Archive for the ‘ecclesiology’ tag
Political voices in the American pulpit
On September 28, about 50 American pastors organized by the Alliance Defense Fund will deliberately preach a political message:
For more than a half-century, federal law has restricted the right of most churches and pastors to speak out about candidates for office. But on Sunday, Sept. 28, about 50 pastors nationwide . . . will deliberately challenge that law by speaking out politically from their pulpits.
. . .
Pastors long spoke out on great moral issues such as slavery, women’s suffrage, child labor and prostitution. Pastors also have spoken from the pulpit with great frequency for and against various candidates for government office.
All that changed in 1954 with the passage of the “Johnson amendment,” which restricted the right of churches and pastors to speak about candidates for office. The amendment . . . changed the Internal Revenue Code to prohibit churches and other non-profit organizations from supporting or opposing a candidate for office.
Did the amendment really restrict the right of free speech? No:
Afer the amendment passed, churches faced a choice of either continuing their tradition of speaking out or silencing themselves in order to retain their church’s tax exemption.
Churches and pastors can preach whatever they want to preach. Whether or not they have the privelege of tax-exempt status is a matter of the content of their message. Therefore, if a church feels it cannot fulfill its proper role, perhaps tax-exempt status should be abandoned in favor of a prophetic witness.
The plan on the 28th is to draw the ire of the IRS and thereby file a lawsuit which can be appealed in hopes of ivalidating the Johnson amendment. I have no idea if it will work, though it is not a bad strategy for affecting political change (I believe the Scopes monkey trials came about in a similar way). What is disconcerting is that churches who felt political speech was an essential part of their mission were voluntarily silent for 50 years in order to avoid financial hardship.
Tax-exempt status is not everything. Indeed, it might be better for churches to voluntarily renounce it, in the model of the rich young ruler selling all his possessions to follow Jesus. In doing so they can reduce the power of the state over them. But I am not convinced that true political preaching has anything to do with political candidates. I’ll repeat part of the quote:
Pastors long spoke out on great moral issues such as slavery, women’s suffrage, child labor and prostitution. Pastors also have spoken from the pulpit with great frequency for and against various candidates for government office.
The portion in bold remains possible for the tax-exempt American church. This, I think, is the essence of political preaching. Anything that has to do with a specific candidate is too vulnerable to mere partisanship.
John Piper on the Church and the State
In 2005, during his slow crawl through Romans, John Piper preached four messages on Romans 13:1-7 entitled “Subjection to God and Subjection to the State.” I listened to them initially not long after they were preached, but I decided to go through them again these past few days. They are, all things considered, a frank treatment of the passage. I appreciate that Piper, who is in the thick of the Evangelical movement in the United States, honestly examines the contradiction between Paul’s teaching here and the Declaration of Independence, on which the US (a “Christian nation”) is founded. I think his ideas on this topic warrant a closer examination, so here are the links to the audio, if you have 3.5 hours to spare:
Part 2 has a favorite line of mine (paraphrased): “Nobody ever went to hell because they didn’t get their civil rights.” Regardless of whether people agree with Piper, he is right when he says that Romans 13 is brimming with implications for our everyday lives.
Something new every day
Now here is something I have never seen in a doctrinal statement:
We believe only in the local church and not in a universal church.
I am actually quite curious about what is meant by that. My suspicion is that it is related to church polity and not the union of Christ with his body. Still, I have to say that is an unusual article of faith. Though I should not have been suprised to find something unusual in a statement which starts with the following:
We believe that the King James Bible is the word of God without error.
