A Wilberforce to Be Reckoned With

Amazing Grace by Eric Metaxas
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Wilberforce is the embodiment of Chesterton's quip, "The only thing to be done with the ideal is to do it." Wilberforce and his group not only brought slavery to an end in the British empire but also re-christianized Britain with their reformation of manners.

Manners here refers to how man relates to his fellow man. Britain was so barbaric at the time it's hard to imagine that the Victorian Age was coming. The Victorians had their excesses to but it was an incredible improvement over the barbarism of the gladiatorial-esque cruelty to animals, prostitution, and incivility in the streets. By advancing his Christian worldview Wilberforce liberated Britain from Enlightenment racism and paganism.

My only criticism is that the book is short on critique of Wilberforce though there are a few. He comes off as a can-do-no-wrong-hero. Even heroes have their flaws and he would be even more believable if we knew more about them. The book is well written, truly inspirational, and all the more moving because the story is true.


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Maddening Love

Sometimes it is more loving to make people mad, than to make people happy.

Legalizing gay marriage would make a lot of people happy but it would not lead to their happiness. Restraining them would make them unhappy, but might lead to a greater happiness. This is because living in harmony with "nature and nature's God," despite their desires, will lead to true happiness.

Heterosexual people must do this too. They have to resist their desires to be unfaithful to their spouses.  Desires, by themselves, are not a guide to what's natural.

Why Are Religious People Considered Politically Dangerous?

I recently read Douglas Murray's, "Atheists vs Dawkins. My fellow atheists, it’s time we admitted that religion has some points in its favour." Murray was supposed to be on the side of his fellow atheist Richard Dawkins in a recent debate but ended up arguing against him. It turns out that Murray can't play with Dawkins when he portrays religion as "a force of unremitting awfulness, a poisoned root from which no good fruit could grow." Murray opines, "It seems to me the work not of a thinker but of any balanced observer to notice that this is not the case."

I would argue that Christianity is not a religion like any other because it presents God as graciously condescending to save man rather than teaching man to ascend to God through good works. It was Christianity and its doctrine that all people are made in the image of God and are objects of redemption that brought human rights into the Roman Empire. Women converts were a majority in the early church because they recognized the dignity the gospel brought to them. It was Christianity that ended the gladiatorial games, abortion, and infanticide in late antiquity. It was Christianity that ended slavery during the Middle Ages and again in the British Empire and most of the abolitionists in the US were Christians. It was Christianity that founded the first hospitals and is still the greatest source of charity in the world.

But other religions besides Christianity have obviously done good in the world. Even Dawkins' religion of scientism has been responsible for some good. Dawkins himself is supposedly a very kind and polite man and even a careful scholar when he is not attacking Christianity.

Murray is dead on when he says:

My fellow atheist opponents the other night portrayed the future — if we could only shrug off religion — as a wonderful sunlit upland, where reasonable people would make reasonable decisions in a reasonable world. Is it not at least equally likely that if you keep telling people that they lead meaningless lives in a meaningless universe you might just find yourself with — at best — a vacuous life and a hollow culture? My first exhibit in submission involves turning on a television. 

But then Murray swerves off course:

Religions must give up the aspiration to intervene in secular law in the democratic state. In particular they must give up any desire to hold legislative power over those who are not members of their faith. In much of the world the Christian churches have already done this. Of course there are other religions and places where this separation has not been so nearly achieved. But the concession is vital, not least because the ability to dictate politics or law is the ability that most rightly concerns the non-religious about religions.  

Why is it assumed that only religious people would legislate morality? Why is it assumed that secular law has no moral agenda to legislate? The question is not whether morality will be legislated but which morality will be legislated. Will it be a morality grounded in nature, the way things are, or a morality based upon what we want nature to be?

Why is it assumed Christian morality is oppressive when the historical record shows otherwise? Though Christians have been inconsistent with their founder many times, their movement has liberated the world from tyranny again and again. Christian influence in politics, properly conceived, doesn't impose Christianity on non Christians. It doesn't try to make Christians out of non Christians through the political process. It appeals to something believers and non-believers share in common and that we all know by heart: natural law.

True Patriotism

The true patriot repents for and calls for the repentance of his nation: "Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people" (Proverbs 14:34 ESV).

Stinking to High Heaven

Last night I was asked about a serious of prints hanging in our school library that portray a civilization developing out of nature, flourishing into a golden age, and then decaying into ruins. Someone remarked that we should probably take down the decaying into ruins part.

Here's an argument for keeping that front and center. Every civilization, except the very young ones alive today, have all over ripened, stunk to high heaven, and died. Every civilization except the one based on the church instituted by Christ.

Jesus never promised that the gates of hell wouldn't prevail against Constantine, medieval Christianity, the Great American Awakenings, or the Energizer Bunny. "The Bunny, the Bunny, Oh! I love the Bunny." Ok, I stop it now.

He promises that the gates of hell will not prevail against the church because he is the chief cornerstone. That means the source of Christian civilization will keep it "going and going and going." The church has outlasted every philosophical fad that predicted its demise from Voltaire, to Nietzsche, to Sartre.

So the question remains, what are we building on? What are we investing our time, talent, and treasure in? Is it a kingdom of the world, or are we trying to reform those kingdoms with the everlasting truth of Christ crucified, risen, reigning, and returning.

Secular Jihad

Today, when the whole population of every civilized country is subjected to an intensive process of schooling during the most impressionable years of their lives, it is the school and not the church that forms men's minds, and if the school finds no place for religion, there will be no room left for religion elsewhere.
                                Christopher Dawson, Cultural Historian, Civilization in Crisis  (1950) (Thanks to Chris Baker for this quote.)

When government schools declare religion out of bounds, they aren't, as they claim, being neutral towards all religions. They aren't just saying that religious expression isn't relevant to education either. They are enshrining the religion of secularism with its saints (like Darwin), martyrs (like Galileo), and liturgy ("separation of church and state") to be the established faith of the school.

Because religious beliefs are our most basic beliefs, they frame, color, and define our view of the world at every waking and sleeping moment. Claiming otherwise, would be like telling your coach you could see the ball just as well wearing your welding helmet as your batting helmet. The welding helmet keeps certain things out while the batting helmet helps you see as God intended. Your coach would not be fooled.

"What God has joined together no man can put asunder." So government schools pull a fast one by pretending to have put it asunder, while installing their own belief system for all practice day in and day out from pre-K to graduation.

The students get the message too. When I spoke up from a Christian perspective in my government school, it wasn't the teachers who were offended. It was my fellow students who told me to shut up!

Teachers are expressly forbidden from teaching from a Christian point of view. Evangelism is an outrage and Christianity is evangelistic. This makes Christian statements unwelcome in the classroom.

Christians in public schools have been conquered by secular Jihad and reduced to the status of dhimmitude, which means "concession, surrender and appeasement" towards government demands. The government isn't Sharia law but Secular law.

With government schools leaving no place for Christian expression, is it any wonder that the Christian recession in the public square starting in the early twentieth century continues today with disastrous moral results?

Freedom From Responsibility

Thanks to Mark Horne for this quote:

In the end, more than freedom, they wanted security. They wanted a comfortable life, and they lost it all – security, comfort, and freedom. When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again. -- Edward Gibbon

"Intemperate Minds Cannot Be Free"

Edmund Burke wrote in 1791:

Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites .... Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters. 

We tend to define freedom in terms of the maximizing of choice. We think the more we can have what we want the freer we are. The Christian view of freedom is the ability to do what is right. Since we have given up on any standard of right and wrong that applies to everyone, we are left with, "I'm free to do what I want any old time." This is a recipe for bondage. Jesus didn't say, "He who sins has free choice." But, "He who sins is a slave to sin."

Burke explained the proliferation of law that we see today. Our view of freedom as personal choice throws off internal restraint. We aren't born with internal restraints. They must be instilled by parents and other God-given authority figures teaching the word of God through words and wood. This needed little back up from government when churches and parents were doing their jobs. Today it's left up to government and laws try to keep up with accelerating lawlessness. But now the law looks more and more arbitrary and is taken less and less seriously.

John Witte Jr. argues  that without a basis in divine and natural law, positive law becomes a sort of wish list. To make up for this courts are invested with divine like power. In an episode of Seinfeld, Poppy challenged Elaine to defend her pro-choice view by asking her, "What gives you the right?" She replied, "The Supreme Court!"

Rick Santorum recently remarked in a Republican debate that government doesn't give us rights. It's job it to recognize and protect our God-given rights. This is much more satisfactory than Ron Paul's naive view, expressed in the same debate, that his religious views wouldn't affect his presidential politics. "You can't legislate morality," they say, but isn't it the case that we shouldn't legislate anything but morality? If so, where do we get it?  If we don't get it from God it will be the end of society. If we return to him individually and in our homes, work, churches, and in public, there is hope of a most glorious and gracious kind.

To sum up: Without divine law there's no internal restraints. Without internal restraints positive law increases. Without divine law to back it up, positive law has little force. To give it more force we give more power to our government, especially our courts. But its not the job of government to give us laws and rights but to maintain the God-given ones. If we don't acknowledge what we acknowledged in the Declaration of Independence then we won't be independent much longer. If we return to him we return to hope.

What's Wrong with Only Doing Evangelism and not Politics?

In his Politics According to the Bible: A Comprehensive Resource for Understanding Modern Political Issues in Light of Scripture, Wayne Grudem has a nice summary of Alvin Schmidt's work on Christian influence on the state. He also does a nice job critiquing the "do evangelism not politics" view represented by John MacArthur:

Historian Alvin Schmidt points out how the spread of Christianity and Christian influence on government was primarily responsible for outlawing infanticide, child abandonment, and abortion in the Roman Empire (in AD 374); outlawing the brutal battles-to-the-death in which thousands of gladiators had died (in 404); outlawing the cruel punishment of branding the faces of criminals (in 315); instituting prison reforms such as the segregating of male and female prisoners (by 361); stopping the practice of human sacrifice among the Irish, the Prussians, and the Lithuanians as well as among other nations; outlawing pedophilia; granting of property rights and other protection to women; banning polygamy (which is still practiced in some Muslim nations today); prohibiting the burning alive of widows in India (in 1829); outlawing the painful and crippling practice of binding young women's feet in China (in 1912); persuading government officials to begin a system of public [Christian] schools in Germany (in the sixteenth century); and advancing the idea of compulsory education of all children in a number of European countries.

During the history of the church, Christians have had a decisive influence in opposing and often abolishing slavery in the Roman Empire, in Ireland, and in most of Europe (though Schmidt frankly notes that a minority of "erring" Christian teachers have supported slavery in various centuries). In England, William Wilberforce, a devout Christian, led the successful effort to abolish the slave trade and then slavery itself throughout the British Empire by 1840.

In the United States, though there were vocal defenders of slavery among Christians in the South, they were vastly outnumbered by the many Christians who were ardent abolitionists, speaking, writing, and agitating constantly for the abolition of slavery in the United States. Schmidt notes note that two-thirds of the American abolitionists in the mid-1830s were Christian clergymen, and he gives numerous examples of the strong Christian commitment of several of the most influential of the antislavery crusaders .... The American civil rights movement that resulted in the outlawing of the racial segregation and discrimination was led by Martin Luther King Jr., a Christian pastor, and supported by many Christian churches and groups.

There was also strong influence from Christian ideas and influential Christians in the formulation of the Magna Carta in England (1215) and the Declaration of Independence (1776) and the Constitution (1787) in the United States. These are three of the most significant documents in the history of governments on the earth, and all three show the marks of significant Christian influence in the foundational ideas of how governments should function. These foundations for British and American government did not come about as a result of the "do evangelism, not politics" view.

Schmidt also argues that several specific components of modern views of government also had strong Christian influence in their origin and influence, such as individual human rights, individual freedom the equality of individuals before the law, freedom of religion, and separation of church and state....

Therefore I cannot agree with John MacArthur when he says, "God does not call the church to influence the culture by promoting legislation and court rulings that advance a scriptural point of view." When I look over that list of changes in governments and laws that Christians incited, I think God did call the church and thousands of Christians within the church to work to bring about these momentous improvements in human society throughout the world. Or should we say that Christians who brought about these changes were not doing so out of obedience to God? That these changes made no difference to God? This cannot be true.

MacArthur says, "Using temporal methods to promote legislative and judicial change ... is not our calling--and has no eternal value." I disagree. I believe those changes listed above were important to the God who declares, "Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream" (amos 5:24). God cares how people treat one another here on earth, and these changes in government listed above do have eternal value in God's sight.

If the Christian church had adopted the "do evangelism, not politics" view throughout its history, it would never have brought about these immeasurably valuable changes among the nations of the world. But these changes did happen, because Christians realized that if they could influence laws and governments for good, they would be obeying the command of their Lord, "Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them" (Eph. 2:10) (Politics - According to the Bible: A Comprehensive Resource for Understanding Modern Political Issues in Light of Scripture, Zondervan, 2010, 39-51).

Leithart's Defending Constantine points out that Constantine was the first Greco-Roman ruler to recognize the church as its own distinct polis, as Augustine would later distinguish the city of God and the city of Man. This distinction was completely lost on pagans who had worshipped their emperor as a god and assumed that Rome was sacked in 410 because the gods were angry that they weren't getting their sacrifices.

Prior to the Christianization of the empire, there was no distinction much less separation of state and religion. Leithart shows that the pagan Roman Empire was drenched in sacrifice to the Roman gods from top to bottom. Today, modern pagans want to use this Christian distinction between church and state to silence the church in the world at large. Shouldn't this get us talking politics again?