Luther vs. Christian Nationalism

July 7, 2023 By Gene Veith

As I mentioned earlier this week, this is the 500th anniversary of Luther’s treatise on Temporal Authority: To What Extent It Should Be Obeyed, published in 1523. I observed that this treatment of the doctrine of the Two Kingdoms has much that ties in to today’s controversies and that we would be blogging about some of those in the weeks ahead.

Temporal Authority–in some translations rendered “Secular Authority,” which uses the term we use today–has much to say, for example, about “Christian nationalism.” Can there be a Christian nation? If so, what would it take to create one? Can that be achieved with the force of law? Could a Christian ruler enforce laws to make his citizens righteous and devout?

Here is what Luther says:

lt is indeed true that Christians, so far as they themselves are concerned, are subject to neither law nor sword and need neither; but first take heed and fill the world with real Christians before ruling it in a Christian and evangelical manner. This you will never accomplish; for the world and the masses are and always will be unchristian, although they are all baptised and are nominally Christian. Christians, however, are few and far between, as the saying is. Therefore it is out of the question that there should be a common Christian government over the whole world, nay even over one land or company of people, since the wicked always out- number the good. (p. 237)

Temporal authority, he explains, is a matter of law. And law cannot make Christians. To be sure, temporal authority can enforce the first use of the law, to restrain evil. Indeed, this is its purpose. And Christian citizens and rulers should work towards that end. But making everyone be moral by force cannot make a Christian nation.

Christians are made such by the gospel, through which the Holy Spirit creates faith in Christ, through whose atonement we receive forgiveness of our violations of God’s law. But faith in the gospel cannot be created by political power.

“No one can be compelled to be a Christian” (248), wrote Luther. “For faith is a free work, to which no one can be forced. Nay, it is a divine work, done in the Spirit, certainly not a matter which outward authority should compel or create” (253-254).

All of this is to say that to have a Christian nation, the Christianity, from the gospel and faith, must come first. But if everyone in the country were a true, faith-filled, spirit-filled Christian, they wouldn’t even need a government. They would do what is right as the fruit of their faith, loving their neighbors with no need of legal coercion. The fact is, even Christians must still struggle against sin, so they still need to be governed by the law and by secular authorities, by whose vocation God limits the destructive power of sin.

The state, which rules by the law, cannot make anyone devout. And the church, which conveys the gospel, cannot rule politically.

For this reason these two kingdoms must be sharply distinguished, and both be permitted to remain; the one to produce piety, the other to bring about external peace and prevent evil deeds; neither is sufficient in the world without the other. For no one can become pious before God by means of the secular government, without Christ’s spiritual rule. Hence Christ’s rule does not extend over all, but Christians are always in the minority and are in the midst of non-Christians. (237)

This is not dualism. God is the King of both kingdoms.

Interestingly, contrary to the common assumptions, Luther says that morality is the business of the state, not the church, whose business is to bring forgiveness to those who have failed to be moral (that is, all of us).

So Christians are right to press for morality in the public square, for justice and righteousness. And yet the most that the state can do in this regard is to restrain external immorality, which is an important accomplishment. Though the state can never achieve this perfectly because it can never change the hearts of sinners, which bear fruit in overt evils. The church, though, can change the hearts of sinners through the gospel.

Most Christian nationalists today are thinking of morality when they think of creating a Christian nation. So they might not be completely wrong. But they would do well to work through Luther’s Temporal Authority.

Illustration via Pxfuel

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Loving Your Country Is Like Loving Your Family

July 4, 2023 By Gene Veith

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Today is the birthday of the United States of America. We are 247.

I had an idea for a blog post for Independence Day, and in my research, I found what sounded like a good source. It turns out, the author was me! I had already written what I wanted to write 5 years ago, back in 2018! (Making me acutely aware that I am approaching 247.)

So, hoping you won’t mind, I am offering you a Fourth of July re-run. (I’m making it a free post, so you can pass it around if you want as an Independence Day greeting.)

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On this Independence Day, I would like to offer you words from G. K. Chesterton on patriotism. For him, love of country was like love of family. You don’t necessarily love them for all of their wonderful qualities, as if you would stop loving them should they lose those wonderful qualities. You love them because they are your family. And we should love our country because this is our country.

For Chesterton, patriotism is not a belief–for example, the conviction that one’s country can never do any wrong–but a feeling of affection. Also a virtue.

Chesterton opposed the cosmopolitanism of his day that valued “globalism” over one’s particular homeland. He also opposed the view at his time in England that it was necessary for England’s glory to rule over an international empire. Chesterton opposed the Boer War, but he did so, he claimed, because he was a patriot.

Here are several excerpts from essays in which he discussed and applied the concept of patriotism.

From A Defence of Patriotism:

To one who loves his fatherland, for instance, our boasted indifference to the ethics of a national war is mere mysterious gibberism. It is like telling a man that a boy has committed murder, but that he need not mind because it is only his son. Here clearly the word ‘love’ is used unmeaningly. It is the essence of love to be sensitive, it is a part of its doom; and anyone who objects to the one must certainly get rid of the other. This sensitiveness, rising sometimes to an almost morbid sensitiveness, was the mark of all great lovers like Dante and all great patriots like Chatham. ‘My country, right or wrong,’ is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, ‘My mother, drunk or sober.’ No doubt if a decent man’s mother took to drink he would share her troubles to the last; but to talk as if he would be in a state of gay indifference as to whether his mother took to drink or not is certainly not the language of men who know the great mystery.

From Orthodoxy (Chapter V. The Flag of the World):

My acceptance of the universe is not optimism, it is more like patriotism. It is a matter of primary loyalty. The world is not a lodging-house at Brighton, which we are to leave because it is miserable. It is the fortress of our family, with the flag flying on the turret, and the more miserable it is the less we should leave it. The point is not that this world is too sad to love or too glad not to love; the point is that when you do love a thing, its gladness is a reason for loving it, and its sadness a reason for loving it more. All optimistic thoughts about England and all pessimistic thoughts about her are alike reasons for the English patriot. Similarly, optimism and pessimism are alike arguments for the cosmic patriot. . . .

People first paid honour to a spot and afterwards gained glory for it. Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.

From The Patriotic Idea:

The scepticism of the last two centuries has attacked patriotism as it has attacked all the other theoretic passions of mankind, and in the case of patriotism the attack has been interesting and respectable because it has come from a set of modern writers who are not mere sceptics, but who really have an organic belief in philosophy and politics. . . .

This important and growing sect, together with many modern intellectuals of various schools, directly impugn the idea of patriotism as interfering with the larger sentiment of the love of humanity. To them the particular is always the enemy of the general. To them every nation is the rival of mankind. To them, in not a few instances, every man is the rival of mankind. And they bear a dim and not wholly agreeable resemblance to a certain kind of people who go about saying that nobody should go to church, since God is omnipresent, and not to be found in churches. . . .

If you ask them whether they love humanity, they will say, doubtless sincerely, that they do. But if you ask them, touching any of the classes that go to make up humanity, you will find that they hate them all. They hate kings, they hate priests, they hate soldiers, they hate sailors. They distrust men of science, they denounce the middle classes, they despair of working men, but they adore humanity. Only they always speak of humanity as if it were a curious foreign nation. They are dividing themselves more and more from men to exalt the strange race of mankind. They are ceasing to be human in the effort to be humane.

The truth is, of course, that real universality is to be reached rather by convincing ourselves that we are in the best possible relation with our immediate surroundings. The man who loves his own children is much more universal, is much more fully in the general order, than the man who dandles the infant hippopotamus or puts the young crocodile in a perambulator. For in loving his own children he is doing something which is (if I may use the phrase) far more essentially hippopotamic than dandling hippopotami; he is doing as they do. It is the same with patriotism. A man who loves humanity and ignores patriotism is ignoring humanity. The man who loves his country may not happen to pay extravagant verbal compliments to humanity, but he is paying to it the greatest of compliments – imitation.

The fundamental spiritual advantage of patriotism and such sentiments is this: that by means of it all things are loved adequately, because all things are loved individually. Cosmopolitanism gives us one country, and it is good; nationalism gives us a hundred countries, and every one of them is the best. Cosmopolitanism offers a positive, patriotism a chorus of superlatives. Patriotism begins the praise of the world at the nearest thing, instead of beginning it at the most distant, and thus it insures what is, perhaps, the most essential of all earthly considerations, that nothing upon earth shall go without its due appreciation.

Photo via Rawpixel, public domain

Our Pagan Theocracy

June 30, 2023 By Gene Veith

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The estimable Joy Pullman of The Federalist has written a stirring critique of “Pride Month,” which requires all good people and all socially-acceptable institutions to do obeisance to the LGBTQ+ cause by flying the rainbow flag and making other symbolic gestures of submission.

She argues, in the words of the title of her article, that Pride Is The Flag Of American Occupation, showing how the rainbow flag has often displaced the stars and stripes–even on embassies and other official government buildings–and how it represents a regime change from our constitutional order.

But what struck me most about her article is her contention that we are seeing the rise of a “pagan theocracy.” As the overall society rejects Christianity, it turns to other belief systems that are given absolute moral and spiritual authority. While progressives keep raising the specter of a Christian theocracy–as if that could happen–the real threat to our liberties is coming from a pagan theocracy. She writes:

Paganism doesn’t keep the trains running or un-looted, but it does keep people involved in rituals that distract from their own dysfunction. Some religious rites resolve dysfunction — penitence and forgiveness, for a key example. Others, such as scapegoating, perpetuate dysfunction.

Through repentance, people take responsibility for their actions and promise to improve. Through scapegoating, people transfer responsibility for their actions to uncontrollable entities like the rain god, white supremacy, and global warming. You should be able to see why a society based on the former would have more functioning infrastructure and why a society based on the latter would have less.

It’s no accident that cancel culture mushroomed as a ritual in the age of identity politics. Its entire cycle of repeat public shaming without resolution is a pagan religious ritual.

Identity politics unites pagan religious impulses with legal structures for enforcement and validation. This intertwined religious and political system — a theocracy — is displacing basic American rights like being assumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law and being legally protected from public slander and libel.

Now our own government endorses this religious impulse and elevates its symbols atop the symbols of our former constitutional order. It’s an occupation flag signifying regime change.

It’s ultimately not surprising, because every government has to operate upon a widely accepted code of morality. Every government is informed and affected by the religion of its people. The basis of culture, as Russell Kirk noted, is the cult: a religion. From that religion’s philosophical underpinnings flow government, the arts, and all the rest.

I would add, though, that this is not orthodox paganism, if I can use that expression. Most paganism is built around fertility but this heretical paganism is built on infertility. Most paganism reveres nature. Today’s heretical paganism pays lip service to nature by consuming organic foods, by adhering to the tenets of environmentalism, and by its apocalyptic preaching about global warming. But by assuming that human beings control nature–to the point of being able to destroy it–and by insisting that human beings are not part of nature, as well as by denying the sexed natural body and by downplaying the imperative to reproduce, they are violating pagan orthodoxy.

Still, Pullman gives us a useful “explanatory paradigm,” as the postmodernists say, that can help us to understand our times. And she suggests, drawing on what some of the adherents are themselves saying, that the pagan deity being served is not one of the ancient deities of antiquity or one of the nature spirits of animism, but someone else: the father of lies himself.

Photo: Pride Flag flying at the United States Department of Agriculture in Washington, D.C. via Rawpixel, Public Domain, CC0

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The Need for “Apolitical Space”

June 27, 2023 By Gene Veith

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When making conversation, we were always told, don’t talk politics or religion. Stick to safe subjects like sports or the weather.

The reason for that is that politics and religion are divisive. Not everyone agrees about them. If the person you are talking to is a friend who already agrees with you, fine. But when making social chit-chat with someone you don’t know, it’s best to talk about non-controversial topics. Liberals and conservatives, Christians and atheists can all enjoy and have common ground with sports. And everybody is subject to the weather (cf. Matthew 5:45).

But today a conversation about sports can get into teams celebrating Pride Month, athletes protesting during the National Anthems, league policy about China, and boycotts from either the left or the right. Conversations about the weather can lead to arguments about climate change and global warming.

The point is, it’s hard to find “safe topics” any more. Virtually everything has become charged with politics and religion.

In a response to billionaire Mark Cuban’s claim that “woke capitalism”– in which corporations take public stands in favor of progressive causes–is “good for business,” Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy had this to say:

“When those businesses wade into social disputes, not only is that often bad for business, just look at what happened to Bud Light, look at what’s happening to Target. . . .But more importantly, it’s bad for our civic culture in our country, because what we need is apolitical spaces that bring people together.”

Exactly! We need “apolitical spaces.” The lack of them is why our nation has become so polarized. There have always been sharp political disagreements in this country. But there have also been apolitical spaces in which Americans, for all of their differences, have found common ground, creating a sense of national unity.

Americans celebrated national holidays and appreciated our history. Everyone was grateful for our constitutional legacy of political and personal freedom, with individual rights and a democratically-elected government. During the Cold War, both Democrats and Republicans opposed communism.

The public schools were mostly apolitical. So were businesses. So were movies, television, and other forms of entertainment. So was the military. So were churches, with Democrats and Republicans worshipping together in the same theologically conservative churches.

Now these are all political minefields. Celebrating the Fourth of July has become an occasion for vehement arguments between those who vilify the founders as slaveholders and those who defend them for building a free society that eventually freed the slaves. American history, for many, is something to be ashamed of. Both the left and the right are criticizing our “liberal” political system, with its freedoms and democracy.

Schools, businesses, the entertainment industry, even the military have seemingly “gone woke” to one degree or another, sparking furious reactions from the other side. Churches now sort themselves out between those that push for progressive causes and those that steadfastly resist them.

The catalyst for this polarization and its spread throughout our institutions seems to be sex–embracing feminism, the LGBTQ+ movement, transgenderism, and support for abortion–which the progressives have tied together with racial civil rights into an intersectional package.

So we might think that sex has become politicized. But how did that happen? To be sure, certain laws affect these things–anti-discrimination laws, same-sex marriage, the overturn of Roe v. Wade, etc.–and those were political. But most of those issues, rightly or wrongly, have been settled.

The issues now seem to be not so much political as attitudinal. What is your attitude towards the LGBTQ+ movement? Companies display their support while some of their customers display their opposition. With no real political issue in question, what we have are moral issues. Those often come down to religious beliefs.

So not only does politics permeate religion, religion, of one kind or another, permeates politics.

Are there any “apolitical spaces” left? How might we bring some of those back? Are there any “areligious spaces”?

In India, for example, the concept of “secularism” by no means repudiates religion, as Western secularism tends to, but seeks to create “areligious spaces,” in the government particularly, so that people of divergent religions can come together into a political unity. That is arguably what the American founders had in mind with the “separation of church and state.” Is that kind of secularism possible or desirable today in the U.S., when secularism has come to mean opposition to religion? How might Luther’s doctrine of the Two Kingdoms help us sort out some of these issues?

Photo: Vivek Ramaswamy by Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

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Is the Universe a Brain?

June 23, 2023 By Gene Veith

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Science is used to assuming that the universe is just a collection of inert objects governed by mechanistic laws. But a new theory of cosmology argues that the universe is, in fact, a vast neural network. That is to say, a brain, which adapts and learns.

Neuroscientist Bobby Azarian explains in an article for the “Hard Science” section of Big Think entitled The case for why our Universe may be a giant neural network. Here are excepts (my bolds):

A new scientific paradigm is emerging that presents us with a radically different cosmic narrative. The big idea is that the Universe is not just an arbitrary physical system, but something more like an evolving computational or biological system — with properties strikingly similar to a complex adaptive system, like an organism or a brain. If this characterization turns out to be accurate, I do not think it is an overstatement to say that it is the most profound paradigm shift in the history of science and philosophy. If true, it raises new existential questions that will force us to completely rethink the nature of reality and ideas about whether the Universe has a function or “purpose.”. . .

In recent years, a number of highly respected theoretical physicists and scientists from various fields have published papers, articles, and books that have provided compelling technical and mathematical arguments that suggest the Universe is not just a computational or information-processing system, but a self-organizing system that evolves and learns in ways that are strikingly similar to biological systems.

For one thing, the map of the universe looks like the neural map of the brain:

Like our nervous system, the Universe has a highly interconnected, hierarchical organization. The estimated 200 billion detectable galaxies aren’t distributed randomly, but lumped together by gravity into clusters that form even larger clusters, which are connected to one another by “galactic filaments,” or long thin threads of galaxies. When one zooms out to envision the cosmos as a whole, the “cosmic web” formed by these clusters and filaments looks strikingly similar to the “connectome,” a term that refers to the complete wiring diagram of the brain, which is formed by neurons and their synaptic connections. Neurons in the brain also form clusters, which are grouped into larger clusters, and are connected by filaments called axons, which transmit electrical signals across the cognitive system.

There is some evidence of “non-local connections”–such as quantum entanglement, some of which has been observed on the galactic scale, as galaxies and objects such as black holes and Quasars seem to affect each other, despite the vast distances between them.

Azarian cites the work of Vitaly Vanchurin, who has shown that thinking of the universe as a neural network can make possible the maddeningly elusive “theory of everything” that physicists have been struggling to find, a way of reconciling general relativity and quantum mechanics (gravity on the massive scale and the “spooky” behavior of particles on the infinitesimally small quantum scale). According to Azarian, “Vanchurin has shown that using the mathematics of neural networks, you could get the quantum behavior at one limit and classical behavior at another.”

This theory could also unite physics and biology. Azarian cites the work of physicist Lee Smolin and computer scientist Jaron Lanier, who propose “that the cosmos may possess an innate ability to learn, adapt, and evolve in a manner akin to a living organism.” They “posit that the laws of the Universe might emerge sometime after its creation, and those laws might change or evolve as the cosmos develops and learns more about its own structure, dynamics, and possibilities.”

The universe being a vast mind could also solve the problems inherent in the theory of evolution:

The new book On the Origin of Time reveals that the great late Stephen Hawking believed that the reductionistic paradigm he defended for much of his life is incorrect. Ultimately, Hawking felt that the mainstream narrative failed to explain “How the Universe could have created conditions so perfectly hospitable to life.”

According to his close collaborator Thomas Hertog, the author of the book, Hawking came to the conclusion that the Universe is an evolving system that operates according to Darwinian principles that drive the world toward higher complexity, which would explain the existence of observers like you and I.

For these scientists, thinking of the universe as a mind is a way of saving Darwinian, despite the inability of random natural selection to account for the purposefulness and design that is evident in the universe. If the universe as a whole evolves, it can bring forth mini-minds like us.

Now this cosmology strikes me as a way of accommodating the arguments of Intelligent Design (a concept that is still taboo in scientific circles) without invoking a Designer (God being even more taboo). The universe becomes its own designer.

But among the “new existential questions” that Azarian foresees will surely be the re-introduction of God, but in such a way that the universe itself is seen as God.

This would be a new pantheism, but it doesn’t have to be. If the universe is a brain, like our brains, it still needs a mind. “It takes more than a certain type of structure to think thoughts,” says Azarian. “A dead brain is just as thoughtless as a rock.” Just as we have not only physical brains but a spiritual soul that animates them, a transcendent God may animate His physical creation.

In fact, thinking in these terms might help us understand better God’s omnipotence, His omniscience, His providence, and other qualities.

Azarian says that the first person to come up with the notion of the universe as some kind of mind was the ancient Greek thinker Anaxagoras, who, around 500 B.C., “proposed that an intelligent cosmic force, or ‘Nous,’ guides the development of the Universe toward a more organized and purposeful state of existence.” Nous is the Greek word for “mind.” The connection of nous/mind to the cosmos became a commonplace of Greek philosophy, addressed also by Plato and Aristotle, and, as this article shows, it was closely connected to logos, or “word,” the meaning and the order built into the universe. Which, in turn, St. John reveals to be God the Son:

In the beginning was the logos, and the logos was with God, and the logos was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. . . .

And the logos became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. (John 1:1-3, 14)

So I think this new cosmology, if it is confirmed scientifically, would have significant apologetic potential.

At any rate, that some scientists are speculating in this direction shows the limits of their sheerly mechanistic, materialistic, sheerly random worldview that they had been operating with and that they themselves are admitting is reductionistic and inadequate.

Illustration: Neural Network, image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

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“Queerness as the redemptive message of Christianity”

June 21, 2023 By Gene Veith

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We often assume that if we give in just a little, the other side will be satisfied. But it never is, pushing for more and more and more, going to ever greater extremes.

The issue in progressive churches is no longer gay rights, or accepting LGBTQ+ members and pastors, or performing same-sex weddings, or being inclusive of transgendered individuals. Rather, all of this is only preparatory to Queer Theology, according to which Christianity itself is all about homosexuality and transgenderism.

In order to know what is happening in mainline churches and liberal seminaries, you must read Queering Jesus: How It’s Going Mainstream at Progressive Churches and Top Divinity Schools. The article, by John Murawski of RealClearInvestigations, shows just how pervasive “queer theology” has become in these ostensibly Christian circles. Here is an excerpt, with my bolds:

Progressive churches are moving beyond gay rights, even beyond transgender acceptance, and venturing into the realm of “queer theology.” Rather than merely settling for the acceptance of gender-nonconforming people within existing marital norms and social expectations, queer theology questions heterosexual assumptions and binary gender norms as limiting, oppressive and anti-biblical, and centers queerness as the redemptive message of Christianity.

In this form of worship, “queering” encourages the faithful to problematize, disrupt, and destabilize the assumptions behind heteronormativity and related social structures such as monogamy, marriage, and capitalism. These provocative theologians and ministers assert that queerness is not only natural and healthy but biblically celebrated. They assert that God is not the patron deity of the respectable, the privileged, and the comfortable, but rather God has a “preferential option” for the promiscuous, the outcast, the excluded and the impure. . . .

Queer theology presents itself as an apocalyptic, revival movement, rendering queer people as angels and saints who are a living foretaste of what’s to come, when all binaries and man-made social constructs fall away as remnants of heterosexual oppression and European colonialism. There is a sense in which to be queer is to be the chosen people, those favored by God to spread the good news. 

I can’t bring myself to quote any more of what Murawski describes and critiques on this blog. Read it yourself.

This is not just the speculations of academic theologians. Murawski shows how this is showing up everywhere in mainline churches.

We keep hearing that the split in the United Methodist Church, the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) breaking away from the Episcopal Church, the North American Lutheran Church (NALC) breaking away from the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the revolt of global Anglicans against Canterbury are all about “accepting gay pastors” or the like. But the bigger issue is surely the rise of Queer Theology and whether it will be allowed to replace actual Christianity.

Back when the main issue with liberal theology was the higher critical approach to the Bible, as accompanied with the “social gospel,” J. Gresham Machen wrote Christianity and Liberalism, in which he argued that liberal theology was not just a strain of Christianity or a theological option in the church universal. Rather, liberal theology is a different religion than Christianity.

He was right then in 1923. And Queer Theology, as the decaying fruit of that rebellion against the authority of Scripture, is certainly a different religion than actual Christianity.

This happens to be the 100th anniversary of the publication of that book. It is worth reading in light of what liberal theology has mutated into.

Photo: Church Door with Pride Flag by Haanala 76 via PublicDomainPictures.Net, CC0

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