nanay, “‘Know thyself ’ is not just silly advice: It’s actively dangerous.” Aeon, October 16, 2017, accessed June 6, 2021, https://aeon. co/ideas/know-thyself-is-not-just-silly-advice-its-actively-dangerous.

2 I want to make a theological caveat here. In essence, our holiness is not what justifies or sanctifies. 2 Corinthians 5:21 tells us that Christ became sin for us that we might become the righteousness of God. So it is the holiness of Christ given over to us that allows us into the presence of God. Yet, despite this reality, there is an expectation for believers to actively participate in the holy identity that has been given to us through Christ’s offering on the cross.

3 See the definition of pluralism in the introduction of Timothy Keller and John Inazu, Uncommon Ground: Living Faithfully in a World of Difference (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2020).

4 See R. Alan Fuhr, “True Worship Versus False Worship: Worship in the Preexilic Minor Prophets,” in Biblical Worship: Theology for God’s Glory, ed. Benjamin K. Forrest, Walter C. Kaiser, and Vernon M. Whaley (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel, 2021), 271-280.

5 See also, G. K. Beale, We Become What We Worship: A Biblical Theology of Idolatry (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2008).

6 Claire Cain Miller, “How to be More Empathetic,” New York Times, n.d., https://www.nytimes.com/guides/year-of-living-better/how-to-bemore-empathetic (accessed, June 25, 2021).

7 Doug Wilson and Joe Rigney, The Sin of Empathy, Man Rampant, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6i9a3Rfd7yI (accessed, June 27, 2021). For an insightful summary of Rigney’s views on empathy, see his fictional letter written in the Lewisian voice of Screwtape to Wormwood, “The Enticing Sin of Empathy,” DesiringGod.org, May 31, 2019, https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/the-enticing-sin-of-empathy (accessed, June 28, 2021).

8 Paul Bloom, Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion (New York: ECCO, 2018).

9 Here, it could be pointed out that I am partaking in what I am warning against. I am using veiled language to pick at an issue from afar without clearly identifying where I am aiming. This temptation is subtle and can use good intentions for division in the body. The challenge for those engaging this subfield of cultural engagement is to assess, reflect, and evaluate whether the intention here is for self-aggrandizement as a virtuesignaler or whether one is stewarding their voice humbly and biblically as an encouragement and admonition. My approach is to consider often how easily I could also fall into the trap of pugilistic public theology and engagement. I know I can, and so I hope that I am walking carefully, writing not only about what I see in others but also about what I know wants to grow within my own heart.

10 Søren Kierkegaard, JP, Volume 4, S-Z, Edited and Translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975),40.

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Faculty Contribution

Timothy Yonts Instructor of Ethics College of Arts & Sciences, Liberty University

The City of God and American Greatness: Keeping an Eternal Perspective in Turbulent Times In 410 A.D., the City of Rome fell. “The City which had taken the whole world,” wrote St. Jerome, “was itself taken.”1 Nicknamed the “Eternal city,” Rome was seen as the spiritual center of the Empire. When it fell, it had a destabilizing effect on the rest of the ancient world. Many Romans attributed Rome’s fall to Christianity, but for many Christians, there was a general fear that this moment would initiate another wave of persecution. Many of them wondered whether the sack of Rome was the end of the world as they knew it. It was during this time that St. Augustine published his seminal work, The City of God (413 A.D.). Like many church fathers before him, Augustine set out to explain that Christianity was not to blame for Rome’s demise.2 Rome did not fall because it had become Christian. Rather, Augustine argues, it fell because it had not become Christian enough.3 Moreover, Rome was not the Eternal City. No earthly kingdom could be the Eternal City. The only truly eternal city was the City of God, and this reality — this city — was the object of Christian hope.

This article will explore the concepts of hope, peace, and home in the City of God as an application for American Christians in the current age. Augustine’s point was that Christian hope lies in the future, and therefore, no Christian should be surprised or dismayed when earthly kingdoms fall. This principle applies not only to Romans but to Christians of every age and empire. As America faces a new decade in the 21st century, Christians living in America would do well to remember Augustine’s advice.

A Waning American Empire?

Although this article was written prior to the 2020 election, it has been written to provide helpful reflections no matter the outcome. With any election cycle, American Christians face a doublesided temptation: to believe that America’s best days are ahead or to despair that she is driving off a cliff.

The fortunes of this great nation have always been an open question, but as we enter the third decade of the 21st century, sentiments of fear, uncertainty, and doubt loom heavy in the minds of many American Christians.

The first twenty years of this century have produced a great deal of domestic and international upheaval.

Domestically, the rise of a once benign secularism4 has seemingly transmuted into a triumphant and nearly totalitarian ideology at odds with many communities of faith.5 Internationally, America’s leadership seems to be in constant flux.6 Military conflicts, proxy wars, and challenges to American dominance are in no short supply. Global financial downturns seem to occur with increasing frequency. Amid these problems, Christians may find themselves (if only by analogy) feeling like their Roman predecessors who faced unprecedented challenges at the turn of the 5th century with endless war, economic uncertainty, and national insecurity. The experiences of Roman Christians may seem distant for saints living in modern America, but their spiritual reality is the same. Just as Augustine’s City of God offered hope and peace to his contemporaries, so too, it offers guidance for our present situation. Just as Rome was not the Eternal City, neither is the United States.

Just as Roman Christians were reminded not to fear as their beloved city fell, American Christians also must not fear in the uncertainty of America’s future.

A Tale of Two Cities In his seminal work, Augustine seeks to explain how two spiritual cities — the City of Man and the City of God — relate to one another and to earth’s kingdoms.

Throughout human history, the kingdoms of this world either provide momentary peace for the City of God, or they join the City of Man to make war against the saints. Augustine reminds us that whatever their disposition these empires are temporary — they rise and they fall — but the City of God endures. The City of God endures because, unlike earthly empires,

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it transcends both time and space. Unlike earthly empires, it cannot be conquered. Its consummation is the goal toward which God is directing all of human history. By using this framework of divine providence, Augustine admonishes Christians of every era and every empire to persevere as citizens of the City of God, not merely as citizens of the Earth. Augustine’s perspective offers Christians of every age — whether they live during the Pax Romana or during the Pax Americana — a way to view the world through the eyes of heavenly citizens.

The United States of America may not be Rome, but the hope of Christians in both kingdoms remains the same. Even though we are not Romans living in antiquity, even though America has yet been conquered, and even though our situation is incalculably different than 5th century Rome, our experiences as believers are not terribly foreign to our Roman predecessors. What was spiritually true for Roman Christians is also true for American Christians.

I contend that based on this shared spiritual experience, Augustine’s City provides at least three principles of reflection for contemporary American believers.

1. Our hope lies at the end of history, not in our present moment.

A central theme in Augustine is the doctrine of divine providence, the view that God is consciously directing all of history toward a goal for which the saints can hope. For Augustine, this historical direction gives meaning to human existence. All historical events derive their meaning and purpose from the singular goal of history; namely, the consummation of the City of God.7 Earthly kingdoms are only temporary chapters in the unfolding of God’s history. This idea is not foreign to the contemporary Christians, but it may be easily forgotten if we place our confidence in the current status of American greatness or if we despair at the prospect of an impending American decline. Rest assured, Augustine reminds us: history has a goal, but that goal is not American greatness; it is the City of God. All earthly empires will melt away at this coming Kingdom.

So, it is with this historical perspective that we should understand our place in history. America will eventually fall. Its destruction is a historical and theological inevitability. The United States may well dominate the global stage for another thousand years, but what if it does not? What if we witness the long decline of the American empire? Can we accept this reality as God’s providence? Are we willing to accept

it? If our fear or joy is shaped by the prospects of our earthly kingdom, we have misplaced our hope in the temporary houses of the City of Man, not in the eternal dwelling of the City of God.

2. Our peace comes from a spiritual city, not from earthly kingdoms.

It is important to recognize that Augustine views earthly governments as instrumentally good for the City of God insofar as they facilitate peace in society (Romans 13:1-7). However, since earthly governments are formed by citizens of both the City of Man and the City of God, they can only be instruments of temporal peace — a fleeting and fragile peace. True, lasting peace belongs only to the City of God, which Christ will secure in the Last Day.8 In the meantime, the City of Man makes war with the City of God. The values which give rise to earthly kingdoms — greed, conquest, lust — belong to the City of Man and contradict the values of the City of God. The City of God finds itself inevitably at odds with the culture and governments of the City of Man. The same is true of American Christians. In the short history of the United States, religious liberty has been a bedrock Constitutional right, but the relative peace we have enjoyed may not last. If it does not, the rise of religious persecution should not surprise the people of God (2 Timothy 3:12). Religious liberty has provided an incredible opportunity to live quiet and peaceful lives, but it is not an entitlement without which we should despair. Religious liberty is worth defending, but if we lose it, we will not have lost our source of true peace in the City of God.

3. Our home is in heaven, not in this world Citizens of the City of God are sojourners amid the foreign kingdoms of the earth. The City of Man loves earthly goods and earthly kingdoms, but the City of God loves God Himself. These two loves are in direct conflict. Thus, when properly aligned, the love of God should produce feelings of homelessness and longing in the hearts of believers. It should produce a sense of alienation from worldly systems and a desire for a home beyond this life. If the saints begin to feel at home in the world, it is a sign that something has gone wrong with their love.

A longing for another world does not preclude patriotism, however. To the contrary, Augustine says saints should pray for peace and tranquility and even to defend it militarily.9 However, amid their temporal

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allegiances, the saints should never seek their true home in the kingdoms of the earth. Patriotism and Christianity are compatible only insofar as the former submits to the latter. If patriotism leads to arrogance in times of prosperity or despair in times of uncertainty, then it has supplanted faith in Christ. It has led us to combine our eternal spiritual home with our temporary earthly home.

Thus, the City of God reminds us that our true home transcends every nation and empire throughout time, and although we should work for the success of our nation, we must never make our home here. As saints, we are citizens of an empire that can never be conquered. Why would we ever fear the demise of our earthly kingdom? We must recognize that patriotism is good, but citizenship in the City of God is better.

Conclusion

Christ, the Lord of history and the One who holds the keys of death and hell (Revelation 1:18). Even though it is good to confess one’s love for God and country, we must never allow our confidence in the latter to shipwreck our faith in the former. Nor should we allow fear in the present to destroy our hope in the future. In the coming decades, whatever America’s fate, Christians should not despair. Rather, we should look toward the heavenly city to which we belong and toward which we are going.

1

Jerome, Letter CXXVII. To Principia.

Augustine, The City of God, ed. Vernon J. Bourke (New York: Image, 1958), 55–56.

2

Ronald H. Nash, The Meaning of History (Nashville: Probe Books, 1998), 50.

3

Richard Neuhaus, The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1984).

4

For a glimpse at some emerging challenges facing communities of faith, see Allen Hertzke, ed., Religious Freedom in America: Constitutional Roots and Contemporary Challenges (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015), 135–248.

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We are pilgrims on the Earth, sojourners whose citizenship in the City of God requires us to await the coming Kingdom of Christ. Whether we find ourselves in a moment of peace or trouble; whether we lose religious liberties or keep them; whether we witness prolonged American greatness or the demise of our once prosperous nation; with or without America, the eternal City of God will endure. Amid our efforts to engage and transform culture, we must never place our hope in earthly kingdoms, political victories, or charismatic leaders. We must never allow the rise or fall of earthly empires to displace our confidence in

For two helpful and recent articles discussing the decline of American dominance on the global stage, see Tom Engelhardt, The End of the American Century, The Nation, June 19, 2020, https://www.thenation. com/article/world/trump-empire-decline/; Richard Lachmann, Life at the End of American Empire: Richard Lachmann on the Slow Decline of a Superpower, Literary Hub, January 14, 2020, https://lithub.com/life-atthe-end-of-american-empire/.

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7

Augustine, The City of God, 198.

8

Ibid., 473.

J. Philip Wogaman, Christian Ethics: A Historical Introduction, Second.

(Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2011), 58–60.

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Faculty Contribution

Dennis R. McDonald Instructor of Theology John W. Rawlings School of Divinity, Liberty University

APPLIED THEOLOGY IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIETAL CONTEXTS Even though the days in which we live are polarized, they are not unprecedentedly so. People and societies have always experienced tensions resulting from different approaches to life. Therefore, in order to consider the foundation and necessity of living by faith in the contemporary social context, we must consider what Scripture highlights as the normative practice and outworking of the Christian spirit. This involves applying theology in our world by focusing on the dynamic momentum of faith, which carries us from the innermost life of our soul into the outer worlds of culture and society. To this end, it is helpful to re-ground our social and political engagement in our Christian convictions, recognizing that such engagement begins with theology and expands outward as that theology is applied in varying situations and terrains, culminating in a unified expression of human life lived unto the glory of our Father in Heaven.

To do this properly, however, and with any chance of success, requires us to recognize which aspects and doctrines of the Christian faith must take priority in our efforts to engage culture, and which represent areas of unnecessary conflict and tension, which are not essential to the heart of the Gospel. Gavin Ortlund, in Finding the Right Hills to Die On, explains a helpful approach to doctrinal prioritization, designed to provide a framework through which Christians can determine which of their beliefs are worth fighting for in different contexts, as opposed to those which would be counterproductive. Ortlund groups Christian beliefs into four basic categories:

• First Rank Doctrines are those which are essential

to the Gospel itself and cannot be compromised or underemphasized without losing the very nature of Christianity.

• Second Rank Doctrines inform the healthy operations of churches and are important enough to separate churches into denominations.

• Third Rank Doctrines are important to Christians

but not so important as to justify separation or divisions among Christians.

• Fourth Rank Doctrines may be intellectually interesting but are unimportant to Gospel witness and ministry.1

This article will explore different realms of theology, dealing with how Christianity impacts various human relationships. It will also seek to evaluate what issues should take priority in each of these circles according to Ortlund’s evaluative framework.

“The Things of First Importance”: Knowing God and a Personal Faith Now I would remind you, brothers, of the Gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved … For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received …

(1 Corinthians 15:1-3a) We begin with the things of “first importance,” which the Apostle Paul defines as the personal application of the Gospel to an individual’s heart — a real and certain transformational encounter with God Himself through faith in His Son (1 Samuel 10:5-6, Romans 6:4). By a gracious act of divine regeneration, a person receives a new moral orientation (Ephesians 4:21-24). What man was once blind to morally, concerning things that did not bother him, now trouble him since they are seen from God’s perspective (John 9:39-41). Thus, the Christian comes to an awareness of God in the forefront of all of his endeavors (Acts 10:36). We become societal examiners, viewing human customs and institutions through the grid of values provided in the Scriptures (Acts 17:21-23). Consequently, an earnest believer should experience keen conviction as his heart is

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realigned towards pleasing God in whatever he does (Colossians 3:17). One becomes an evangelist of one’s own heart first (Jeremiah 17:10, Ephesians 2:1-5) and thereafter a heralder of the faith beyond oneself. This new view of the world, informed by biblical categories and values, actively shapes and orders the patterns of one’s life and relationships. This progressively becomes the catalyst for the totality of a convert’s life — leading to renewed relationships with society and culture as well. While there will certainly be healthy debate among Christians about how precisely to organize doctrines, one must reflectively consider which beliefs are so essential that they cannot possibly be downgraded. The Gospel is not one of those.

“You Shall Teach them Diligently”: Passing on These Things of First Importance And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise (Deuteronomy 6:6-7).

The conversion of an individual’s heart impacts their immediate surroundings. Specifically, it must rewire the way in which he understands family life (Joshua 24:15). Both the Old and New Testaments place

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a high value on paving the way forward for future generations. Here, everyone has a part. Men come to view themselves as a protector and vanguard of their own families (Ephesians 5:23). Women come to see themselves as fellow workers and teachers, bestowing wisdom on the next generation (Philippians 4:3, Proverbs 31, Titus 2:3-4). Their homes become an extension of God’s Kingdom (John 14:21,23) on Earth. With personal faith a man comes to treat his wife as a faith partner, in that, he comes to love her as Christ loves the church (Ephesians 5:28-32) and learns to walk in their covenant as partners in history unto God’s glory (Genesis 1:26-28).

His children, also, should be raised to honor and revere the things of God (Proverbs 22:6). Their minds should be trained as warriors (Psalms 128:2-4, 127:3-5, 128:2-4). Slowly, their thinking is changed as they are discipled (Romans 12:1-2). Soon they themselves will go out into society, bearing with them their refined understanding of and relationship with God. When discussing the realm of family life, it is important to thoughtfully consider whether one’s ideas of male headship in the home fall into first rank or second rank. For some, the organization of the family structure should not be considered of Gospel rank but is nonetheless an important tool for Gospel witness.

“Whatever You Do”: Vocation as Worship to the Lord Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving (Colossians 3:23-24).

As stewards of God’s created potential on the Earth, we come to work or labor not only to provide for our families or our own physical needs, but because work represents a pure expression of God’s design for mankind. While it is ideal if our job or career corresponds to our inner passions and skills, all work — even that which seems mundane — can become an avenue of redemptive purpose and joy. No job is too small for those in Christ. Even Jesus was a manual laborer (Matthew 13:35). So while we may prefer it if our work corresponds to our unique talents, and if possible be something that we enjoy, our faith never reduces the value of work to merely a fulfillment of our own desires and passions. It is rather the design of God for human life that manifests itself in all

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productive and creative cultivation or service, no matter what form it might take.

Our methods of making a living should reveal our character and desire for God to be honored in our life and our labor (Acts 4:13). We are to work to honor God in whatever we do (Matthew 5:14-16). Yet the world and its persuasions are often hostile toward the people of God and their desire to reflect the character and works of the Savior. Therefore, as workers we must set our faces and make it our determination to please Him in our labor (2 Corinthians 5:9). Even the trials of affliction and social pressure on the job may have a larger lesson and bring greater increase to the kingdom than we can imagine. As believers we learn through challenge and trial (John 16:33), and in those hard times, people observe us to see if there is any value or practical validity in our faith. Our theological views on vocation are most likely a third or fourth tier doctrine.

“Contend for the Faith”: Social Presence as Cultural Engagement Dear friends, although I was very eager to write to you about the salvation we share, I felt compelled to write and urge you to contend for the faith that was once for all entrusted to God’s holy people (Jude 1:3).

A Christian becomes an agent, a vessel, and a tool of Christ as he lives his life in the public square.

Christ awakens the noetic nature of man. Paul demonstrates this in his address on Mars Hill. The Apostle became critical of the reality around him, and desired to bring God’s perspective on issues to the people who were suffering under delusions and lies (Acts 17:18-19). One thing that needs to occur more critically in our day is for Christians to bring God’s perspective on life and circumstances (Proverbs 8:13-16). This holds true even in civil engagement.

No one confronted cultural malaise more than Jesus, but He gave God’s viewpoint on moral issues through an unabated and active righteousness (John 7:7). Admittedly, such behavior might irritate some, but the Christian must be willing to stand up for the truth even in the midst of social pressure and hostility (Acts 4:13). The believer cannot retreat from his faith’s conviction but must know when to answer a fool in his folly and when not to (Proverbs 26:4). Therefore, as a Christian is involved in his neighborhoods, communities, political institutions, etc., the conviction and content of one’s faith should inform one’s perspective and be demonstrated in one’s conduct (Galatians 5:11, 25). The early

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American dynamic of Christian involvement affords a profitable example of how this can be done well and a model for contemporary engagement. Cultural engagement, depending what denomination you are in could be a second or third tier doctrine. It is practically necessary for every Christian and has led to denominational division in the past.

“And You will be My Witnesses”: Faith on Display before the World And you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth (Acts 1:8b).

Finally, an earnest believer becomes concerned with the spreading of the Gospel around the world (Matthew 28:18-20). Just as a believer has been affected by good news from a far country (Proverbs 25:25), so earnest faith should concern itself with the larger spreading of the Gospel around the globe for God’s glory. The goal is to consider one’s self, family, vocation, and larger society as multiple fields of human life in which God’s creative and redemptive glory can express itself through His people (Isaiah 12:3). Exactly how or when we spread the Gospel may be up for debate, but as Christians we cannot resist our duty to what is most important.

Conclusion In each of these domains, acting according to Christian beliefs and convictions may bring one into tension or conflict with the patterns of this world and even — at times — with other Christians who view certain doctrines differently. As such, it is necessary to form some kind of framework to evaluate what beliefs and behaviors are necessary for Christians to stand and fight for, as opposed to those which would actually be counterproductive to one’s ministry. The framework in this article gives a helpful operational basis for exhibiting one’s faith both to other Christians and to nonbelievers.

Christianity not only provides a basis on which to engage with each area, relationship, and sphere of life as a unique creational domain of God but also furnishes a practical grid through which to inform how we approach each. By living actively and reflectively, prioritizing our witness biblically in each public and private relationship, the Christian is able to demonstrate through his conduct and behavior the purity and practical truth of his beliefs.

Gavin Ortlund, Finding the Right Hills to Die On: The Case for Theological Triage (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2020), 19.

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CENTER for APOLOGETICS & CULTURAL ENGAGEMENT

Check Out Our Recent Faculty Publications LUAPOLOGETICS.COM

Biblical Worship: Theology for God’s Glory Benjamin K. Forrest, Walter C. Kaiser Jr., and Vernon M. Whaley

The Inquisitive Christ: 12 Engaging Questions Cara L.T. Murphy

Talking About Ethics: A Conversational Approach to Moral Dilemmas Michael S. Jones, Mark J. Farnham, and David L. Saxon

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Faculty Contribution

Carey Roberts Online Dean and Professor of History College of Arts and Sciences, Liberty University

THREE TRADITIONS IN AMERICAN POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT: FINANCE, VIRTUE, AND INSTITUTION Contemplating the ramifications of the 2020 presidential election is serious business. Running up to Election Day, pundits insisted that what followed would be apocalyptic for whichever party loses. It was not the first time that American voters believed their worlds were at stake. Intense partisan division is not new to presidential politics even though things have arguably gotten worse over the past four years. Time will tell if 2020 will be any more eventful than 2016, or 1992, or 1968, or 1932, etc. … That so much is at stake may say more about the fractured and overpowered state of the political system than it does about the mindset of average voters. Pivotal elections can often raise equally pivotal questions about the ongoing success and sustainability of American self-government. This was no less the case in the 19th and 20th centuries or now in the 21st century.

republicans,” who insisted that the virtue of the people guaranteed their freedom, that only the best qualified should hold political office, and that inculcating personal virtue among the population was indispensable to the future of self-government.

On the other were “agrarian republicans” committed to properly arranging political institutions so that they best met the needs of the people even if selfinterested sorts gained office. Contemporary words that best describe these two traditions are “virtuous” and “institutionalists,” with Adams representing the former and Jefferson reflecting the latter. A third was the financial tradition where neither virtue nor institutions mattered nearly as much as forging a close partnership between the wealthy (or those most capable of producing wealth) and those who controlled the reins of government.2

One of the most calamitous elections occurred in 1800, when Republican Thomas Jefferson defeated Federalist John Adams. The election pitted clear choices on how Americans would maintain their self-government. For years, Jefferson insisted that Adams and his followers steered the country off course and derailed key compromises for producing the Constitution and Bill of Rights. To John Adams, Jefferson represented the repugnant rabble of the frontier. But worse, Jefferson’s affinity for the French Revolution and scathing rumors of relationships with his slaves disqualified him from holding high office.1

Knowing how each unfolded in subsequent centuries goes far in helping us understand the deeply divided political system we face today, and it also helps define important differences in how Americans vote — and perhaps why there are now greater divides among Christians in the political realm than in elections past. It should also be noted that these political cultures may be closely tied to political parties but by no means does any historic party have a monopoly on one or the others. Rarely in the past have party leaders cobbled together electoral victory from only one political culture. While the limited financial tradition is important for context, what matters most for contemporary America is the tension between the more widely felt virtue tradition with its emphasis on the personal character and conviction of leaders and those who insist on striking a proper balance between ruling elites and the interests of ordinary people.

Three Traditions in American Political Engagement There are three great political traditions of early America that continue to shape political life today.

Historian Forrest McDonald described two of these in early America, typified by the contestants in the presidential election of 1800. He argued that early Americans followed two clear paths to preserve “republicanism,” a term used then to describe selfgovernment. On the one hand were the “puritanical

The Financial Tradition Typified by Hamilton The tradition began when the first companies of Elizabethan England colonized North America and continues to this day. Its approach has been to

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combine the interests of both financial and political elites so that those closely connected to financial markets get rich — with the hope that the rest of society will also rise accordingly. One of the best early examples occurred in the first months under the Constitution when Alexander Hamilton proposed a series of financial plans during the Washington administration. But this tradition soon moved through history to include small town boosters scheming for a railroad in antebellum Pennsylvania to industrial lobbyists clamoring for protective tariffs, and more recently culminating in corporate executives demanding bailouts because their companies are “too big to fail.” Given the vast resources of North America, the hopes of the financial tradition as buoying the general population are realistic, and even when their schemes fail, bankruptcy protection and taxpayer bailouts usually keep the economy afloat. From the beginning, theirs is always an effort to politically speed up rather than slow down capitalist progress.3

The Virtue Tradition Typified by Adams Making sure the right quality of person seeks and gains political office is usually the highest priority for those in the virtue tradition. Even if electoral victory is beyond their grasp, they take comfort in knowing they did the right thing. The view is commonly summarized by a statement attributed to John Adams’s son, John Quincy, who may have stated, “Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost.” While the virtuous use different language to describe their principles — often drawing from Scripture, classical antiquity, scientific disciplines, and even faddish self-help movements — whatever definition they choose typically means more than moral rectitude.

Rhetorically, it involves self-sacrifice and willingness to put the needs of others above your own. Within a political context, it implies that there is some higher good above the concerns of a given population, and only those with a certain kind of character can ensure it is met. The more people hold these virtues, the more likely self-government and peaceful coexistence will continue. However, determining which virtues matter most takes wildly different approaches over the course of American history.

What constituted virtuous behavior to John Adams differed greatly from that of Ralph Waldo Emerson or leading progressive intellectuals like Herbert Croly a century later.4 Yet, the message remained the same. For self-government to function in the United States, the population must hold to a list of ideas and

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perceptions and behave a certain way. The nation must be dedicated, at all costs, to putting the right kind of person into a position of political power. This is of supreme importance.

The Institutional Tradition Typified by Jefferson As a defining term, “institutionalists” can be difficult to understand. The term “federalists” is the apt description, but that term has long been used for other purposes. Most Americans define federalism as the separation of powers in the federal government or perhaps the separation of power between the federal government and the states. However, the term when considered according to the original Latin root, foedus — meaning “covenant” or an “association” or even a “league” of states — comes to signify much more than political institutions. They see human existence, especially of Americans, as composed of countless relationships and associations spanning space and time. The daily habits of life subject a person to obligations and benefits from each relationship in such a way that the typical person lives in an interconnected web of parallel societies each having its own rules. The extent to which persons in a society can freely forge meaningful relationships and associations, rather than their personal character, is most critical. For politics, advocates of this tradition included men like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison who insisted that human freedom and liberty depend upon protecting the sanctity of these relationships, such as churches, schools, or civic leagues, which are often institutionalized in nonpolitical, cultural, and legal means.

For institutionalists, the key to self-government is making sure no one person, institution, or groups thereof gain supremacy over the rest. Therefore, the concept of “separation of powers” is partly correct but involves much more than separating just the executive, judicial, and legislative branches of government. Applied to politics, institutionalists have little faith that virtue has practical use if the institutions are combined to overpower individuals or associations in civil society. Likewise, corrupt institutions will inevitably attract shady people, or otherwise corrupt even the best among us. Personal character plays an important role but is not as consequential as preserving the sanctity and free exercise of forging balanced relationships, free from overriding external pressure.

Traditions and Weaknesses There are serious downsides to both the virtue and institutionalist traditions. The virtuous can easily

become insular, provincial, and even abstract in their thinking. They lose touch with their relationships when they inflexibly insist on universal precepts and principles. There is a tendency to avoid tensions for the sake of virtue — even when people are mired in clear moral compromise. When given multiple leadership roles, responsibilities are not carefully weighed and prioritized. Instead there is a presumption that one set of principles should cover all aspects of life.

Centuries of custom and institutions usually mollified demands for such all-absorbing principles. But by the 20th century, the effort to render supreme a single virtue or principle grew into ideological thinking and fomented an infinite array of isms. Too easily drawn to perceiving the world in exclusive ideological terms, the virtuous transitioned matters of character into planks of a political agenda, and they started measuring human worth in terms of how fully people dedicated themselves to those principles. Thus the “personal becomes the political.”5 By the end of the century, this perspective affected the entire range of political and social commitments in the United States. It easily included key cultural figures who reflected diverging religious, moral, and political convictions.

Alternatively, what makes institutionalists successful often becomes their key vice in the eyes of the virtuous. The flexibility to rebalance and constantly reprioritize relationships smacks of an unanchored mind mired in earthly and populist traditions. Building common, everyday relationships or interacting within a traditional institution does not always require highminded virtues, let alone deliberate choice. Matters of culture are rarely so intentional and rely as much on reflexive habit as they do on reflective virtue. It seems those best at living in this complicated, institutional world have a kind of sixth sense that enables them to perceive their intricate and nuanced rules. But at times, they also see the imperfections and may even exploit the rules and weaknesses they discover.

Consequently, the most hazardous aspect of the institutionalist tradition is that its successful adherents may not always gently navigate the country’s cultural mosaic. They can see their world from a bird’s eye view while strategically plotting their next step into a new relationship. But when unable to overcome some impenetrable barrier, they push forward with the sheer power of personality and offer little regard to certain cultural norms and traditions. Despite whatever success they bring to themselves and others, they come across as bad characters, callous, and unrelenting in their pursuit of personal ambition.

For people who deeply understand the complex relationships of American life, they are not necessarily good at honoring all their forms and rules. Yet, this

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political tradition produces powerful and determined personalities like presidents Andrew Jackson and Richard Nixon. It also produces highly successful entrepreneurs like John D. Rockefeller, Sam Walton, and even Steve Jobs.

At the point when institutionalists rely upon the strength of will and the virtuous sink into ideological bubbles, there is no room for partnerships between the two thus creating political problems that often seem insurmountable. Typically fewer Americans assent to the virtue tradition. It is safe to say, however, that people like this often serve as the clear power brokers in modern, partisan politics. Up until present times, the virtuous served the useful function of keeping political life contained, tame, and less abrasive. They shaped party platforms, occupied important places in media and movement organizations, and ultimately served as the gatekeepers for those seeking office. They shared mannerisms and personality preferences despite deep divisions along ideological lines.

An argument can be made that the lasting tension between the virtuous and the institutionalists only benefits those in the Hamiltonian, financial political culture. It can be easy to then conclude that the financial elites will always win no matter which political party holds power. Yet in a period when portions of those elites now foster specific ideological demands, those holding to traditional virtues as well as the value of traditional institutions should settle their grievances. In time, traditional virtues will be totally supplanted by new ideological fads and prescriptions.

Irrespective of every religious and thoughtful effort to defend traditional virtues, the tide has turned against them. In no short order, the virtue tradition will further fragment along impenetrable ideological lines and ever more institutions will be forced to meet

ideological litmus tests. The cultural descendants of Adams and Jefferson will suffer together unless “Jeffersonians” learn to speak the language of virtue and at least cautiously embrace it. But advocates of traditional virtues must be prepared to do what they historically failed to do. They must accept that the things that matter to most people are not found in elite culture, and they must learn to speak without pretention, or worse, apply principles totally alien to common circumstances. It may also demand that the virtuous accept that no matter how decent their leaders may be, corrupt institutions may still overwhelm the most steadfast. To state that both sides need each other now more than ever may seem trite. Their very survival now depends upon it.

The best lengthy treatment of the turbulent friendship of Adams and Jefferson remains Gordon S. Wood, Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson (Penguin, 2017).

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2 Forrest McDonad, Novus Ordo Seclorum: The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution (University of Kansas Press, 1985). See especially chapter 3. McDonald covers the “financial” tradition most directly in Alexander Hamilton: A Biography (W.W. Norton, 1982).

3 See John Steele Gordon, Hamilton’s Blessing: The Extraordinary Life and Times of our National Debt (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2010), and The Business of America: Tales from the Marketplace - American Enterprise from the Settling of New England to the Breakup of AT&T (Walker and Company, 2001).

4 The literature on the “virtue” tradition is abundant and includes classic works such as Alasdair MacIntyr, After Virtue (University of Notre Dame Press, 1981) to Quinten Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge University Press, 1978). To understand its shift in modern American, see Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: The Story of Ideas in America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002).

5 Carol Hanisch, “The Personal is Political,” reprinted in Barbara A. Crow, Radical Feminism: A Documentary Reader (New York University Press, 2000).

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Guest Interview

CULTURAL ENGAGEMENT, LISTENING, AND PUBLIC THEOLOGY Recently, D.A. Horton took some time to have a conversation with Ben Forrest, managing editor of Faith and the Academy. Horton is Assistant Professor of Intercultural Studies at California Baptist University.

He is author of several books, including “Intensional: Kingdom Ethnicity in a Divided World.”

Forrest: As a Christian, what guides your view of public theology?

Horton: I recognize that the Kingdom of God is a

theme that runs throughout Scripture, as the space in which God’s sovereignty is the reality that He rules and reigns over all things. I also recognize the role of the Church to be a preview of what His restoration of all creation is going to look like. When I look at all the different spaces of influences and issues in society, I look to apply the kingdom ethics found in Scripture to this specific topic. What I do in my teaching and writing is bring Scripture into dialogue with what is going on around me in society so that Scripture speaks into these lived realities.

Forrest: Can you tell the audience a little bit about

who you are and what brought you to your role as professor, writer, and church planter in the pluralistic context of California?

Horton:

I come from a heritage that is Mexican American, Native American, as well as various European ethnicities. I am a bit of a montage, but at the same time, I grew up in a predominantly AfricanAmerican context. I also grew up in poverty, with heavy gang and drug activity all around. I began to

When it comes to the ethnic divisions in our world, we speak often of seeking racial reconciliation. But at no point have all the different ethnicities on Earth been reconciled.

Animosity, distrust, and hostility among people from various ethnicities have always existed in American history. Even in the church, we have often built walls — ethnic segregation, classism, sexism, and theological tribes to divide God’s people from each other. But it shouldn’t be this way. God’s people are the only people on earth who have experienced true reconciliation. Who better to enter into the ethnic tensions of our day with the hope of Jesus? Here, Horton steps into the tension to offer vision and practical guidance for Christians longing to embrace our Kingdom ethnicity, combating the hatred in our culture with the hope of Jesus Christ.

D.A. Horton, Intensional: Kingdom Ethnicity in a Divided World. Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2019. $15.99

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see brokenness in humanity multiplied everywhere I went. When the Lord saved me in my teenage years, I began to recognize that just because He has resurrected me, it does not mean my entire community has been resurrected to life. So I began to deal with the new tension of how to represent the Lord, how to share the Gospel, and how do I even defend my faith against all those various religions and philosophies which saturated my environment. I had to learn early on how to defend the faith before I even knew what apologetics was. Now that I live in California, God has allowed me to have a heart that is filled with empathy and compassion, which seeks to understand the people from all sorts of contexts. They often have different opinions, and from them I can learn what they are looking for and how to express the truth of God’s Word into their story.

California is filled with people from different cultures and worldviews. I have found that building my conversation from a shared vision of humanity allows conversations to find greater receptivity. So I don’t divorce my humanity from my faith, and this allows me to be seen as human to somebody who is unregenerate.

Then, I can express common shared humanity and how the Gospel is good news for my frailties which leads to Gospel-infused conversations. My goal is to drive nonbelievers to become more inquisitive about my position, even if they feel like they're looking for inconsistencies in my worldview, which to me is an open door for more Christ-infused conversations that are contextualized to the topic at hand.

Forrest: As you are talking about shared humanity,

one thing that I assume is required to cultivate that is a posture of listening. How have you cultivated that posture in your own walking with people in different worldviews, and how can Christians grow as listeners?

Horton:

I was raised in a Pentecostal charismatic environment, from five to twenty-five. Alongside that rhythm comes the reality of holiness, from a charismatic Wesleyan influence. Holiness, from this perspective, often deteriorated into an avoidance of drinking, smoking, profanity, and sexual promiscuity.

Then my biblical training was rooted in a classical dispensational perspective. The ethos of this was a bit rigid when engaging cultural conversations as to what is acceptable as Christian behavior or not. I say this as a backdrop because I used to have ears that would only listen to refute the person. What the Lord has done, as I have surrendered my heart more to Him, is mature my approach to listening. Previously, I never

thought to listen to understand people as persons. I began to recognize greater value in listening in order to draw out the content of their heart. Now, I have learned to not only listen to them, but as I listen, to also ask the Holy Spirit to sensitize my being that my response is inviting and God-honoring. This includes still remaining theologically cognizant so that I can answer questions from Scripture. This approach has made follow-up questions more meaningful because it has allowed people to recognize that I am sincerely interested in their perspective and conclusions. When I then respond, I always do it by leveraging the conversation and asking something to the effect, “May I ask your permission to share my perspective and my experience of what shapes my vantage point to this issue?” Most often the response is, “Absolutely.” Active listening has gotten me much further in conversations than simply conditioning my responses to their questions in a pre-rehearsed, catechetical response.

Forrest: Continuing with the value of listening, how

can the habit of listening help Christians engaging in apologetics, knowing that few have answers to all the questions that can be asked in an apologetic scenario?

Can it/does it relieve some of that fear that is often associated with evangelism and apologetics?

Horton:

I think that question actually highlights one of the deficiencies I have found in Evangelicalism.

When it comes to issues like the problem of evil, we get stuck in our head, and we divorce the content in our head from our heart. Dr. Hindson at Liberty has actually been very influential in my life because he talks about the importance of the head, heart, and hands. We have the theological framework of Scripture in our head, but we also need to leverage our heart.

We have separated our God-given emotions from our interactions. We are multifaceted beings, and part of the reality of the non-material gifts that God has given us are our emotions. One of the reasons we forget the value of emotions is because of the temptation for extreme emotionalism. But in guarding against emotionalism, we disconnect heart from our head.

In conversations where we do not have an answer, we don't have to tense up and shut down. We may think, “Okay let me just give them the Scripture, and then I've done the job.” In those moments, we need to be sensitive to the Holy Spirit, not in the thirdwave sense, but in an honest posture of submission to the leading of the Spirit. This often requires grieving with those who are in grief. When we do not have the answers, faithful presence is apologetic itself.

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When we divorce our emotions we do not know how to be good listeners, we do not know how to show empathy. Instead, we think we are cowering to humanists or the nonbeliever and thus not effectively representing God. That is not always true, however.

Learning to integrate our humanity with our theology does not make one an outright humanist. We have to understand that the gifts that God is giving us are to be used for His glory. So if I deny my emotions, I am not honoring God. I am actually suppressing a gift that He has given to me to have shared experiences with other human beings. That does not always mean it is going to lead to regeneration, but what it can mean is a reinforcement of biblical truth. And so in many moments where I am walking alongside those in mourning, I have followed the biblical admonition to weep with those who weep (Romans 12:15). While I know that our God is sovereign, this may not be the time for introducing this theological reality. Instead, I am going to simply sit with you here and walk with you through your season of loss. In these moments, we become more holistic in our apologetic as we approach others with our head, heart, and then hands.

In my context this often lays the foundation for future conversations where I can verbally and theologically engage believed heresies that have surfaced as I have gotten to know people.

Forrest: How is the theme ‘inhabiting the City of Man, being the City of God’ relevant to this cultural moment?

Horton:

This is a conversation that I have with my students as I walk them through the nuances of Augustine’s theology. One of the components that I express to them about the City of God is that it helps us particularly in America because of our unique position. Throughout history, there has not been a democracy like ours. What I try to help students understand is that no matter who is in power in the executive, legislative, or judicial branches, no matter what their worldviews are, the global mission of Christ’s Church — to make disciples of every ethnicity — is still intact. The reality of living in the City of Man allows us to be kingdom previewers of the City of God. So, our mission to express what righteousness, holiness, justice, empathy, compassion, righteous indignation, and truth-telling are — these are kingdom attributes that Christ embodies perfectly. So even when we fail to do that, even when we miss opportunities, the good news is that Jesus’

perfect righteous never retreats from us. We are still forensically not guilty and our citizenship remains in heaven. The reality is that the country of our origin, whether here today or gone tomorrow, does not change the fact that we are called to make disciples.

Often the greatest pushback to this perspective is from my fellow Christians. The reason is the unholy weaving of the doctrine of Americanization that was employed mainstream in our culture, especially escalating post World War II, which meant that to be American is to be Christian, to dissolve your previous heritage, to take on a new heritage, and a new nationality. In the church, it is assumed that your identity in Christ has nothing to do with or has no room for dialogue on ethnicity, which is something we don't do with gender. If we did this with gender, we would have no skin in the game when it comes to the LGBTQ conversation or the sanctity of marriage conversation. We do not do it when it comes to economic stewardship because we talk about stewardship, employment, and work ethic, but when it comes to ethnicity all of a sudden, we are one in Christ. There is no Greek or Jew. But if we are only going to take a two-thirds interpretation of Galatians 3:28, then we need to be consistent. We either need to take a zero-third interpretation or a three-thirds interpretation. So the reason I feel led to dialogue with that in the City of God is because when we look at Revelation 21:44-26, it is the ethnicities which are bringing the honor of their cultures, heritage, and spiritual capital into the City of God to present to Him as a presentation for His glory. So the ethnicities of the regenerate, the full elect of God, the City of God, all the constituencies are a multiethnic, multilinguistic, multigenerational, populated city of those that God has elected and those whom He will save. Therefore, ethnicity remains present in the eternal state. This side of eternity, specifically in America, the church has bought into the lie that ethnicity causes division, and my pushback is the City of God shows us there is unity but still ethnicity.

Thus, this is something we need to redeem as American Christians. It is a God-given gift. To affirm the ethnicity of a believer is not to usurp their identity in Christ, and I think this is an important counter to what many have believed stemming from the City of Man.

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Faculty Contribution

Mary Macdonald Ogden Instructor of History College of Arts & Sciences, Liberty University

THE LESSONS OF HISTORY: CONSERVATIVE FEMINISM, CHRISTIAN WITNESS, AND COMPROMISE Feminist icon Betty Friedan said, “Men are not the enemy, but the fellow victims. The real enemy is women’s denigration of themselves.” The war today is among women, not against them. This was made clear in the reaction to the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. On Sept. 25, 2020, The Nation labeled Barrett an extremist who ignored “the moral and ethical underpinnings of her faith when they conflict with the cruel requirements of conservative dogma.”1 A month later, minutes after the Senate confirmation, the National Organization of Women published a statement claiming Barrett as “groomed to overturn many of the important equality gains of the last 60 years” — namely the Affordable Care Act, abortion funding, LGBTQIA+ rights, and environmental protections — and warned, “We know what’s at stake — everything.”2 Anti-Barrett media oozed deep vitriol. Denounced as “one weird woman with weird ideas and weird

religion,” Barrett’s Catholicism and conservative feminism are choices that remove her from a seat at the feminist table. For a woman who embodies feminist achievement — mother of seven, legal scholar, and newly minted Supreme Court justice — the great question is why?

The vicious attacks reveal deep fissures among women about what is and is not feminist.

Somewhere along the way in women’s push for equality, feminism “mutated into a forceful enumeration of partisan positions that one must adhere to as a verified feminist,” and rather than living up to the feminist goal of inclusivity and equity, it morphed into an exclusive club.3 If feminism in its simplest form is advocacy for women’s rights on the basis of equality, then why is conservative feminism so polarizing?

Wil Lou Gray, 1905, Vanderbilt University, center row 2.

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A recent journalist framed the answer clearly: “Conservative feminism” is not only a nonsensical term, but an oxymoron. Feminism at its core is about dismantling long-standing patriarchal power structures and protecting women’s freedom in the pursuit of gender equality. This is not what Barrett’s judicial history reflects … she does not seem to believe in women’s freedom to make their own choices about their bodies.4 Body politics are the dividing line in the contest between who’s in and who’s out of the feminist collective. French scholar Michel Foucault captured the centrality of the body in the politics of oppression when claiming it as an “object and target of power, a field on which the hierarchies of power are displayed and inscribed.” Only in the past fifty years, after decades of activism, have women in the United States gained political and social equality and control over discourse about the female body. Among the greatest achievement of the women’s movement was the power of choice. But choice about work, family, education, politics, and the body is a contested idea, especially when choice is used to choose poorly. Who determines what is a good and bad choice is key to explaining why some women are hailed as icons of female empowerment and others dismissed. Conservative feminism is relegated to the latter category because of its rejection of sexual politics.

What is conservative feminism? It is a form of feminism that builds on “rather than repudiating — the ideals and institutions of Western culture” to promote justice.5 It is not anti-male, anti-family, or subordinate to patriarchy, but it does seek equality while recognizing the innate differences between men and women, childbearing chief among these.

To alleviate fears at the start, I’m not advocating for a feminism associated with abortion, radical overhaul of society and its morals, or a call to “dismantle the patriarchy.” Nor do I think a conservative or Christian feminism leads to such outcomes. In her seminal essay “The New Conservative Feminism,” Judith Stacey saw conservative feminism as a significant threat to the women’s movement because it shared common roots with radical feminist activism in the pursuit of economic, political, and legal equality. Stacey viewed it as a “reactionary response to a broad social crisis in family and personal life” and the “unresolved tensions between androgyny and celebrating traditional female and maternal values.”6 Conservative feminism revealed the weaknesses of the women’s movement and in turn offered what today is often referred to as difference feminism.

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A more modern interpretation could argue that rather than a branch from a common root, it was a concurrent movement rooted in the values of the religious right and conservativism, and manifest in the politics of women like Phyllis Schlafley. This group aggressively opposed the The National Plan of Action crafted for the 1977 Houston Conference that included reforms in divorce and rape laws, tax-funded abortion, access to childcare, end to discriminatory insurance practices, and most significantly, civil rights for lesbians, a group historically labeled mentally ill for their sexual orientation. Jimmy Carter did not support the plan for fear of alienating Christians, and the opposition gained support from the Republican Party, effectively leading Reagan and later Bush to reject abortion and adopt the pro-life, pro-family values entrenched today in conservative politics.7 The roots of women’s push for equality in United States history stem back to the origins of the Republic and passed through many thresholds in the 19th and 20th centuries that crystallized reforms specific to women, suffrage among the most significant. When historicizing women’s rights movements, the early 20th century is one of these important thresholds.

Between 1880 and 1920 the largest number of single, educated women in United States history chose public work over marriage and the household. As a result, the period is often referred to as the era of the single woman, a time that intersected with the rise of eugenics and mass immigration, tremendous urbanization, industrialization, and tangent cultural shifts.

Although the majority of these educated women — both black and white — were of a higher socioeconomic class than their laboring sisters, they used clubs, churches, civic groups, and community organizations to agitate for reforms in education, healthcare, suffrage, and prohibition. Their efforts manifest in federal policies like the 18th and 19th Amendments, compulsory education and child labor laws, and for many, support of the Equal Rights Amendment. Progressives, as they were known, looked to government to create moral reform. The watershed moment of these efforts was the New Deal in the 1930s, and from that point to the present, government at both the state and federal level assumed control of public welfare funded by tax dollars, an issue prior to the 1930s the responsibility of charitable, faith-based groups.

It was the Methodist faith that drove reform before government engaged in public welfare. Reformers

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created the infrastructure that the state eventually assumed control over, evolving into tax funded programs like Medicaid, Social Security, Medicare, Food Stamps, subsidized housing, childcare, Planned Parenthood, and public education by the late 20th century. The progressive feminists of the early 20th century planted the seeds that prefigured the expansion of the federal government and the radical changes in women’s equality under the law. What is significant about this early wave of women activists is the role of Christianity and the church as seedbeds of collective action and the source of the values that shaped the reform to uplift those in need.

South Carolina’s Wil Lou Gray (1883-1984) is a great example of the single, educated, reform-minded activist who worked to elevate and improve the lives of her fellow statesmen long before federal and state money funded public service. She used her church, women's clubs, civic groups, and powerful friends and family to achieve what is nothing short of a remarkable ascendance to a leadership role in South Carolina state government before women had the right to vote. She dedicated her career to the uplifting of people in her state through programs she designed from within the structure of state government and then validated with social science research, using northern philanthropic and educational institutions for money and academic credibility.8 Progress is political, and the mechanics of how change happens matters. In a moment when violence, COVID-19, contests over public space, groupthink, and lack of dialogue about critical national issues accent every hour of every day, Gray’s work and legacy reveal the transformative power of belief in shared

humanity, God's grace, and the transcendence of the human spirit over the barriers of isms. Her willingness to compromise on some issues but stand firm on others made her a force to be reckoned with, yet in her work she remained aligned with religious values of Methodism and regional custom.

Gray stood at the forefront of opposition to the status quo that fueled progressive changes in the South.

Her resistance was not aggressive or overtly radical as displayed in later decades like the sixties, but rather a skilled, political move orchestrated from inside state government that opened the way for educational access for all people in her region. By challenging the status quo, she confronted the very essence of who she was in terms of heritage, class, and race.

The values, traditions and social inequalities that defined her place in the social fabric of her region also endowed her with connections and status that made her capable of achieving what she did. The very systems that empowered her to direct the economic, social, and political progress of the state were ironically the exact ones that limited her as a woman.

She did not dismantle the structural inequalities that defined the social system that made her who she was, but she was aware of how these inequalities stagnated progress. She used her access to power to create opportunities that otherwise would not have been afforded to the disadvantaged poor of her state, and in doing so, created a special space for herself in the social fabric of a hypergendered region. She was part of a disparate group of Southern educators, intellectuals, writers, and artists who challenged the grim social realities of illiteracy, poverty, and racism by advocating regional progress.

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Feminism is a big enough tent to encompass different perspectives that empower women. Progressive feminist dogma leaves no room for individuals committed to religiously held views of the family, reproduction, and interpersonal relationships.

Barrett is the epitome of an empowered woman, but because her religious beliefs and legal interpretations oppose certain progressive feminist dogma, she is labeled anti-feminist. Why can’t Amy Coney Barrett operate in the boundaries of the court and in the boundaries of her faith? If the personal is political, there is no line between belief and practice. But, in a secular world governed by secular law, there is most definitely a line, and to claim otherwise is disingenuous. Historically, women’s pursuit of equality in part relied heavily on Christian doctrine as both justification for full citizenship and as the foundation of the values that shaped public reform both in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Progressive feminism controls what is considered normative, the sacrament of abortion its central tenet and bedrock of progressive precepts. But, if feminism is about access and equity, then conservative feminism has a place at the table. Indeed, it is on the basis of Christianity that feminism has ground to stand on. Each person is created in the Imago Dei, thus they have equal worth and should be treated equally. Not only that, but to love one’s neighbor as oneself, at the very minimum, gives credence to the thought of extending the same rights I have to my neighbor. Feminism is not something to be feared but to be redeemed, or given feminism’s history, something to be reclaimed. With the focus of this journal on Christian public witness, the lives of Barrett and Gray reveal the importance differentiating service from self. In Matthew 22:21

Jesus said, “Render to Caesar that things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” As women continue to push for equity in various forms, this is a worthy consideration.

Elie Mystal, “Amy Coney Barrett is an extremist- just not the kind you think,” The Nation, 25 September 2020 at https://www.thenation.com/ article/politics/amy-coney-barrett-extremist/ accessed 27 October 2020.

1

“NOW Denounces Amy Coney Barrett’s Confirmation to SCOTUS,” NOW, 26 October 2020 at http://now.org/media-center/press-release/ now-denounces-amy-coney-barretts-confirmation-to-scotus/ accessed 27 October 2020.

2

Lizzie Bond, “The Conservative Case for Feminism,” Duke Political Review, October 2020 at http://www.dukepoliticalreview.org/theconservative-case-for-feminism/ accessed 20 October 2020.

3

Natalie Gontcharova, “No, There’s No Such Thing as Conservative Feminism,” Refinery29, 28 September 2020 at https://www.refinery29. com/en-us/2020/09/10055965/amy-coney-barrett-nominationconservative-feminism accessed 25 October 2020.

4

Lee Jussim, “Conservative Feminism,” Psychology Today, 19 August 2015 at https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/rabble-rouser/201508/ conservative-feminism accessed 26 October 2020.

5

Judith Stacey, “The New Conservative Feminism,” Feminist Studies, Vol. 9 (Autumn, 1983), 574.

6

Gillian Thomas, “‘Four Days that Changed the World’: Unintended Consequences of a Womens’ Rights Conference,” New York Times, 6 March 2017 at https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/06/books/review/ divided-we-stand-marjorie-j-spruill.html accessed 10 October 2020; Marjorie J. Spruill, Divided We Stand: The Battle over Women’s Rights and Family Values that Polarized American Politics, (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017).

7

8 Mary Macdonald Ogden, Wil Lou Gray: The Making of a Southern Progressive from New South to New Deal, (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2015).

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Faculty Contribution

Gai Ferdon Professor of Government, Helms School of Government, Liberty University Zane A. Richer Graduate Student, Helms School of Government, Liberty University

A CHRISTIAN VIEW OF GOVERNMENT Every article should have at least one idea in it.1 The one idea in this article is simply that a Christian view of the state is possible. And it is a wondrous development in the history of Western thought that this idea presently wants for proof not among the Marxists, who have always believed it, nor among the Nihilists, who have never doubted it, but among the narrow circle of the baptized, who once believed it unto the shedding of blood and are now quite pleased to give it up.

Indeed, it is common enough to hear genuine believers say that there can be no authentically Christian view of government because the Bible does not tell us exactly what sort of government to have. And yet the curious thing is that, on the same evidence, we should never assume this for the other institutions of life. Consider, for instance, the family. The Bible tells us simply that there is such thing as families, that God has made them, and a particular authority is placed at their head. The rest is rather conspicuously left open. There is no telling from reading Scripture who precisely should control the money, or the number of children to have, or how the daily chores are to get done.

There is tremendous liberty here in how family life can manifest itself. Every family is a unique creation because every combination of two individuals will create an entirely unique dynamic, have at its disposal unique talents, and wrestle against unique weaknesses.

There is almost untold diversity available to the human race when it comes to the free development of family life. No two are the same; yet, we would never say there is no such thing as a Christian view of the family.

Moreover, because it is God’s design and delight to bring this familial diversity into richer and deeper development across the generations, there is a correspondingly vast terrain of liberty in which it may blossom. And yet, this liberty must always remain tied to God’s particular framework for the family. We may choose who to marry; we may not choose to marry three people instead of one. We have freedom to determine how family decisions are made; we have no freedom to decide that the wife or the child is now the

head of the household. We may choose how our family worships God; we may not choose for our family to worship Baal. There is astonishing freedom for fruitful relationships within God’s ordinances. There is no freedom outside His ordinances.

Thus, we say, there is a Christian view of the family, not because every Christian family is the same, but precisely because each is different, yet bound together naturally, united in their diversity, through one divinely created relational framework.

It is in this sense also that we speak of a Christian view of government. Not only do we recognize that there may be a genuine variety of possible political arrangements, arising from the unique history, geography, culture, and genius of a people — as a fact, we insist upon it. Any view which denies this essential liberty to the free development of a nation in their civic life is not only un-Christian, it is positively anti-Christian. We do not claim, for instance, that the precise constitutional configuration of the United States is the only conceivable way to organize public affairs. The American constitutional order and system represents the unique genius of the American people, suited to their particular disposition and character, and tied to their common heritage of chartered liberties and covenantal self-rule. There is no reason to suppose that it should fit with the French, or the Russians, or the Sudanese, who share none of America’s formative history,2 and in many cases, reject their basic creeds.

Yet even in the midst of this legitimate liberty of structures, there is still a framework designed by God — just as in the family — in which the state must operate if it wishes to meet with the approbation of Christianity. This much we insist on, even in the face of the most disintegrative postmodern relativism. Just as with families, the legitimate liberty of expression for civil organization arises organically from the particular people, history, talents, and virtues being covenantally joined into one nation. But this should never lead us to suspect that governments can be (or can do) anything under the sun. God Himself

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has set the parameters in which government is to operate and the great ends it is to serve — mankind has no authority to alter or to modify these arbitrarily.

And despite an admittedly very good, if somewhat laborious, campaign on the part of the Enlightenment Rationalists and their modernistic intellectual offspring to convince us that the mysticized “public square” has, in a very bad parody of our Lord’s own kenosis, emptied itself of all allegiance to God, we nonetheless meet this innovation with the historic confession of the Church: that the royal scepter of Christ extends over the whole domain of our human existence, and that the state — just as the family — holds its office and its authority by the Grace of God. But what is its authority? For what purpose did God create civil government? Here we must know something about the biblical view of man himself.

It is the unique property of the Christian religion to assert that man, as male and female, is formed in God’s image. We do not presently inquire into the depths of all this could mean but simply draw out of its richness one particular feature: relationality. Because of this Imago Dei, man is intimately able to relate with God and others. We were created to walk in blessed fellowship with God, characterized by total devotion and obeisance, and with one another in mutual, reciprocal love.

Now, God in His sovereignty and creative goodness has fashioned numerous venues of relational activity through which we are to love Him supremely and serve others as ourselves. We may think, for instance, of such relational spheres as the family, the church, the market, the academy, the arts, and the individual’s personal relationship with God. Each of these domains of human life has a unique and highly relational structure, which supports and channels our productive service towards God and others. While undoubtedly our ability to navigate these moral relationships has been diminished by the Fall, our Lord has nonetheless reaffirmed through the Greatest Commandments that the underlying relational structures of human life have not totally dissipated under the assaults of sin but hold together still — no doubt by His common grace — awaiting redemption through His Atonement. The Fall has not altered God’s relational priorities; we are still to follow the light of truth in all of our relationships and spheres.

The result is that, even in a fallen world, we are constantly walking in profound relationships, whether familial, social, corporate, ecclesiastical, intellectual, or political. The question we face across all these venues

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is whether we will walk righteously after God’s own pattern for each sphere, or whether we will participate in their degradation and corruption through sin.

In such an atmosphere, the rationalist attempt to fragment life into separate, walled-off chambers for “Sacred” and “Secular” withers on the vine. Upon touching the ark of God — which is His sovereignty — the attempt explodes altogether. To the Christian, there can be no meaningful distinction between these two words. All of life is sacred to God, Who has set the world upon the pillars of the earth. There is, therefore, only righteousness and unrighteousness, truth and falsehood, submission and rebellion to God in the whole of life.

It is in this sense that Christians speak of selfgovernment; that we are to “walk in the light, as He is in the light.” And it was to preserve the self-governing integrity of man within these relational spheres from the more ravaging effects of sin that God first created civil government. Its purpose was to restrain lawlessness with force so an environment of ordered liberty — necessary to the practice of virtue — could be maintained, even in a fallen world. Through it, God prevented the total dissipation of humanity into chaos by forcibly and mechanically holding together the pieces of society, which had lost the ability to cohere naturally and organically among themselves.

Yet as an organ of immense power, care must be taken to ensure governments do not degenerate, becoming themselves the lawlessness and destruction they were designed to prevent.

Limitation is thus a necessary ingredient for any Christian view of the state. Government, which owes its existence exclusively to God and is dependent on Him for its authority, cannot transgress His patterns for its existence.3 Man must abide in an environment of ordered liberty — not lawlessness — to walk in obedience and blessed fellowship with God, and each other, and to fulfill his moral obligations and duties. Such relational priorities and obligations are impossible under centralized, totalitarian systems which demand total obeisance and devotion to the state. Gene Edward Veith warns what happens when governments consider themselves unbound by God’s moral law: “Excluding transcendent values places societies beyond the constraint of moral limits. Society is not subject to the moral law; it makes the moral law … All such issues are only matters of power.

Without moral absolutes, power becomes arbitrary …

Government becomes nothing more than the sheer exercise of unlimited power, restrained neither by law nor by reason.” To comprehend all of life under the

authority of the state serves practically to stifle man in his desire to obey God supremely and to walk rightly in all of his necessary spheres of relationship. While the precise limiting mechanisms may differ, no government may claim to be Christian which is not wholly consonant with this principle of constraint.

A division of authority in some balanced form must necessarily result from this approach, as well as unambiguous opposition to any attempt by the state to collapse the various other spheres into itself, rendering them dependent on its power alone and destroying their natural ability to govern themselves in liberty and righteousness. Unlawful coercion will destroy the nature of a duty. For Christians, tyranny is chiefly problematic not because it tends to produce violence and poverty but because it dams up the relational channels that God Himself has dug in the human heart, through which the love and the service of His people were to flow freely.

“God,” writes Herbert Titus, “has created man to be selfgoverning, that is, to diffuse authority among men, to maximize the extent of man’s volitional allegiance to Him in the performance of his duties.” A separation of power “preserves the national identity of a people in harmony with the institutions of family, ecclesiastical, and selfgovernment.”4 When this fails, tyranny and persecution are the natural consequence. And despite recent romanticizing on the subject, we were most certainly not made to be persecuted, and we should not desire it — or should we hope for sin that grace may abound? God can use persecution. But it is a terrible suppression of His creational design and a horrific affront to His glory.

Much more could be said. Our idea was that a uniquely Christian view of government emerges not in the organizational forms of one historical empire or another but from the basic relational principles of man and life which God Himself has planted in this world and revealed in Scripture. He is the great End of all Being, and it is to His glory, and the good and present use of His Church, that we offer our observations here.

1 This opening is intended as a respectful homage to the opening of Fulton Sheen’s work Communism and the Conscience of the West.

2 See the works of Donald S. Lutz and John Witte Jr. 3 See William Blackstone’s second chapter, Of the Nature of Laws in General in his Commentaries on the Laws of England for discussion on existential dependency and obedience.

4 Herbert Titus, “America's Heritage: Constitutional Liberty,” A Federal Republic (Lonang Institute, n.d.).

Faculty Contribution

Jason Ross Associate Professor and Department Chair Helms School of Government, Liberty University

BETWEEN 1619 AND THE MILLENNIUM: AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM AND THE LEGACY OF SLAVERY Fewer and fewer Americans today accept that our nation is or ever has been a Christian nation. But almost none would disagree in treating the claim that “all men are created equal” as a kind of American scripture. Whether we see it as an axiom of logic and morality, or as a truth divinely revealed, virtually all Americans accept this passage from the Declaration of Independence as the fundamental truth on which our nation has been founded.

Senses of Exceptionality If Americans accept that our nation has been founded on this proposition, we may, for this reason, see our nation as exceptional. We may see it as so, first and foremost, in that it was not founded on any ethnic, religious, or cultural identity. Most nations of the world are defined by particular features that make it obvious who shares in their nationality and who does not. Ours is perhaps the only nation in the world in which it is not possible (and is even forbidden) to describe our nationality by relying on any shared ethnic, religious, or cultural traits or, indeed, on any particular traits at all. America, it is said, is an “idea.”

Our identity is exceptional precisely because it is shorn of all particularities. For this reason, Americans must see our national identity, out of necessity if nothing else, as universal.

The American nation can also be seen as exceptional in having been founded. Most other nations are the products of a long historical evolution, of a particular set of experiences that has shaped a people’s sense of itself. But in tracing our identity back to 1776 — not to a war for independence, but to the Declaration’s proposition that “all men are created equal” — we can come to see our national identity as disconnected from any shared history, and even as timeless. This is so much the case that some now see Thomas Jefferson as having been condemned by his own words the very moment he was inspired to write them.

Finally, Americans have come to see our nation as exceptional in a moral sense. Some still celebrate our nation as exceptionally good because its founding established the moral principle of equality at the heart of our politics, even as we have not always realized this principle in practice. These Americans may share the faith of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. that the arc of history should and does bend toward justice, and that justice requires our national identity to dissolve any ethnic, religious, or cultural differences. Others, seeing that the American nation has not always been fully and consistently constituted by the universal and timeless principle of equality, condemn the nation as exceptionally evil, and as unpardonably guilty of an original national sin.

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These particular characteristics of America’s exceptional identity go a long way toward explaining the profound success of the New York Times “1619 Project.” That its success has not been slowed even by multiple public setbacks only serves to underscore that the project’s appeal is not related to the veracity of its findings or the originality of its research.1 Instead its teachings appeal to Americans because they are old and familiar.

The appeal of the 1619 Project is less so as a work of history and more so as a ritual renewal of America’s exceptional identity.

These teachings are familiar not least because they have become pervasive in historical scholarship over the past half century. The 1619 Project, in drawing directly from this strand of historical scholarship, culminates a broader project to resurrect the critique of the Constitution first leveled by radical abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. In fact, the historians on whom the Project relies refer to themselves and their argument, explicitly, as “neo-Garrisonian.” Not only did Garrison charge that the Constitution was proslavery, he charged that its framers intended for it to be so. His accusation that the founders were hypocrites in appealing to principles they did not immediately and fully realize in practice finds echoes in the 1619 Project’s claim, “Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written.”2 This belief that American national identity is and should be tied to the universal and timeless moral claim of equality has a special appeal to a Christian people. First, we know that God is the creator of this world and remains sovereign over it. “For by Him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities — all things were created through Him and for Him” (Colossians 1:16). We also know that in Christ, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female,” but we are all one (Galatians 3:28).

This latter passage, in particular, convicts us deeply as American Christians; in light of the historic practice of slavery here, nobody doubts that we are guilty of a national sin. When we recall this sin, the advice of our founders to make a frequent recurrence to fundamental principles may seem misguided, even cynical. Christians may thus be attracted to the more radical answer of the 1619 Project, and to Garrison, its spiritual father. But Christians should also be aware of the ways in which Garrison’s approach was theologically both too radical and, at the same time, not radical enough.

Radical Heterodoxy Garrison’s radical and recently resurrected critique of America’s founding is impossible to disentangle from his unorthodox theology. In embracing the doctrine of moral perfectionism, Garrison was influenced by John Humphrey Noyes, who would go on to launch the infamous social experiment in communism and free love at Oneida, New York, in 1848.3 Amid the Second Great Awakening, where speculation flourished about the Second Coming, Noyes was convinced that the spiritual return of Christ had already occurred. Those professing to be Christians were blind to this, Noyes believed, because they had not yet been spiritually awakened. The promise of Christ’s millennial reign on earth would be realized only when Christians accepted a third dispensation (the dispensation of the Old Testament being the Mosaic law, the dispensation of the New Testament being the grace of salvation) — that of the moral perfection of the saints.4 In light of this standard of moral perfection, Noyes saw America as irredeemable. He believed that as a Christian, he could have nothing to do with such a “villain.” He saw no way to remain above or apart from its sin, no way to remain “in the world and not of the world.” Instead, he condemned “[e]very person who is, in the usual sense of the expression, a citizen of the United States, i.e., a voter, politician, etc.,” as “at once a slave and a slaveholder.” He told Garrison that he had made his own personal declaration of independence, “renouncing all allegiance to the government of the United States, and asserting the title of Jesus Christ to the throne of the world.”

Finally, he believed that he and other perfect saints were “authorized not only to hope for the overthrow of the nations, but to stand in readiness actively to assist in the execution of God’s purposes.” He explained to Garrison, “My hope of the millennium begins … AT THE OVERTHROW OF THIS NATION.”5 Garrison almost immediately adopted this radical doctrine. He recited Noyes’s call for the overthrow of the nation, verbatim, at a lecture he delivered the next Fourth of July.6 He asserted, “Total abstinence from sin, in this life, is not only commanded but necessarily obtainable,” and claimed that through such moral perfection, the Kingdom of God “is to be established upon the earth.” In light of all this he asked, “Shall we, as Christians, applaud and do homage to human government? Or shall we not rather lay the axe at the root of the tree?”7 Ultimately Garrison would call for immediate dissolution of the United States,

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making “No Union With Slaveholders” the motto of his weekly abolitionist publication, The Liberator.

Garrison’s approach was seen as radical even by his fellow abolitionists at the time. It represented a break from the stated principle of the New England AntiSlavery Society, which Garrison founded, that, “The whole American people ought to be an Anti-Slavery Society. This is the very first principle upon which our government is built. The spirit of civil and religious liberty requires it. The Declaration of ’76 requires it.

The spirit and letter of our Constitution require it.”8 It also represented a break from the abolitionist strategy of interpreting the Constitution, especially in light of the Fifth Amendment, as protecting individual liberty and the due process of law.9

A More Radical Orthodoxy This view of our Constitution, which Garrison rejected, has been vindicated in the adoption of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments.10 But the moral claims at the heart of the 1619 Project trace their origins back to the radical doctrine of moral perfectionism and the speculative eschatology that Garrison embraced.11 Christians ought to be aware enough of these false doctrines to guard ourselves from them — though who would follow false doctrines if they were not tempting? But if these critiques of America’s founding — and of

human politics — that flow from them may appeal to Christians precisely because of their radical nature, there is another way in which these critiques are not radical enough. This is in failing to recognize that the Christian teaching of redemption is more radical even than the perfect justice demanded by those following the spirit of Garrison.

The belief that the legacy of slavery in America amounts to a national sin resonates with the doctrine of original sin that we accept as Christians. Yet there is no parallel in American political theology for redemption from that sin. Many call for reparations, and indeed it is just and fitting to offer recompense to those who continue to suffer the consequences of slavery. But we who live in the light of the Reformation know that the payment of indulgences is not adequate to absolve us of sin. More, who can say what these reparations should be? This was the conclusion of Abraham Lincoln when he conceded that payment for the sin of slavery may continue “until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.” As long as the principle of an eye for an eye endures as the reigning principle of justice in America, our nation will remain under the judgment of an exceptional original sin and will remain without hope of redemption.

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Lincoln appealed at Gettysburg to the blood of fallen soldiers as marking a new birth of freedom for a nation, based on its rededication to the proposition that all men are created equal. Their blood may indeed have bought, for a time, a more temperate spirit among Americans, North and South, who shared a living memory of their sacrifices. But when our historians and citizens believe the propositions of our founders were null and void, and their promissory note a fraud, what else can we conclude but that the Civil War’s dead died in vain. Others may seek to avoid reopening the endless cycle of recriminations owing to blood drawn from the lash that may not have been repaid by the sword; these may call for a resurrection of the political faith of Abraham Lincoln.

But even this is not enough. Neither he nor anyone since could make the claim that the blood shed at Gettysburg fully atoned for the national sin of slavery.

Instead, only the blood of Christ can atone, redeem, and heal the scourge of sin.

As Christians we live under the promise of a new heaven and a new earth, in which the old order of things will pass away, and there will be no more death or mourning (Rev. 21:1-4). But we must endure, for a time, the reality of suffering in a fallen world. Part of this suffering is remaining bound in the flow of history that can never wholly be disconnected from an old order of things. At times when the burden of waiting for the fulfillment of Christ’s promise can seem unbearable, Christians may be tempted to take the radical step of attempting to hasten the coming of that new heaven and new earth — of asserting our own moral perfection and calling on the moral repudiation or condemnation of those whom we believe have fallen short.

The more radical way, though, is for us all as Christians to accept our own fallenness, to accept the forgiveness of Christ, and to play our part in the work of redeeming this fallen world by forgiving one another.

This is the foundation for working together, in faith, that the promises of liberty and unity are not the promises of mere men, a birthright handed down only to their own children, but are the promises of God to all His children. If these promises are to be made more real in this fallen world, it will only be through the work of Christians to transcend the law of an eye for an eye, to redeem our Constitution as a promise of the liberty and unity of all Americans, and thus to reclaim the real exceptionalism of our identity as a people called to a new covenant with one another and with God. Under this covenant the Puritans, following God’s call to build a city on a hill, believed we would

“rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body.” Only under this covenant can the American people “keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace.” And only then “The Lord will be our God, and delight to dwell among us, as his own people.”12

These setbacks include the denunciation of its thesis by several eminent historians, the New York Times’ own correction of one of the project’s central claims, and the revelations that the Times and the 1619 Project’s lead author rejected the advice of their own fact checkers, then surreptitiously deleted some of the Project’s claims that had fallen under public scrutiny.

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2 Nikole Hannah-Jones, “Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make them true.” New York Times, October 8, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/ interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/black-history-american-democracy. html.

3 Michael Barkun, Crucible of the Millennium: The Burned-Over District of New York in the 1840s (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1986).

Spencer Klaw, Without Sin: The Life and Death of the Oneida Community (New York: Penguin Books, 1993).

4 Ernest Sandeen, “John Humphrey Noyes as the New Adam,” Church History 40, no. 1 (1971), 82–90.

5 “John Humphrey Noyes to William Lloyd Garrison, March 22, 1837,” quoted in Wendell Phillips Garrison & Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison: The Story of His Life, Told by His Children. Vol. II, 1835-1840 (New York: The Century Co., 1885), 145-48.

6 William Lloyd Garrison, “Fourth of July in Providence.” The Liberator, July 28, 1837.

7 Garrison and Garrison (1885), 151-2.

8 Moses Thatcher, “Address to the New England Anti-Slavery Society,” The Liberator, February 18, 1832.

9 Jason Ross, “William Lloyd Garrison’s Shattered Faith in Antislavery Constitutionalism: The Origins and Limits of the ‘Garrisonian Critique,’” American Political Thought, 9 no. 2 (Spring 2020): 199–234, https://doi.org/10.1086/708444.

10 James Oakes, The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics. (New York: Norton, 2007).

11 The intellectual link between Garrison and the 1619 Project is in the scholarship of historian and New Left activist Staughton Lynd.

His 1965 article, “The Abolitionist Critique of the United States Constitution,” resurrected Garrison’s interpretation of the Constitution as having been intended to be pro-slavery (in The Antislavery Vanguard, ed. Martin Duberman (Princeton University Press, 1965, 209-39).

Lynd later highlighted the agreement between Garrison and Noyes on the necessity of rejecting “the framework of national allegiance,” and on their introduction of teachings into the American conversation that Lynd recognized as proto-Marxist, in Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1968), 130-38. Lynd’s work has been continued by the self-styled “neo-Garrisonian” historian David Waldstreicher, whose book Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009) is directly quoted in the 1619 Project’s lead essay. Waldstreicher has celebrated Lynd’s work in print, and the two have co-authored multiple articles.

12 John Winthrop, “A Modell of Christian Charity,” Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society (Boston, 1838), 3rd Series, Vol. VII, 47.

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Faculty Contribution

John S. Knox Associate Professor of Sociology School of Behavioral Sciences, Liberty University

BUILT ON THE ROCK OF FAITH: MODELS OF FAITH IN TURBULENT TIMES For many (or most?) people, it seems like every political election cycle brings with it an ominous cloud of doubt, incertitude, and foreboding. That which has been established and functional is assaulted with challenge and change, which all too frequently ends with arbitrary dysfunction ostensibly contrived for the sake of partisan appeasement or domination.

With Jobian angst, we fear our consequential and unrelenting fate: “But the falling mountain crumbles away, and the rock moves from its place; water wears away stones, its torrents wash away the dust of the earth.” Even more, we often blame God for our own specious human transgressions — “So you destroy man’s hopes” (Job 14:18-19).

This stressful state seems to be deeply and universally ingrained in the human condition (and our collective affairs). Cynicism and suspicion are regularly coupled with despair and capitulation, until the terrifying tempest passes by, for a time. Unsurprisingly, our resolve and confidence can and often does wane as we wait for the noxious winds to return (as they always seem to do). While such feelings may feel novel to those in the moment, the grander reality is that political change and political fears have been a constant in human history since its genesis thousands of years ago.

Being human, the followers of God have not been spared from social-civic interactions with their neighbors. Rather, we who live by faith also live in the present on the Earth and so encounter the same belligerent or transformative forces that those who live by the flesh experience. And while our Creator may be perfect, we exist far from that condition and so reveal our hearts, beliefs, and dependencies during periods of political chaos. This can be easily observed in the biblical accounts as well as during the early church movement, with prominent figures displaying their inner convictions and perceptions in times of trial and tribulation — for better or for worse.

Biblical Models of Faithfulness and Faithlessness In all cases, the stories of Christians who have lived in the City of Man have put flesh and spirit around the parable of Jesus shared with His disciples two thousand years ago: “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like the wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against the house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it” (Matthew 7:24-27).

Succinctly, Jesus’ parable tells readers to listen to the Lord, to adapt their behavior according to God’s commands and advice, which will guarantee stable and productive lives regardless of what’s going on around them — socially and physically.1 The opposite holds true, of course, for those who ignore the Lord, remain hard-hearted in their rebellion, reaping the results of their foolishness or wickedness (whether in this life or the life to come).

I can think of no two better examples than Joshua and King Ahab, both political-religious leaders of Israel and two men diametrically opposed in core beliefs and personal missions, which inevitably lead to their final fates and fame (or infamy).

A Nation Built Upon the Rock Joshua, the Son of Nun and the successor of Moses (ruling around 1400 BCE), was a man of noble

FA I T H A N D T H E A C A D E M Y: E N G A G I N G T H E C U LT U R E W I T H G R A C E A N D T R U T H

character, great military mindedness, and a steadfast voice literally calling out in the desert for Israel to follow God with all their heart, mind, soul, and strength. During the initial establishment of the kingdom of Israel in Canaan, Joshua demonstrated the rock that his faith rested upon when he admonished his people, “Now fear the Lord and serve him with all faithfulness. Throw away the gods your ancestors worshiped beyond the Euphrates River and in Egypt and serve the Lord. But if serving the Lord seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served beyond the Euphrates, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living. But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord” (Joshua 24:14-15).

Joshua’s unwavering faith in God and searing commitment to God carried him and the people of Israel from Egypt through the desert of testing and battling, all the way to the Promised Land.

Norm Geisler’s summation of this text reminds us that “[Joshua] is a book of triumph for faithful obedience to God.”2 While Joshua’s triumph may be different from ours today (for his battles were divinely mandated), we see in Joshua that, regardless of the storms we must pass through, God provides pathways to peace even through valleys of the shadow of death.

A Kingdom Built Upon Sand Alternatively, King Ahab is perhaps one of the most contemptible “rulers” of Israel in the Bible. Whereas Joshua is known for his great persona, leadership skills, and fearlessness, Ahab could be called “the Great Corruptor” in his abdication of godly and royal responsibilities as well as his political capitulation to Queen Jezebel’s wicked, pagan schemes. The author of 1 Kings 16 writes, “Ahab son of Omri did more evil in the eyes of the Lord than any of those before him. He not only considered it trivial to commit the sins of Jeroboam son of Nebat, but he also married Jezebel daughter of Ethbaal, king of the Sidonians and began to serve Baal and worship him” (vv. 30-31).

Ahab abandoned God’s kingly calling for him to appease his aggressive wife, to accumulate great wealth and comforts, and to cultivate political strength in the world. This rebellious king’s selfserving compromises resulted in the loss of his lands (1 Kings 21:26), the death of his queen (2 Kings 9:30–37), and the execution of all seventy of his sons (2 Kings 10:6–8). By focusing and relying solely upon the fruits of the flesh, Ahab only guaranteed himself and his progeny a short- and sour-lived reign.

He foolishly set his throne upon shifting sand, where it was destined to be toppled.

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While some might presume that such parabolic teaching is for vaulted leaders alone, the truth is that we all are both leaders and followers to those around us. In fact, some of Jesus’ highest praise came for those from the lowest social classes (Matthew 15:28) or with the most to lose, socially, for their faith in Him and God (Matthew 8:10). During periods of political chaos or change, everyone is involved, everyone responds, and everyone shows their heart in the matter at hand — be it in noble submission to God’s commands or hedonistic rebellion (or surrender) to human agencies.

An Early Christian Model of Faithfulness Because of this history and these biblical examples, it is no wonder that in the dawn of the Christian movement, when faced with unjust persecution and martyrdom for their political views, thousands of believers stood their ground, proclaimed their adoration and fidelity, and refused to deny Jesus as their Lord and Savior. Polycarp was one such ambassador for the Way. A lifelong Christian and pupil of the Apostle John, Polycarp had been politically targeted at age eighty-six for his embrace of a monotheistic religion during a cultic period in Greco-Roman society, which demanded submission, oaths of loyalty, and worship to the emperor. Dragged before a proconsul, it was demanded that Polycarp denounce Christ and receive freedom or persist in his faith and lose his life.

But the proconsul was insistent and said: “Take the oath, and I shall release you. Curse Christ.” Polycarp said: “Eighty-six years I have served Him, and He never did me any wrong. How can I blaspheme my King who saved me?” And upon his persisting still and saying, “Swear by the fortune of Caesar,” he answered, “If you vainly suppose that I shall swear by the fortune of Caesar, as you say, and pretend that you do not know who I am, listen plainly: I am a Christian.”3 In that instance, Polycarp’s righteous response showed the depth of his convictions and the lengths that he was willing to go to do the right thing. Regardless of the storm beating down upon him, despite the threats of ignorant and impious people unaware of the dangers of religious compromise for political gain, Polycarp did not waver in his obedience and trust in God. But the proconsul said: “I have wild beasts. I shall throw you to them if you do not change your mind.” But he [Polycarp] said: “Call them. For repentance from the better to the worse is not permitted us; but it is noble to change from what is evil to what is righteous.”4

Polycarp’s timeless response is a model to follow for all believers and has been echoed throughout the lives of people like Joshua, King David, the Prophet Jeremiah, John the Baptist, St. Peter, St. Paul, St. Stephen, Ignatius of Antioch, Perpetua, Justin Martyr, Ambrose of Milan, Augustine of Hippo, John Chrysostom, Athanasius, Luther, Wycliff, Livingstone, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and so on. Polycarp’s was and is the response of a person fully convinced, committed, and courageous in their relationship with God, for whom they owe everything. Deviation was never an option for people such as these faithful ones.

A Faith Built on Trust in Jesus Over the past year, we experienced yet another political storm in America — one that was building up for decades. It felt like the winds and rains had never occurred with such intensity, but the timeless truth still remained: God’s followers are to be submissive to the governmental powers (1 Peter 2:13) while also contending for the faith (Jude 1:3), restoring each other gently (Galatians 6:1), walking in the light (1 John 1:6-7), and waiting for God to make it right in the end (Romans 12:12). Truly, this is a daunting task to accomplish on our own.

Blessedly, we have Jesus — our guide, our protector, and our model — who also shared in the chaos of politics while on His earthly mission. In His life and on His walk to Calvary, He showed us how walking faithfully through the storms of life can be done for the glory of God and the benefit of all humanity.

Though the political winds blow and the rain aims to beat us down, God’s followers do not waver, we do not relent, we do not despair, for we rest upon the rock, the one true God, from whom all blessings come (Psalm 16:2), and He is worth it all.

1 This language used here has been chosen for effect: the words, guarantee, stable, productive, socially, and physically, do not imply a materialist understanding of the Christian life. Instead, they are used to highlight what is said by Christ regarding the results of a right foundation for His followers. In this passage, the house stays upright (physically stable) and people still live in it (socially productive) — regardless of what is going on around them. This includes the rain that falls on the righteous and the unrighteous (Matthew 7:25, 27). What is being clarified is a proverbial, universal notion: “The curse of the LORD is on the house of the wicked, but He blesses the dwelling of the righteous” (Proverbs 3:33), and “Whoever pursues righteousness and love finds life, prosperity, and honor” (Proverbs 21:21).

2 Geisler, A Popular Study of the Old Testament (Baker, 1977), 96.

3 The Apostolic Fathers, The Apostolic Fathers (Moody Classics) (Moody Publishers, 2009. Kindle Edition), 138.

4 The Apostolic Fathers (Moody Classics), 139.

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Get ready to take on the subject of “Dealing with Deconversion.”

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Alumni Contribution

Emily Page Alumna Liberty University

THE VALUE OF AFFLICTION The Old Testament shows us what it looks like to walk with God. It is challenging, filled with highs and lows and sometimes long stretches of seeming silence. So often during these silences, God’s people face intense pain — inflicted by others, inflicted by themselves, and sometimes inflicted by nothing at all.

The danger of experiencing this suffering without being prepared is that believers start to doubt. We are so prone to questioning our faith to death. We question why God is silent while His children suffer.

How can we prepare for suffering so that we do not question our faith to death? By knowing our God and knowing why we can trust Him. In my estimation, there are two basic reasons to trust anybody. The first is that our own experience leads us to trust them. The second is someone we already trust gives testimony to their character.

Throughout the Old Testament narrative, we are acquainted with people who are learning to trust God. By their life experiences wherein God demonstrates His loyalty and faithfulness, they testify that God can be trusted. As He acted over and over again in the lives of real people, so also we can trust He will act in ours. From the opening pages of His Word, God makes known that He is watching, listening, and caring even when He is not yet intervening.

The Testimony of Genesis Hundreds of years before the Exodus, God showed that deliverance, indeed, was a cornerstone of His character. The motif of affliction and God’s response of protection becomes a pattern in Genesis. First, God promises Abram that he will honor his covenant and would one day rescue Israel from foreign enslavement (Genesis 15:13-16). We know that God follows through on this. When the time comes, God sees Israel’s suffering in Egypt and acts — in His time, and in accordance with the promise He made long before (Exodus 2:24-25; Genesis 15:13-14).

However, God does not wait until Exodus to show that he delivers. Right after his promise to Abram, the LORD shows his concern for the oppressed by protecting and showing mercy to Hagar, Sarai’s Egyptian slave-woman (Genesis 16:11-12). The messenger of the LORD appears to Hagar as she flees from Sarai and Abram, saying, “the LORD has listened to your affliction” (Genesis 16:11).1 God hears her affliction, and He responds with deliverance by bringing prosperity to Ishmael and protecting them in the wilderness (Genesis 21:17-18).

The enactment of His deliverance does not stop there.

The LORD shows up again to deliver Jacob from the affliction of Laban. Jacob suffers labor abuse from Laban for 20 years without hearing a word from God (Genesis 31:41). Not until it was time to leave Laban did the LORD speak to Jacob again (Genesis 31:3), and only then is Jacob able to say, “My affliction and the toil of my hands, God has seen” (Genesis 31:42).

The author does not say if Jacob felt abandoned by God during those 20 years, but the narrator does tell us that he was most certainly not abandoned, regardless of how Jacob might have felt.

During those 20 years, another victim faced affliction.

Leah, Jacob’s unloved wife, suffered through her marriage to an indifferent husband. Jacob did not love Leah, but he loved only Rachel (Genesis 29:30). Even as Jacob suffered Laban’s abuse, he mistreated another in his own household. God paid attention to that.

The LORD repeatedly opens Leah’s womb and closes Rachel’s womb, for a time, so that Leah would have comfort in her pain (Genesis 29:31). The narrator of Genesis never reveals if Jacob came to love her, so presumably, he did not. But Leah receives mercy and concern from the LORD, and that was enough.

God reveals once again that He is concerned for the oppressed, even when the oppressor is one of His children too.

After God brings Jacob out from Laban, affliction once again comes upon Jacob’s family when Shechem rapes Dinah, Jacob’s daughter by Leah (Genesis

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34:2). Not only is this an attack against Dinah, but it is also a threat on the whole family of Jacob because the danger of intermarrying with foreigners becomes a reality (Genesis 34:8-17). If this happens, then the promise of nationhood to Abraham would fail (Genesis 12:1-3, 15:5, 17:1-2, cf. 3:15). Simeon and Levi respond to Shechem’s outrage by tricking and slaughtering the whole clan of Shechem, but in doing so, the safety of the family is threatened by revolt from the Canaanites (Genesis 34:31). While they flee, God protects Dinah and Jacob’s family by placing a terror upon the surrounding nations (Genesis 35:5). For the sake of Dinah and for the sake of God’s promise, the LORD shields Jacob’s family from danger.

Finally, the LORD reveals again His character of deliverance by His attention to and protection of Joseph. God used Joseph, even after he was sold into bitter slavery, to protect His children from death by famine (Genesis 45:7). By allowing Joseph to suffer under his brothers and at the hands of an Egyptian master (and his wife), God used Joseph’s faithfulness as a tool to show divine mercy on all His people. Joseph suffered affliction, but he is never shown to question God’s presence with him. And Joseph’s confidence in the LORD was not in vain.

God delivered the children of Israel in a mighty way through Joseph’s obedience in the midst of affliction.

The Testimony of Jesus The culmination of this pattern of affliction and deliverance finds its full expression only in the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Himself. Far from using His Deity to escape the suffering of humanity, Paul describes how Christ “emptied Himself ” and became “obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:8). In this gripping pinnacle act of human history, the Son of Man does not scorn the suffering of men but identifies Himself entirely with God’s afflicted people, grieving with them “outside the camp” (Hebrews 13:13). Beneath the weight and pressure of real time and space, Jesus the Crucified breathed His last and died. This death was not a trick, a forgery, or a farce; for three days there was silence and stillness in the sepulcher of the Most High.

It is with His own suffering that God in Christ sanctifies the suffering of His people, and it is with His own death that the Lord Jesus fulfills and consumes the isolation, silence, and death of all who trust in Him for deliverance. The affliction of all humanity converges around this Sacred Head Sore Wounded, Who demonstrates His trustworthiness in

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the Person of the Jesus Christ, Whose cross towers over the wrecks of time as a witness to the truth that God will never ask us to suffer anything which He Himself has not first suffered in our place. And we have this assurance: “if we suffer, we shall also reign with Him” (2 Timothy 2:12). God Resurrected Jesus and has promised to make Him the firstborn of many brothers (Romans 8:29). Those who join themselves to Him in the solemn covenant of faith shall be raised with Him from death in the greatest rescue ever accomplished, and the final fulfillment of every promised deliverance.

How Scripture Prepares Us So, what do the testimonies of these stories tell us?

First, it is in God’s character to deliver, but a close second is that we often experience what we think is God’s silence before His deliverance. Walking with God sometimes feels like wandering in a den of isolation. But we learn from the testimony of His Word that even then He can be trusted.

By knowing God’s character, we can avoid the shattering of our faith when we suffer and learn to trust Him all the more.

The psalmist says, “It was good for me that I was afflicted so that I might learn your statutes” (Psalm 119:71). This is the voice of someone on the other side of suffering who has the joy of looking back and seeing what God was teaching through intense pain (Psalm 119:65-72). In affliction, God teaches

us who He is and who we are before Him. He shows us that He never turns a blind eye to the oppressed.

To you who are suffering affliction: God has not abandoned you. In the 20 years that Jacob did not hear from the LORD, God was protecting him. After Israel’s long wait in Egypt for God’s hand, He brought it, and when He did, He struck the Red Sea in two.

The LORD is present in your life. Be faithful.

To you who have not yet suffered greatly: do not be anxious for your day of affliction. It will come, but it is not something to fear. Through it, God will grow you and teach you why you can trust Him. Do not rush to your affliction so that you can all the sooner experience God’s subsequent deliverance. God’s timing brings the truest, deepest growth. Be faithful.

To you who have endured suffering: reflect on what God has taught you. Do not waste your lesson. Learn what is meant for you to learn. Then, tell others. Like Joseph, calm the fears of those around you by offering a word of truth (Genesis 50:20). Give testimony to God’s faithfulness so that somebody else can trust. Be faithful.

Because the LORD sees the afflicted, and He rescues — trust Him.

1

All translations are the author’s work.

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INTERDISCIPLINARY ESSAYS

Joining the Journey with Students: Interdisciplinary Engagement from Aviation and Divinity Claudia Dempsey, Online Chair, John W. Rawlings School of Divinity, Liberty University Julie Speakes, Online Dean, School of Aviation, Liberty University

A significant challenge for many Christians today is discerning how to engage the culture. While this question has obvious implications for the Church universal, we would like to explore whether there are specific considerations for Christian educators. Some may wonder, however, how two schools, like Aviation and Divinity, can collaboratively speak to engaging students in a way that embraces a telos that goes well beyond the academic classroom. After all, Dr. Speakes specializes in aerodynamics, horizontal stabilizers, and instrument landing systems, whereas Dr. Dempsey’s work focuses on bibliology, exegesis, and ministry praxis.

Clearly, these two academic worlds do not readily intersect, yet we believe they can and should because of their shared understanding that humans are a “journeying people.”1 Although notably different, Liberty’s Aviation and Divinity programs exist to teach students about specific aspects of the journeying process. The School of Divinity, for example, explores the reality of man’s spiritual journey from the vantage point of God’s redemptive metanarrative, while the School of Aviation specializes in one of the most spectacular modes of journeying available to modernday travelers.

So, although we are distinct on many (if not most) levels, we’ve partnered on this effort because we recognize that life is a voyage, and to honor God in our forward pursuits, we must learn how to journey effectively with those around us. For educators, this means learning how to walk with our students in a way that fuels their journey while also modeling what it means to walk with others.

Co-Journeying with Different Perspectives There are some who contend that humanity was designed as a co-journeying entity.2 Yet, when it comes to engaging people with different perspectives,

Christians typically default to one of two contrasting options. The first approach, in pure Benedictine fashion, advocates a withdrawal response in order to insulate oneself from the depravity and influence of sin.3 Clearly, a strong defense trumps a good offense in this camp. At the other end of the spectrum, there are those who seek to combat the beliefs and values of the culture in an attempt to reclaim that which has been taken captive by sin. While both approaches are not without value and may have their time and place in a Christian’s response to culture, these extreme views have left many within the Church feeling as though their only options are to bend, mend, blend (with), or fend (off) the culture around us.4 There is, however, a middle-ground approach, which recognizes the call for Christians to engage and walk amid the culture as instruments of God’s love and grace. Based upon Christ’s example of drawing near, this approach encourages believers to walk alongside (rather than hide from or oppose) those with differing views and perspectives. How else will those around us hear of Christ’s message of hope unless we demonstrate a willingness to share the road as we shine our light?

A Biblical Paradigm Scripture is full of stories that highlight significant journeying moments. From Abraham’s homeland departure to Israel’s Promised Land pilgrimage and Paul’s missionary ventures, there is a clear understanding that the life of faith is a process of forward movement.

Contemporary literature similarly acknowledges and highlights this journeying motif as well-known travelers, like Bunyan’s pilgrim and Hurnard’s Much-Afraid, depict various realities of the journey.

For Christians who embrace the journey of faith, it is crucial to also embrace a journey-share mindset that recognizes fellow travelers as part of God’s providential design. It is for this reason we believe that true cultural engagement is much more than a recognition of the

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trends and perspectives of our day or well-intentioned efforts to make our message relevant and culturally sensitive. It is intentionally walking with others in a way that acknowledges their views and values without allowing them to tarnish our own.

Theologically, this willingness to walk with others honors the Imago Dei image imprinted on the DNA of each man’s soul, because those who do share our views or resemble our likeness are still image bearers of the King. To embrace them is not only to embrace God’s imprint on their lives but also the hope of what they can ultimately become in Him.

Practical Application The classroom is full of diverse students with different backgrounds and beliefs. So, we realize that not everyone will choose the path to salvation. Yet, we must treat our students with the same kindness and grace that has Christ showed us. As educators, this kindness and grace will take different shapes and forms. But, we would like to suggest that it must begin by loving our students with our actions, not simply our words.

It’s not enough to know the Bible and recite Scripture.

The New Testament reminds us to love as we have been loved, to feed the sheep in our fold, to withhold judgment from the one whose vision is impaired, and to meet the needs of those on our path. We must, therefore, lead our students with the approachable love of Jesus if we hope to open doors, build bridges, and walk paths to readied hearts. As professors, we have the unique opportunity to listen to our students’ stories and guide them along in their disciplines while seeking to be the hands and feet of Jesus. For many, this may be the first time they experience such courtesy.

Our encouragement to fellow educators is therefore to co-journey with students in practical ways. Just as Dr. Speakes might position herself beside a flight student to offer presence and direction as they soar to new heights, or a music professor comes alongside students to concert together as they practice new scales and scores, or an engineering professor collaborates on the design of new systems or product concepts, so we too can position ourselves in strategic ways to serve, support, and accompany our students as they journey spiritually.

This may involve meeting a student for coffee, offering prayer and support, serving as a mentor, or inviting a student to join you and your family for church or an event. But the strategy is simple: Display an interest in the lives of your students, create strategic touch-points to connect, and then find practical ways to invest in their lives — even if they do not embody the beliefs or values that are inherent to your faith. It is our hope that, in time, the seeds we plant will generate growth that lasts long after our season of co-journeying comes to an end, and — if we dare to dream — that one day our students will become the hands and feet of Jesus as they walk the road of life with others.

M. Seiler, “Three Journeys.” St. Matthews. Sermon, September 9, 2010. http://www.stmatthews.com/sermons/Archive/MSeilerMar292009.pdf (Accessed 11/20/2020).

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2 Edward T Welch, Side By Side: Walking With Others in Wisdom and Love (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2015).

3 Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a PostChristian Nation (New York, NY: Sentinel, Penguin Random House LLC, 2018).

4 Timothy Keller, “Cultural Dis(Engagement),” Redeemer.com, January 2018, https://www.redeemer.com/redeemer-report/article/ cultural_dis_ engagement

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INTERDISCIPLINARY ESSAYS

Creative Image-Bearers and the AI Horizon: Interdisciplinary Engagement from Christian Ethics and Engineering Jason Glen, Instructor of Ethics and Interdisciplinary Studies, College of Arts & Sciences, Liberty University Hector Medina, Professor of Mechanical Engineering, School of Engineering, Liberty University

The concept of endowing machines with intelligence has been around for almost three quarters of a century; however, only in the last two decades has this technology significantly impacted our society. John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, and Nathaniel Rochester first coined the words artificial intelligence (AI) in the mid 1950s in a proposal to conduct summer research at Dartmouth College. There are different ways of defining AI. Perhaps, an acceptable definition could be summarized in the following question: Can machines learn to think, reason, feel, or sympathize in a comparable way (or even better than) humans?

As AI advances, some fear that machines will eventually be able to subdue humans and usurp human control. Surely this has been made a popular thesis in movies, books, and other forms of entertainment. Yet, these stories reflect a fear that artificial superintelligence is, in fact, achievable and if left unleashed could lead to the extinction of humankind. Others disagree and believe that AI cannot surpass human control, regardless of how much it develops. However, there seems to be a more optimistic consensus that AI can help solve some important current and future challenges facing the world, such as disaster prediction, energy sustainability, and ecological challenges, among others.

On the flip side of the human-technological relationship spectrum is the idea that technology can be integrated into human bodies or even the idea that humanity can be integrated into robots, i.e., biomechatronics. We find this notion in a Popular Science article written in 2012, which explained, At the recent Global Future 2045 International Congress held in Moscow, 31-year-old media mogul Dmitry Itskov told attendees how he plans to create exactly that kind of immortality, first by creating a robot controlled by the human brain, then by actually transplanting a human brain into a humanoid robot, and then by replacing the surgical

transplant with a method for simply uploading a person's consciousness into a surrogate 'bot.1 Although we have not yet achieved Itskov’s goal, scientists and engineers have made progress since this 2012 article, having engineered mindcontrolled prosthetic limbs that also have the ability to communicate a sense of touch to the brain. But what are the benefits and dangers of connecting our minds and bodies to robotics and computers? Will the calculus result in gain or loss?

Societal views on AI and biomechatronics are so divergent that even the founders of AI, McCarthy and Minsky, have split since co-founding the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Ultimately, the idea of what it means to be human looms large in the background of these conversations. Differences stem from various factors including, but not limited to, education, ethical convictions, and religious views, all of which are involved in exploring the ethical implications for this horizon of engineering. In this article, we’ll briefly address these technological possibilities through the lens of theological anthropology and Christian ethical theory.

Humanity and Creation Much of the complexity concerning proposed boundaries and expectations for AI and biomechatronics revolves around disagreements over what a human is and should be. Atheistic worldviews do not share the same convictions as Christians concerning the created intentions for humanity nor the proper telos for human flourishing. As Christians, we believe we are not simply mind-body dualities, or a combination of a material host for an expressive individual. In his book Created in God’s Image, Anthony Hoekema is clear that “man must be understood as a unitary being. He has a physical side and a mental or spiritual side, but we must

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not separate these two. The human person must be understood as an embodied soul or a 'besouled' body.

He or she must be seen in his or her totality, not as a composite of different ‘parts.’”2 Hoekema goes on to say that his preferred word for this unity of two aspects is a “psychosomatic unity.”3 Although Scripture doesn’t give us a neatly packaged systematic theology concerning the composition of the human person, we do get a glimpse of this unity referred to by Hoekema in passages like Genesis 2:7, where God is said to have “breathed” life into a man that He formed from the earth. Job 32:8 further explains the nature of this life, saying that “it is a spirit that is in mankind, and the breath of the Almighty gives them understanding.”

Just as important as what we are is what we have been made to do, and how we do it. For Christians, Genesis 1:28 gives direction for our relationship with the material world; we are to “subdue” and “rule over” it.

We are to nurture it like a gardener nurtures a garden and to do so as one who will answer for its fitting fruitfulness. Whereas Christians create and build in order to partner with God in displaying His glory, those outside of Christ often create in order to seek meaning and fulfillment in the power of their will. We see a clear example of what God does not intend for our creativity in the story of the Tower of Babel: “And the Lord said, 'Behold, they are one people, and they all have the same language. And this is what they have started to do, and now nothing which they plan to do will be impossible for them'” (Genesis 11:6). In that particular historical narrative, God put an end to humanity’s unified technological initiatives because their motivations and telos were no longer aligned with His. Just because humanity can collaborate to do something profound doesn’t mean that they should.

Ethically Engaging Technology as Image Bearers In April of 2016, Kevin Kelly, executive editor of Wired Magazine, presented at a conference on the advancement of AI and how Christians could approach this technological advancement. Kevin reminded everyone attending that AI already existed and that it would only get more and more complex and capable in the coming years. A statement of his stood out as theologically and morally speculative. He suggested that because we image the creative capacity of our Creator, we are also destined to produce creatures with the same capacity as us. He ended his discussion by proposing that Christians needed to disciple AI with Christian values. The takeaway was that if Christians didn’t frame the future of AI,

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someone else would. While Mr. Kelly’s observations should definitely cause us to reexamine how Christians engage AI programing and the tech industry in general, it should not be assumed that his prophesies are correct or his theology well-informed. This sort of prognostication is akin to saying that Christians should help empower healthy same-sex marriages because homosexual marriages are a reality whether we think them natural or not.

Biblical Christianity has a specific anthropology that must be held as a foundation for our ethical thinking on all human endeavors. Notre Dame law professor Carter Snead recently wrote a book on bioethics that also relates to the need in the technological engineering field for an ethical telos that sees humans rightly. He says, “What is needed, therefore, is an ‘anthropological’ corrective to … integrate into public bioethics fitting goods, practices, and virtues suitable to governing a polity of embodied human beings.”4 Just replace “bioethics” with “engineering technology,” and this statement still rings true. The proposal that Kelly raised should provoke within us a curiosity for how our biblical and ethical convictions can approach technological advancements in a God-honoring way, a way in which we avoid building our ultimate hope around our own creative power. Our relationships with our creations will no more equal our relationships with each other than God’s relationship with us equals His relationship with Himself. There will always be an ethical gap between how we treat fellow humans over against how we treat technologies that we have engineered to mimic our qualities and capacities. We know that we have relational responsibilities to God and our neighbors, and there is no doubt that our creative capacities in replacing limbs for amputees and making industries less wasteful with advances in AI are in line with our role as stewards of God’s creation.

But the temptation to keep pressing the innovative envelope must be held in check by our telos of loving God and neighbor according to God’s standards.

Governments and corporations often default to utilitarianism in seeking to guide their policies and production, but Christians should not simply base their decisions on what makes the most people happy.

We seek to apply God’s general and specific revelation to the myriad of responsibilities and roles inherent to our existence before Him and within Him. This revelationally and relationally driven ethical system must guide our use of technology and frame the goals we seek to achieve.

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Concluding Remarks Some of the theological and ethical concerns surrounding engineering technology are genuine and must be thoroughly addressed at all stages of development and implementation. However, despite the controversies around initiatives in this field, AI still remains a beneficial resource for human flourishing.

Advances made in AI and biomechatronics have the capacity to be honoring unto God, as they can demonstrate the unique creative abilities that God has bestowed on us. In addition, it is reassuring to remember that God alone has the power to create life ex nihilo, and no current or future advancement in technology will ever usurp that. Furthermore, as creatures of God, we are to bear His image; and as imitators of His character, we are to instill — when

applicable — those virtues and moral boundaries into our technological advancements.

Clay Dillow, “Will People Alive Today Have the Opportunity to Upload Their Consciousness to a New Robotic Body?,” Popular Science, March 2, 2012, https://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2012-03/ achieving-immortality-russian-mogul-wants-begin-putting-humanbrains-robots-and-soon.

1

2 Anthony A. Hoekema, Created in God’s Image (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1994), 216.

3 Ibid., 217.

4 O. Carter Snead, What It Means to Be Human: The Case for the Body in Public Bioethics (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2020), 13.

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INTERDISCIPLINARY ESSAYS

Humility in Christian Cultural Interaction: Interdisciplinary Engagement Through Music and Language Learning Robert Morehouse, Professor of Arabic, Liberty University Katherine Morehouse, Professor of Ethnomusicology and Chair, Department of Multi-Ethnic Music Studies, Liberty University

Humility in Christian Cultural Engagement Jesus told us to disciple the nations, and He modeled what our approach should be. Discipling someone requires entering into a relationship with them, actively engaging to help them experience the Kingdom of God by the power of the Holy Spirit. If we are to disciple the nations we must engage their cultures. Just as Jesus dwelled among us incarnationally, we dwell incarnationally with those we are ministering to and alongside.

Primary attributes for a disciple are humility and submission. A disciple sat literally “at the feet” of the teacher in a subordinate position. Jesus invited Mary to be discipled by listening at His feet (Luke 10:39).

Paul was educated “at the feet” of Gamaliel (Acts 22:3). The healed demoniac was found sitting at the feet of Jesus (Luke 8:35). In fact, in the story of Mary and Martha, Jesus tells Martha that Mary has chosen the only necessary thing: sitting at the feet of Jesus and listening to Him (Luke 10:42).

But then, in the ultimate role reversal, on the night Jesus was betrayed, he took a towel and bent low “at the feet” of His disciples to wash their feet. He was demonstrating that the greatest among us would be servants. More than that, He showed that love and service will be the hallmark of His disciples (Luke 23:8-12, Philippians 2:1-11). Intentionally deciding to learn a new language or musical style for the purpose of discipleship is a kind of servanthood.

Out of a heart of love and service, we place our own comfort aside and step into the glorious discomfort of being new at something we are not yet good at. If we intend to engage people from a culture other than our own, we must go to them, learning their languages, customs, and beliefs. This is an active process. It is an educational process, a humbling process. Disciples of Jesus disciple others by going lower, not higher.

Seeing People’s Hearts If we are going to invite people to follow Jesus like He called His disciples to follow Him, we must go to them. If we are going to make disciples we must know them. Jesus went; He knew His disciples’ hearts; He saw them as they were; and He called them to, “Follow me.” We too must go to the nations, learn to see them, and call them to follow Jesus. Going to people is a form of going lower. We must empty ourselves, setting aside our biases and preferences and choosing to see other people and their world with humility. This starts with observing, listening, and seeking to be taught the culture through language, music, and other avenues, so that we might understand them on their terms (the emic perspective).

The human instinct to engage others through our own filters has historically been a problem for the Church. Rather than taking a humble approach, missionaries have sometimes seen themselves, and their own “Christian” cultures as superior, and have thus focused on imparting values, norms, taboos, etc. as part of presenting the Gospel. Instead, we need to learn first, and to dwell first, so we can decontextualize and get rid of our own cultural baggage before we can contextualize the Gospel in another language or musical style. Missional approaches that operate under the assumption that believers in other societies are in some way spiritually dysfunctional or dependent on “first world” churches for their health and wellbeing cripple the body of Christ by binding healthy limbs and stifling growth that comes with exercise.

The better thing would be to take time to know and understand people, to see their hearts. Then, from a place of relationship, invite, enable, and encourage them to make disciples themselves.

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Experience Life with People Cross-cultural discipleship requires actively being a part of normal life with the goal of producing followers of Jesus. It requires going, meeting, inviting, listening, learning, and participating. There is a lot to be said for the academic engagement of other cultures.

Indeed, it is valuable to learn the languages, literatures, histories, religions, norms, taboos, arts, etc. of the people that you are hoping to engage. However, there is no substitute for experience. When we participate respectfully and receptively in others’ lives, this shows deference and love. Whether in sharing meals, doing business, participating in recreation, worshipping together, or other activities, sharing our lives with others as we join in theirs, it is in these interactions that our learning, however meager or extensive, is realized. Our senses come alive with the experience of the greetings, meals, habits, rites of passage, etc. that we have studied.

Language learning is a powerful way to enhance the degree to which we experience life with people.

Being able to speak to someone in their own language changes the nature of engagement. We talk about things being “lost in translation” for a reason.

Knowing the language allows us more intimate access to a broader understanding of the culture. We can recognize and convey nuance and subtlety that might otherwise be missed.

Learning someone else’s language is also a way to go lower. It requires a humble “sitting at the feet” of someone who knows the language. Committing the kind of time and energy required to learn another language demonstrates your level of interest to those to whom you are trying to communicate. It shows that you are willing to lay aside your own time, language, and culture in order to understand theirs.

Inviting People into the Kingdom The fruit of approaching others from a place of this kind of humility comes in a number of forms. Those we engage will know the sincerity of our interest and our genuine love for them as they are. They will feel appreciated and understood, trusting that there is someone from another culture who is trying to understand what it means to be from their culture — someone who is capable of seeing beyond caricature and stereotype. Where better to minister to others than from a place of trust?

Discipling the nations involves talking about the Kingdom of God and living by the values, habits, and customs of that Kingdom. When Jesus spoke of the Kingdom, He set forth a whole new set of principles that will be foreign to ALL cultures to some extent: don’t strike back if someone hits you; don’t save your money, but divest yourself of it for the Kingdom’s sake; and don’t worry about your life, but trust God to provide. The values of the Kingdom center our focus on God and others, rather than on ourselves. Even as the Holy Spirit draws someone to the truth of Jesus, in many settings there will also be incredible social pressure against following Him. In some cultures the invitation to follow Christ in building His Kingdom asks the new believer to truly sacrifice everything they hold dear, as they may well lose not only their possessions but their family, friends, and at times even their lives. How vital then is the trust we must build with those whom we are calling to come follow Jesus Messiah with us? How worthwhile is the sacrificed time and energy of study and preparation, and the humility of insisting on a posture of servitude through language and cultural learning?

Perhaps the only thing more important than the trust we might garner with those we encounter is our ability to extend the invitation at all. While it is paramount that we know the message and are able to give a reason for our hope, we must know the people, their language, and their ways if we are going to be able to tell what God has done for us in a way they can understand. While singing a translated hymn from our own tradition is not necessarily bad, how much more impactful would it be to tell the bigpicture story of the Bible through a song composed in a local style, in their heart music? If you have learned to see people as they see themselves, if you have committed to experience life with them, and if you lovingly engage with people and you are talking about and living out the Kingdom with them, you are making disciples of Jesus.

Conclusion A “going lower” model of cultural engagement demonstrates our love for our brothers and sisters in Christ. This is itself a mode of evangelism and discipleship. Sometimes more importantly, it reifies the value of our fellow believers and encourages their own agency in the body of Christ. In our emphasis on contextualization and learning the culture, we

FA I T H A N D T H E A C A D E M Y: E N G A G I N G T H E C U LT U R E W I T H G R A C E A N D T R U T H

cannot forget that the Gospel of the Kingdom is countercultural. The truth is that if we love God, we will obey His commands. In what ways are you wanting to disciple the nations? Go. Don’t let fear stop you. The point of learning a culture’s language or music is not to relate to them as an end to itself but to invite them into Christ so that we all may be unified

in one body, one temple, one Kingdom. Once you catch the vision for that, even your times of learning are filled with creative ways of sharing the Gospel and experiencing multicultural worship together.

Therefore, learn, study, and prepare, and then be sure to go low, share life together, and invite them to join in the eternal life of the Kingdom.

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Book Reviews Dennis Nicholson Student Fellow, Center for Apologetics & Cultural Engagement, Liberty University

As pilgrims living in a radically pluralistic age, how are Christians called to bear witness to Christ in their political engagement? David VanDrunen embarks on the difficult quest of addressing this question in Politics after Christendom. His response is no new political theology but instead an old one, anchored in the truth of Scripture and the Reformed tradition. Taking inspiration from Francis Turretin's two kingdoms theology and Augustine's two cities, VanDrunen draws a detailed map of the political landscape for pilgrims and exiles who are called to seek the welfare of the earthly city while looking toward the heavenly one.

Part 1 of Politics after Christendom defends VanDrunen’s central argument that the Noahic covenant, which God made with all of creation, should serve as the orienting compass for understanding what Scripture says about government. Under this covenant, God ordains the rulers of the world to rule over all people, but their rule is not lasting, and they are called to judge according to His standards of justice. These standards of justice are modest, concerned with preserving the natural order of creation rather than manifesting the salvific order of new covenant grace. Consequently, Christians must reject Christendom. Instead, as dual citizens of heaven and earth, they should stay the course to the heavenly city, seeking to instill a measure of common peace in their political communities as they go on their way.

Part 2 outlines just what this dual citizenship entails in the down-to-earth details of political life. VanDrunen tackles religious liberty, family, economics, justice, law, and right authority, concluding with an analysis of the merits of progressive, liberal, conservative, and nationalist ideologies under the Noahic covenant.

In general, Politics after Christendom provokes reflection and topples idols. Some might wish for a more redemptive, eschatological view of politics than what they find here. However, they will be hard-pressed to square their desires with VanDrunen's rigorous exegesis and argumentation. They may even be inclined to ponder the place of politics in their own hearts: do they seek among the kingdoms of the world what God has already provided for them in His church? In either case, VanDrunen's work proves itself to be insightful and deeply applicable. For political scholars seeking Scriptural direction or laymen seeking political orientation, Politics after Christendom is a worthy guide.

VanDrunen, David, Politics after Christendom, Zondervan Academic, 2020. 400 pages.

FA I T H A N D T H E A C A D E M Y: E N G A G I N G T H E C U LT U R E W I T H G R A C E A N D T R U T H

Book Reviews Hunter Brown Student Fellow, Center for Apologetics & Cultural Engagement, Liberty University

The Political Disciple: A Theology of Public Life is Dr. Vincent E. Bacote’s addition to Zondervan’s Ordinary Theology Series in which he offers an answer for Christians seeking to understand their role and responsibility in society and public engagement.

Writing for everyone from pastors to college students — including those skeptical of Christian political engagement — Bacote urges Christians to develop an active, public faith, embrace a biblical identity, and approach public engagement in Spirit-led holiness with an expectation of suffering.

In four concise chapters, Bacote answers the questions, “Should Christians even participate in the public sphere?” “How should Christians understand their identity?” “What kind of people should Christians be in public?” and primarily, “What difference do my beliefs make for the world around me?” He writes that passages like Genesis 1:26 and 1:28 show that Christians have a responsibility to cultivate creation and to lead it to flourishing, and that every area of our lives — including the public domain — is for glorifying God through our participation and transformative presence. When we enter the public sphere, our biblical identity, built from labels like “Image of God” and “Follower of Jesus,” should remind us that we belong to God and that loyalty to country should not be confused with our primary allegiance to Him (52).

Bacote explains that public engagement should be shaped by holiness and love for others, as this will nurture greater change than a passion for political positions. His final primary point is that we should persevere in humble service to the flourishing of society, as we must obey our first commandment even when our efforts are frustrated by humanity’s fallen nature.

At some point, every Christian has wondered how their faith should be shared publicly, if at all. Bacote’s The Political Disciple presents well-researched positions addressing the most important concerns Christians are struggling with regarding their responsibility to the societies in which they live. Not only is this work an invaluable resource for those struggling with these questions, but all Christians should take advantage of his research to learn why and how our faith should be communicated to the world. Bacote shows that we have good reason to believe that our beliefs are for public expression, and their expression should be shaped by our biblical identity, holiness, and selflessness.

Bacote, Vincent, The Political Disciple: A Theology of Public Life, Zondervan, 2015. 96 pages.

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Book Reviews Kayla Hamlin Student Fellow, Center for Apologetics & Cultural Engagement, Liberty University

A poignant collection of essays from church leaders of all ethnicities, Letters to a Birmingham Jail responds to Dr. King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail and assesses how things have changed since his letter was penned.

The assessment is heart-wrenching — the words of Dr. King still ring true that “Sunday at 11 a.m. is the most segregated hour in America.” The authors articulate that racial justice and Christ-exalting diversity is God’s best for humanity. Pointing to the example of Paul in Galatians and Ephesians, we find that Greeks and Jews are brothers in Christ on equal footing — to be equally involved in leadership with their differences not being ignored but existing in celebrated harmony. The Jews were no longer to consider their gentile brothers unclean — the gentile Christians were no longer to remain in the outer court of the temple, but they are to be joined with the Jews into one royal priesthood. Unfortunately, many churches in America are a far cry from this command of harmony, brotherhood, and celebration of Christ-exalting diversity.

The authors lay out practical steps for Christ-exalting diversity and multi-ethnic ministry: Step 1: Acknowledge the injustices of the past and present and humbly listen. Being born into the majority culture, I often forget how recently segregation was abolished. Nearly every black person over 50 years of age has chilling personal experiences of racially based hate, discrimination, and economic injustice in their past.

Often the majority culture speaks of the “color blindness” approach to diversity, but the authors point out that colorblindness sweeps the heart issues that cause injustice under the rug. The church must do as Jesus did and seek reconciliation. When we acknowledge injustice, we can then begin to humbly listen to our minority brothers and sisters and seek reconciliation.

Step 2: Acknowledge that the time is now. The church is frankly far behind secular society, simply because the church is often complacent. Step 2 is the refusal to “punt the problem to the next generation of history.” Even if your church is in a mostly majority culture neighborhood, you must realize that you as a Christ follower have a responsibility to elevate all brothers in all forms of racial justice and Christian diversity.

Step 3: Move away from “tokenism.” Tokenism is the idea that more than one skin color in a room is diversity.

The church leaders in this book point out that diversity is not only visual, but it is also audible. All ethnicities should have a voice, and all voices should be treated with respect and consideration. To move toward diverse churches, the authors recommend diverse leadership where every ethnicity has equal input. This will naturally lead to multiethnic ministry.

Step 4: Take it to the living room. Step four acknowledges that diversity on Sunday morning naturally goes with diversity on Saturday night. Diversity is more than different colors in the same room; diversity is brotherhood of all colors, and brotherhood is forged in the Christmas get-together just as much as it is the Sunday service.

This read will challenge believers of all ethnicities to lay down their misconceptions, check their hearts, and pursue Christ-exalting diversity.

Loritts, Bryan, Letters to a Birmingham Jail: A Response to the Words and Dreams of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Moody Publishers, 2014.

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Center for Apologetics & Cultural Engagement Editorial BOard Senior Fellows Ed Hindson Mark Horstemeyer Gary Isaacs Linda Mintle Fellows Adebukola Adebayo Kelly Hamren John Knox Joseph Martins Christopher Misiano Cara Murphy Jason Ross Nathaniel Valle

“Then Jesus told them, ‘Give back to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.’

And they were amazed at Him.” Mark 12:17

Coming Spring 2022 Vol. 6, no. 2 Faith and the Academy: Engaging Culture with Grace and Truth “Dealing with Deconversion: The Malaise of Fragilized Faith”