When there is an event like the recent shooting in Las Vegas, a national conversation begins.
It takes fairly predictable lines and moves along standard patterns. The anti-gun lobby comes out in force, as does the pro-gun lobby, and the majority of people mourn and scratch their heads in wonderment that anything so awful could be perpetrated by a human being. Such socio-cultural events seem to have increased in frequency in recent years – whether they are events of violence, race, sexuality and gender, or scandals of one kind or another. And the church is increasingly being asked by a secular society to provide moral leadership with regard to these various ‘cultural issues.’
Different approaches
The famous Christ and Culture (by H. Richard Niebuhr, 1951) set out a framework for analysing different approaches to the relationship between Christ and culture, accentuating a cultural transformational model while not ruling out others. Other approaches have taken their cue from this work and reassessed it (like D. A. Carson’s Christ and Culture Revisited ).
It is probably time for a fresh look at these dynamics. Classically, Protestants have been shaped by a ‘two-kingdom’ view, and Presbyterians by a ‘spirituality of the church’ approach, which emphasised a focal point on the particularities of a church’s calling: evangelism, discipleship and the like. Abraham Kuyper, with his famous call that there is no corner of the world over which Christ does cry ‘mine!’, generated a more integrated approach, leading to a neo-Calvinist commonality of ‘transformationalism’ in some quarters at least.
The challenge has been that some ‘two-kingdom’ interpretations have, it seems to some, given insufficient intellectual ballast to allow – for instance – churches to be able to stand up to and speak against the prevalent evils of Nazism (in Lutheran Germany) and slavery (in the antebellum South of America).
Leadership and discernment
I have for some time been postulating an assessment model. That is, in Acts 4 you see the apostles deliberately refusing to obey the authorities. They were commanded to do one thing; the apostles decide that it is their duty to obey God rather than man. On the other hand, in Romans 13 (written while even Nero was alive) we are told to submit to the authorities. The decision point of a leadership, therefore, is whether we are in an ‘Acts 4’ situation or a ‘Romans 13’ situation. Such discernment is never easy, but it is important to be forced to ask the question and, indeed, to ask God for the wisdom to discern.
Crossing the Rubicon
The local church is an embassy of heaven (2 Corinthians 5.20), with a distinct task to call people to be reconciled to Christ, and to be active in the ongoing distinct calling of the church towards the Great Commission of being disciples and making disciples to the glory of God, all around the distinct focal point of the proclamation of the Word of God (2 Timothy 4.1-2). There is a time for the church to speak prophetically against, and indeed act in civil disobedience against, resident evils like Nazism– utilising models like Amos from the Old Testament as a secondary application, though the primary application is to God’s people. But ‘crossing the Rubicon’ between Romans 13 and Acts 4 is not to be entered into lightly, thoughtlessly, or without serious forethought for unintended consequences.
