John Piper is a pastor I greatly respect, and I\u2019ve taken a lot of wisdom from his teachings. But today I want to discuss an area in which he and a great many other Christians, even self-identified conservative Christians, are importantly wrong. More urgently, he is importantly wrong in a way that could provide aid and comfort to Christians farther to the left than he. However, I don\u2019t want to get ahead of myself, so let\u2019s take it from the top. Here I feel like I\u2019m pushing the upper limit of my pay-grade. My happy conviction is that pastors ought not to be experts in lots of things. And I\u2019m certainly not an expert in civil law and how economics work and how politics work. I just don\u2019t know much. I just read my Bible and try to understand what God says and then say just as much as I know, and I\u2019m counting on a lot of lay people to do a lot of hard work for me. That\u2019s the conception I have. If you think I\u2019m the expert on everything, sorry, it\u2019s kinda late in my ministry for you to be corrected on that. [laughter]<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Hmmmm\u2026 that seems a bit odd. If Piper is making a big point of emphasizing his general ignorance on all things political, then how does he expect the average, out-of-the-loop, working-class Joe Bethlehem Baptist Church member to vote intelligently? Besides that, pastors are citizens too, so why are we to believe God would want them to be ignorant on matters concerning them as citizens? And what does economics have to do with a discussion of moral law? This is problematic for many reasons. First, Piper makes no distinction between endorsing a specific piece of legislation <\/em>on the one hand and endorsing a candidate <\/em>on the other. These are two different animals. When you\u2019re talking about a piece of legislation, you\u2019re talking about a clear, written statement<\/em> that is focused on a single issue. When you\u2019re talking about a candidate, you\u2019re talking about a person<\/em> who may have a mixed bag of policies and whose future actions you can\u2019t predict with total certainty. This is even true for candidates you may have some reason to like. Personally, I\u2019m very choosy about whom I vote for. I might even sit out the 2012 election, even though I could say good things about Romney. My point is that a referendum is cut and dried, but a person is not. I can easily imagine cases where one would be morally obligated to vote for a particular amendment. I would almost never<\/em> say one is morally obligated to vote for a specific candidate. Therefore, because these are two very different things, it\u2019s illogical and unhelpful for Piper and his ilk to conflate them. \u201cBasically our position is, we\u2019re not taking one as a church,\u201d Mathis said. \u201cAnd by addressing this in June rather than October or early November, there\u2019s no effort here for political expediency, trying to get certain votes out of people.\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Time out. What did he just say? He said Piper\u2019s sermon was deliberately scheduled so as NOT to coincide with the election. In other words, he did not preach the message when it would be most relevant and most needed\u2026 on purpose. Mathis also took care to emphasize that Piper \u201cdid not hold back over concerns the church could lose its tax-exempt status,\u201d so as not even to leave that hypothesis open for outside onlookers trying to reconcile Piper\u2019s reluctance to support the amendment outright with his clarity in expressing where he stood on the moral issue. (Even so, that would have been a bit contemptible and wimpy, but more logical\/understandable than turning the whole thing into a matter of principle.) I gotta tell ya, to say that leading a church or a pastor, or pressing him or the church into political activism, in the context of talking about gay marriage, or same-sex marriage, or defending traditional marriage here in the state of Minnesota, is essentially to say that marriage is a political issue. So again we go back to the argument\u2026 all we have to do then is label something a political issue, and all of a sudden pastors and churches shouldn\u2019t get involved. I wholeheartedly disagree. I could not disagree more with him on this particular issue. <\/em> I say Amen to that.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" John Piper is a pastor I greatly respect, and I\u2019ve taken a lot of wisdom from his teachings. But today I want to discuss an area in which he and a great many other Christians, even self-identified conservative Christians, are importantly wrong. More urgently, he is importantly wrong in a way that could provide aid […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3595,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9072","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-faith-and-culture"],"yoast_head":"\n
\nIt began with this sermon<\/a> on the upcoming Minnesota marriage amendment, which would affirm traditional marriage and prohibit the legal sanctioning of same-sex \u201cmarriages\u201d in that state. When we evaluate the sermon by itself, in isolation from any later responses or comments, most of it holds up rather well. (Though since the amendment won\u2019t be on the ballot until election season, June seems a bit early to be preaching on it. Hang onto that thought\u2014as you\u2019ll soon see, it\u2019s an important element in this whole situation.) Piper spends the majority of his time clearly laying out the biblical model for marriage, explaining why same-sex \u201cmarriage\u201d is literally a metaphysical impossibility, and explaining why it would be a disaster for society if it were to become the universal norm. So far, so solid.
\nThen in point seven, Piper lays out four considerations for his congregants to keep in mind while they weigh the importance of this issue as it relates to the legal sphere. There\u2019s an important bit of setup for this point in the unabridged sermon video that didn\u2019t make it to the condensed transcript but is worth transcribing and quoting here:<\/p>\n
\nBut once again, if we were to take the sermon in isolation this wouldn\u2019t seem like that great of a concern. And in fact, Piper fills out point seven with some good, sensible points that seem quite clearly to be implying (without coming right out and saying it) that voting for this amendment wouldn\u2019t be a bad idea. Particularly amusing is his point that there was an amendment about hunting and fishing in Minnesota, so in evaluating where a marriage amendment would fall on the \u201cimportance scale,\u201d we could start there. Wink, wink.
\nThen comes point eight, and this is where things start to get strange and confusing. After preaching 7\/8 of a sermon that seems quite clearly designed to persuade his congregants to vote a certain way, Piper loudly and repeatedly affirms the importance of\u2026 not doing that. In fact, he makes it plain that he thinks the church and her leaders should stay out of politics altogether:<\/p>\n[Note: Portions of the second and third paragraphs were transcribed directly from the video.]\nDon\u2019t press the organization of the church or her pastors into political activism. Pray that the church and her ministers would feed the flock of God with the word of God centered on the gospel of Christ crucified and risen. Expect from your shepherds not that they would rally you behind political candidates or legislative initiatives, but they would point you over and over again to God and to his word and to the cross.<\/em><\/strong>
\nPlease try to understand this: When I warn against the politicizing of the church, I do so not to diminish her power but to increase it<\/strong><\/em> [original emphasis]. The impact of the church for the glory of Christ and the good of the world does not increase when she shifts her priorities from the worship of God and the winning of souls and the nurturing of faith and raising up of new generations of disciples. It doesn\u2019t. It feels in the moment like it does. \u201cHa, look how many people showed up for the rally!\u201d Or \u201cLook how many signatures in that church they got!\u201d Or \u201cLook how that committee is functioning.\u201d Or\u2026\u00a0 It feels powerful. Give it a generation. And little by little, that vaunted power bleeds away the very nature of the church\u2026 and its power.<\/em>
\nIf the whole counsel of God is preached with power, week in and out, Christians who are citizens of heaven and citizens of the democratic order will be energized as they ought, to speak and act for the common good. It\u2019s your job, not mine. Don\u2019t look to me to wave the flag for your vote, or wave the flag for your candidate. I may not like him, or it, because of what God says.<\/em><\/blockquote>\n
\nSecondly, this error could be more than just illogical and become downright damaging if Piper\u2019s philosophy were to be applied in the way he is proposing. I could sympathize with a pastor who didn\u2019t want to automatically endorse whoever the Republican candidate is out of blind party allegiance. But Piper is implying that he wouldn\u2019t even allow his members to circulate a petition in his church, no matter how vile the moral evil they were opposing by gathering signatures. There is no biblical or theological warrant for that, and he is seriously confused if he believes he would be strengthening the church that way. If he truly wants Christians to be \u201cenergized as they ought, to speak and act for the common good,\u201d he should recognize that activities like gathering signatures or holding rallies are a natural and important part of this process. And while it\u2019s true that we shouldn\u2019t be too quick to hang all our hopes on conservative politicians, once again, it\u2019s irrelevant and water-muddying for Piper to bring this up in a discussion of a marriage amendment.
\nBut there\u2019s more. And it gets worse. A lot of you have probably read the Star Tribune\u2019s coverage<\/a> of this sermon, which made it look like Piper and other pastors were \u201copting out of the marriage fight\u201d in Minnesota. Upon the release of Piper\u2019s response<\/a>, in which he said the piece was partly right and partly wrong, many evangelicals quickly\u00a0<\/a> dismissed<\/a> the article as a completely unreliable piece of leftist propaganda. \u201cOh, well that\u2019s just a bunch of liberals twisting Piper\u2019s words. Moving on\u2026\u201d
\nBut the fact is that it wasn\u2019t <\/em>just propaganda. In fact, the most damning bits of the report came directly from John Piper\u2019s own representative.<\/em> Amazingly, most every conservative evangelical reaction I\u2019ve seen has either ignored or completely missed this fact. Look at this:<\/p>\n
\nMathis further stated that \u201cHe [Piper] wants to avoid the political realm as much as possible. The Christian Gospel is not left, it\u2019s not right. It is what it is.\u201d Here we go again with the pointless, cliched meme about the gospel not being left or right. Just what we need. (An added irony to this whole thing is that Leith Anderson, the other pastor who refused to take an official stance, offered as his reason that he was no longer an active pastor. So apparently you can\u2019t be political if you are a pastor\u2026 but you can\u2019t be political if you\u2019re not a pastor either. I\u2019ll let you mull that over.)
\nSo in light of all this, Piper\u2019s response doesn\u2019t clarify anything. It just makes his position look still more incoherent. He insists the Star Tribune was wrong to say he \u201copted out,\u201d when in fact he \u201copted in,\u201d yet according to his own spokesman, \u201cour position is we don\u2019t have a position\u201d! And of course, the obvious question is if Piper thought it important to spend so much time dropping broad hints that this amendment is a good thing, why would it have been such a radical, monumental step to simply conclude by saying, \u201cI place my full support behind this amendment, and as a pastor I encourage all of you to take your part in the fight for marriage by casting your vote for it\u201d? Where is the logic in drawing such a sharp line between the two? The answer is that it\u2019s not logical. In fact, it is so internally contradictory it almost makes one suspect that there\u2019s some church \u201cpolitics\u201d behind all this. Piper\u2019s basic gut instincts are right and sensible\u2026 but perhaps there\u2019s a group of influential people who are telling him to hold back. Perhaps it was someone else\u2019s idea to preach in June instead of November. And perhaps Piper, not being the sort of man to pay lip service to a principle he doesn\u2019t believe, has taken that perspective and done his darnedest to somehow reconcile it with his own better instincts, to convince himself that it all hangs together when it quite obviously doesn\u2019t.
\nJohn Piper is a pastor, but he is also an ordinary person, an ordinary citizen like anyone else. Just because he stands in the pulpit while we sit in the pews does not render him duty-bound to muffle himself when it comes to combating the enemy in the political arena. If anything, he has a duty to the other pastors who did speak out plainly in affirmation of the amendment and were discouraged when he did not show his support for them. If anything, he has a duty to be a bold counter-balance to those who are using the exact same apolitical rhetoric as a thin veil for actively pulling the church to the political left. And now he has provided a highly influential source for these people to refer back to. \u201cSee, even John Piper says the church needs to stay out of politics.\u201d If he wishes to strengthen the church, he needs to recognize that this is no time for being coy or pulling punches. Right here, right now, \u201cbeing political\u201d is really just another phrase for fighting the good fight, and it\u2019s imperative that leaders like Piper wake up to this fact and conquer their knee-jerk negative reaction to the word \u201cpolitical.\u201d Regardless of how good their intentions are, they will do more harm than good as long as they refuse to embrace it.
\nTo help illustrate my point, let me close with some sharp but truthful words from a pastor who is of the same mind as I am on this issue. His name is Brad Brandon, and if you go to this link<\/a>, you can hear his full comments. They take up about a five minute segment from minute two to minute seven.<\/p>\n
\nI\u2019m not attacking him personally, but I am attacking this point, I am attacking this philosophy, this ideology that says, \u201cWell, we shouldn\u2019t be pushed into political issues.\u201d We can as churches and pastors get involved with political issues. Let me tell you something, the Bible says that the church is the ground and the pillar of the truth, and if somebody wants to drag the truth into politics, then by golly guess what, we as Christians and the church and the pastors ought to go there.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n