Roger E. Olson

A person promoting revisionist history here recently declared that no honest person can deny that the U.S.’s founding fathers were Christians. I don’t know anyone who denies they (at least most of them) were formally Christians in the sense of being baptized members of nominally Christian churches. The issue is their real beliefs.

Yesterday I visited the largest Half Price Bookstore in the world–a veritable Costco (if that’s the right analogy) of books. It would take someone many hours to peruse every shelf. Even the “Religion” section is amazingly large.

I saw many copies of this book and bought one for my own library: David L. Holmes, The Faiths of the Founding Fathers (Oxford, 2006). Holmes is Walter G. Mason Professor of Religious Studies at the College of William and Mary–the alma mater of some of the founding fathers.

(In case you wonder if I read it over night. Well, the fact is that I read it IN Half Price Bookstore months ago and intended to buy it. Just before going to the cashier to purchase it, after reading it, I laid it down outside the restroom. When I came out it was gone! I then could not find any other copies. I figured there would be another copy or copies next time I visited the store and I was right. This time many copies were on an end cap display.)

Here is a gem from the book that rings true with everything I have read and studied (of a scholarly nature) about the founding fathers:

“Deism influenced, in one way or another, most of the political leaders who designed the new American government. Since the founding fathers did not hold identical views on religion, they should not be lumped together. But if census takers trained in Christian theology had set up broad categories in 1790 labeled ‘Atheism,’ ‘Deism and Unitarianism,’ ‘Orthodox Protestantism,’ ‘Orthodox Roman Catholicism,’ and ‘Other,’ and if they had interviewed Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe, they would undoubtedly have placed every one of these six founding fathers in some way under the category of ‘Deism and Unitarianism’.” (pp. 50-51)

Holmes doesn’t just assert it; he gives plenty of evidence to support it.

Holmes’ chapter 12 is “A Layperson’s Guide to Distinguishing a Deist from an Orthodox Christian.” Very helpful.

Chapter 13 is “Three Orthodox Christians.” They are: Samuel Adams (after whom the popular beer is named!), Elias Boudinot and John Jay.

Anyone tempted to buy into the current flood of revisionism about the religious beliefs and practices of the founding fathers (I say “current” because, again, nothing under the sun is new) ought to read this book. Together with similar ones (e.g., Frank Lambert’s that I recommended the other day) it absolutely blows away (as in a wind, not an explosion) the whole idea that most of the founding fathers of the American Republic were orthodox Christians.

One noted revisionist has publicly stated (on Christian TV) that Thomas Jefferson created his truncated New Testament (“The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth” otherwise known as “Jefferson’s Bible”) as a tool for evangelizing the Native Americans. That is so bogus it boggles the mind. Jefferson explained his reasons for creating it in letters to friends including to John Adams. He explained that he did not agree with much that the apostles wrote and even with much that Jesus taught. But he admired some of Jesus’ teachings and actions.

My response to the commenter here is that no  truly educated person can honestly claim that the majority of the founding fathers were orthodox Christians.

If you live near a Half Price Bookstore, get over there and buy Holmes’ book. Or, just order it from your local bookstore or on line. It’s not dry as dust scholarly stuff. It is written for lay people, not scholars.

Part 11 of Response to The Gospel as Center: Chapter 11 The Kingdom of God

As those of you who have followed my blog for some time know, the Kingdom of God is one of my favorite themes. I am deeply concerned that most Christians seem to misunderstand the Kingdom of God. They talk about “building the Kingdom” and the church as the Kingdom of God. These are simply theological mistakes. Scripture says nothing about “building the Kingdom” (the Kingdom of God is gift) or about the church itself as the Kingdom (although it is rightly understood as a colony of the Kingdom).

So, as I approached Chapter 11, “The Kingdom of God,” in The Gospel as Center I was curious to see what a member of The Gospel Coalition would say about the Kingdom of God. The author is Stephen Um, a Presbyterian minister.

The problem with Um’s chapter is not what it says but what it doesn’t say. Nowhere does he equate the church with the Kingdom and he rightly emphasizes social responsibility as part of the church’s presence in the world (without even hinting at theocracy let alone Christian Reconstructionism).

Um begins by beating the conservative evangelical drum against postmodernism which is allegedly all about overthrowing all authority. Again, as with previous authors who mentioned postmodernity and postmodernism, he doesn’t mention a single postmodern philosopher. He mentions a postmodern theologian—Don Cupitt, but I would say he doesn’t represent all of postmodern thought. In fact, I think Cupitt is just an old fashioned liberal dressed up in postmodern garb.

For the first half of the chapter Um emphasizes the Kingdom of God as God’s kingly, authoritative rule which will only be complete in the eschaton. Jesus is the presence of Gods’ Kingdom in history. He writes about the Kingdom as “already but not yet”—a pretty standard treatment of the Kingdom of God among evangelicals.

His two most often quoted sources are Richard Bauckham and Tim Keller. I wasn’t surprised that he quoted Keller often, but I was surprised that he quoted Bauckham so much. (Last year Bauckham gave lectures at my seminary and told me he read my book Reformed and Always Reforming and considers himself one of my “postconservative evangelicals.” I was, of course, gratified to hear it!)

Toward the end of the chapter Um writes about the church as an “alternative kingdom” or “alternate city” whose citizenship is primarily in the Kingdom of God and whose ultimate loyalty is to that Kingdom rather than to any earthly one.

Again, it isn’t so much what Um says that bothers me as what he does not say.

First, it’s all well and good to emphasize God’s authority, but it seems to me worthwhile to at least mention that Jesus called his disciples (and by extension all his followers who would come later) his “friends.” There is danger in emphasizing either autonomy or authority. The natural reaction to modernistic or postmodern (?) autonomy and individualism is to underscore authority. There is danger there, also. I think Moltmann is right to emphasize that the Kingdom of God is friendship with God. Not equality with God, of course. But the quality of relationship in the Kingdom will be (and perhaps should now be) friendship more than servility.

Second, I looked in vain in Um’s chapter for any concrete application of his generalization that the people of God are to be a “Kingdom-driven alternative community” bound in loyalty to the Kingdom of God over every earthly loyalty.

This chapter struck me as bland. It could have done so much more with the idea of the people of God as citizens of another Kingdom (than any earthly kingdom). That just kind of fizzled out. The chapter lacked courage. Well, perhaps in the circles Um moves in some of what he wrote took courage, I don’t know. But it seemed to me prosaic and bland.

For those who would like to read something more challenging about the Kingdom of God I highly recommend an old standard—The Upside Down Kingdom by Donald Kraybill. At points in his chapter I thought perhaps Um had read this book. He does mention the reverse value system of the Kingdom (from the world’s value systems), but he doesn’t expand on it as Kraybill does.

According to Kraybill, the strange thing about the Kingdom of God is how those we tend to overlook and even denigrate (the poor, the weak, the stranger, the disabled, the marginal, the outsider) become the most important. It’s the opposite of Social Darwinism which is, I think, the default value system of humanity.

Should a Christian Work for Government?

Lately I’ve been reading a lot of Hauerwas. Earlier I read a lot of Yoder and still do pick him up occasionally. Neither one says Christians shouldn’t work for government, but things they do say about Christianity and government incline that way.

Of course there are government jobs where no conceivable conflict with Christian faith and morals would arise—the drivers license bureau, etc. At least one would be hard pressed to think of such conflicts. (Of course, conflicts could arise if a supervisor asked you to do something unethical, but that can happen in any job. Here I’m wondering about conflicts that automatically come with the job or probably will.)

What really got me wondering about this was last Sunday’s (May 13) episode of “60 Minutes.” They interviewed a former top US spy who had a lot of interesting things to say about strategies for information gathering. One that caught my ear was providing pornography to foreign diplomats and agents. He said he never met a diplomat of a certain country that didn’t love pornography and that he and other US agents provided pornography to them in exchange for information.

I had never thought about that before. I knew that as a US secret agent you might have to kill people, but provide them with pornography? Now that’s another question. Can a Christian do that with a clear conscience—for whatever payoff? Does any end justify such an immoral means?

As I watched that I wondered how many Christians watching the show shuddered at that method of obtaining secret information about our enemy countries. I suspected that many who wouldn’t hesitate to defend torture or even assassination did shudder at that and wondered to themselves whether they could do that with a clear Christian conscience.

Where exactly are the limits? I know that there are evangelical Christians working in intelligence gathering for the US government. What will they absolutely refuse to do—no matter what the pay off might be in terms of obtaining important information that might make us more secure as a nation?

Let’s consider torture. I have heard reasonable people defend torture as a last resort. (You can call waterboarding whatever you want to; to me it’s torture.) Okay, let’s agree to disagree about that. (I think torture is always wrong and should never be condoned by policy.) What about torturing a suspected terrorist’s wife and children—if torturing him doesn’t work?

Absurd, you say? Well, it has happened in history. I have read accounts of it being done by Nazis, so it isn’t literally absurd.

No, you say? Never? Why not? What justifies drawing an absolute line between torturing a suspected terrorist to extract information and torturing his wife and children if it is likely to work? (Remember, he’s only a suspected terrorist, so saying torturing him is justified whereas torturing his wife and children is not because he’s guilty and they’re innocent won’t work.)

I think some Anabaptists (and perhaps others) prefer not to work for any government agency or branch because it is impossible to discern the line between what is participation in unchristian, immoral acts and what is not. And there is always the danger of being asked to participate, however indirectly, in violence or immorality such as providing pornography to someone.

I’m not convinced that Christians should never work for government, but I wonder if average, run-of-the-mill evangelical Christians put much thought into what branches of government they would work for and why (or why not).

Again, I suspect many conservative evangelical (and other) Christians would balk at supplying graphic pornography to enemy agents but not balk at participating in torture or assassination or capital punishment (assuming they are constitutionally able to stomach such things).

I don’t agree with Hauerwas or Yoder about everything, but I think they do (did) the church a great service by at least raising questions about Christian virtues and government practices.

In Hannah’s Child (his autobiography) Hauerwas writes about the backlash he felt from theological friends when he criticized America’s invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. One well known theologian with whom he was close walked out on a talk he was giving and later wrote to ask him if he felt no “natural loyalties”—meaning to country, I take it.

I guess I would ask that theologian if he would provide pornography to an enemy agent if it would result in the likelihood of obtaining information that would help make our country more secure. If his answer was “yes,” I would ask if he would provide LSD or other mind-altering drugs. If the answer was “yes,” I would ask what he WOULDN’T do to obtain such information. If there was ANYTHING he wouldn’t do, I could ask him if he felt no natural loyalties.

Hauerwas believes it is always wrong for Christians to kill fellow Christians. Whether he is a strict pacifist is somewhat difficult to discern. I thought so, but then I read an article by him that muddied the waters a bit. He seemed to back off absolute pacifism into a kind of “war is always evil even when it’s a necessary evil” position. But one thing is clear—he wants Christians to be in the forefront of abolishing war (and capital punishment, etc.).

Should natural loyalties over ride Christian brotherhood? C. S. Lewis thought so. What did Christians of the first three centuries think? For the most part they did not participate in war or serve in the military.

Can anyone imagine the Apostle Paul, just to choose one first century Christian, providing pornography to anyone for any reason? Participating in torturing someone for any reason? Taking up arms to kill someone for any reason? I can’t. (I’m leaving Jesus out of the equation here just because I don’t want to play “the Jesus card.” It’s too easy to say “He’s the exception” or something like that.)

So why am I even posting about this? I wonder if, in our American evangelical Christian churches, we have given enough thought to what Christians should and should not do or participate in, in terms of sinful behavior, for the greater good of our country? At times it seems to me that we simply assume that we should do whatever our country asks us to do—especially if we are in the government’s service—without question.

Hauerwas has been vilified even for suggesting otherwise. Perhaps at times he expresses his own ideas in rather extreme ways, but at least he forces us to stop and think about the issues.

Recently I blogged here about Social Darwinism. My main point was that Social Darwinism is incompatible with Christianity. Somehow that launched some readers into a series of assumptions and comments based on them. They assumed that I was attacking capitalism. That’s instructive to me. Do some people interpret any criticism of Social Darwinism as criticism of capitalism? I certainly hope not, but so it seems.

True, I’m not a fan of unregulated, unrestrained capitalism. I don’t call myself a socialist because of the connotations of that term. But I am an advocate of a mixed economy.

HOWEVER (yes, now I’m shouting) I don’t understand how some otherwise quite reasonable people leaped to the conclusion that my post was about capitalism. I didn’t even comment on capitalism per se. I was criticizing a Christian editor for recommending Darwinian economics. SURELY there can be justifications for capitalism that don’t entangle with Social Darwinism. (I call it “Social Darwinism” because the editor clearly was not referring to biological Darwinism.)

Does anyone here want to defend Social Darwinism as compatible with Christianity? Anticipating the objection that government is totally separate from Christianity, let me ask it this way, then. Does anyone want to defend a Christian recommending Social Darwinism as the basis for public policy?

That was my other point in the post–to suggest that too many Christians bifurcate between their Christianity and other areas of their lives including what they believe about public policy. It’s one thing to defend capitalism, it’s something else to recommend it because of “Darwinism” (which in this context can only mean Social Darwinism).

(The following post is by Brandon Morgan. It does not necessarily express the views held by this blogger. (Of course, I wouldn’t post it here if I didn’t think it raised some very important questions.) And it does not imply endorsement of any candidate or party.)

A Republican candidate being asked to give the commencement address at Liberty University is no surprise, especially given that the university is the ‘altar’ school where the marriage between conservative evangelicalism and neo-conservative American politics occurred and is continually bolstered. No one is shocked. But this time is different since the Republican candidate for the presidency is a Mormon.

As a young Christian, I attended a very conservative independent Baptist school and was taught often that Mormonism was a heretical perversion of the Christian faith and should be fought against with rigorous biblical apologetics. The main issue in that context was the manner in which Mormon’s added authorized texts to the biblical canon as a strategy to justify their theological beliefs. The theological differences regarding Christology and the Trinity were not mentioned at all, as they often are today in setting off Mormonism as a deviation from creedal Christianity. It was simply that they read the Bible “wrong” and “added” other texts to the canon, which, among other things, positioned the belief system for being named a Christian heresy. This judgment should be no surprise given that all conservative evangelicals are strong biblicists and solidify their theological positions on strict literal interpretations of Scripture, which in this particular case, finds Revelation 22.18-19 rather helpful. It condemns those who would add to or take away from the Bible and reneges on their share in the “tree of life and the holy city” (read salvation) who would attempt such a pursuit.  I cannot count how many times this verse was used in my conservative Christian upbringing to ward off ‘cult-like’ additions to the biblical canon like those claimed to be found in Mormonism.

I retell this story, not as an entrance into the ongoing debate about the theological differences between Christianity and Mormonism, but in order to isolate just one biblical apologetic strategy used in conservative evangelicalism to distinguish Mormonism from Christianity. I do not agree with the argumentative strategy, but simply describe it as a test case in how biblical literalism furnished the tactics required for conservative Christians to distinguish themselves from Mormons who, apart from obvious theological differences, actually took up, and continue to take up, similar social and political causes related to the institution of the family and, therefore, Republican party interests.

I find this biblical-apologetic strategy of interest because it serves to insinuate the ways in which conservative Christians actually recognized the need to ‘set apart’ Mormons as ‘deviant’ simply because they often looked alike within the social-political sphere. In short, the theological differences between conservative evangelical biblicists and Mormons at one time made all the difference, and often still does, in whether or not to accept Mormons as a part of the Christian faith. The similarities in social and political issues were never mentioned in my ‘education’ in the ‘cult-countering’ apologetic strategies, though they were prevalent. They never needed to be mentioned because every political candidate that ran on the Republican ticket (the only correct Christian choice, I was then taught) had always been a Christian during my life and often felt the need to pander for conservative evangelical votes as a way of recognizing the intricate relationship between conservative Christianity and neo-conservative politics. None of this has changed since my grade school years except that now the Republican candidate pandering for conservative evangelical votes is ironically a Mormon, a belief system always blasted as a ‘cult’ among the very voting block seemingly needed the most. Such ‘cult’ language was even used by FBC Dallas pastor Robert Jeffress early this primary season in the Republican debate circuit as a strategy to again differentiate between the Christian, Texas Governor Rick Perry, and the Mormon, Mitt Romney.  It was Jeffress’ claim that he would vote for Romney, despite his Mormonism because he believed that his principles were true while the principles of the Christian Obama was false, that sparked my interest in the present phenomenon of re-evaluating the relationship between conservative Christians and the supposed ‘religious’ underpinnings of voting for Republicans. Romney’s candidacy and his address at Liberty University further this re-evaluation.

What seems to be occurring now in conservative evangelical circles is a process of discerning shared principles that both conservative Christians and Mormons hold within the political and social sphere. No one is surprised by these similarities, which rest on typical appeals to ‘family values.’ But the strange fact is that no one seems to discern the divergent theological claims that would naturally lead to ‘family values’ talk. In fact, most theological divergences between Christians and Mormons are avoided altogether in order to properly discern similar social concerns, which always find their nexus in traditional Republican claims about abortion, homosexuality, the free-market, and foreign policy. The ‘similarities’ are found within the political sphere, more specifically the Republican sphere, so as to alleviate the obvious theological differences that continually separate conservative Christians and Mormons from each other. Romney’s appeal to the ‘religious’ claims about marriage between males and females, for instance, is a way to persuade conservative voters, like those from Liberty U, to see him as an ally. Likewise, his claims in his commencement address about America’s ‘religious’ founding also serves to isolate the similar ‘mythological’ view that many conservative Christians and Mormons have about the foundational ‘Christianness’ of America.

Many more examples of this strategy of discerning the social-political similarities between Mormons and Christians could be shown. But my point here is to suggest a somewhat radical alteration that has occurred in typical ‘religously’ minded voting within conservative Christian circles. I suggested earlier that biblical-apologetic strategies of differentiation were rampant within my conservative Christian grade school upbringing because the social and political similarities between Christians and Mormons could often be deceptive. The ‘truth’ was in the biblical and doctrinal differences, which needed to be articulated to show that Mormonism was a ‘heresy’ or ‘cultic deviant’ belief system. But now that a Mormon has won the Republican candidacy, the strategies are reversed. The theological and biblical differences are pushed to the side in order to isolate the social-political similarities. That is how a Mormon like Romney can give the commencement speech at Liberty. There simply are no theological reasons why such an invitation would ever be allowed at Liberty. Its occurrence seems to be reliance upon the common presupposition that conservative Christians vote Republican for seemingly ‘religious’ reasons and Romney happens to be a ‘religious’ Republican who shares in social-political values that conservative-Christians value. Nothing about Christian beliefs and Mormon beliefs are referred to other than a blanket appeal to God’s (whose God?) ‘election’ of America as the new Israel—a true Christian heresy in its own right.

My question about all this is: given this state of affairs, can it be claimed with integrity that conservative Christians’ criteria for voting in a consistently conservative way subsist in any ‘theological’ or specifically ‘Christian’ criteria. In short, will not conservative Christians have to give up the claim that they vote with Christian ideals in mind when, in fact, they choose to vote for a Mormon, a group often deemed ‘cult-like,’ over Obama who is a Christian (though perhaps not a conservative one)? Since it is now impossible to claim that a Republican’s political viewpoints reside in his uniquely ‘Christian’ sensibilities, what is revealed is the possibility, perhaps always waiting to be shown, that conservative Christians vote according to neo-conservative political criteria and not uniquely Christian ones. More specifically, what is at stake, and perhaps has always been at stake, is a political ideology and not actually getting a “Christian” into office. Yet the strategy here, as in the past, is to make the Republican political ideology into Christian principles—to amalgamate both into a single religio-political ideology. This strategy, however, must now include Mormonism.

The irony about the Romney candidacy and his Liberty commencement invitation, not to mention his strategies to show the political-social similarities between himself and his needed evangelical votes, is that perhaps many conservative Christians will have to include Romney as a ‘Christian’ in principle, though perhaps not in practice, while excluding Obama as a Christian in principle, despite his claimed commitment in practice. The fact seems to be that Romney, and maybe Mormonism in general, will have to made into a “Christian” through being inducted into the religio-political ideology just mentioned in order to justify voting for him. What, of course, seems to be lost here, and perhaps was always an illusion, is any actual Christian theological claim as an evaluative criteria for political involvement. This is possibly fortunate because it may show that people do not, and maybe have never, actually voted according to their theological belief at all, despite the claims to be doing so. Such beliefs are cast aside for the sake of common conservative principles that will at least defeat the Democrats, if nothing else. Nevertheless, these could be unfortunate realities, if true, because it again alleviates important Christian beliefs, like that oneness of God, the Incarnation of God and God’s Trinitarian life to do any social-political work. It is simply assumed that such particularity serves absolutely no evaluative means to discern what being a Christian citizen, over against the citizenries of the world, could mean. Christianity as a social reality is shown to have never actually been what was at stake in Christian political involvement. What is at stake now is the establishment of common principles to alleviate the lingering separateness between Christianity and Mormonism in order to solidify the needed justification for conservative Christian votes. No doubt our Enlightenment-schooled founding fathers would be proud, though not for the reasons some would assume.