Chapter 4: The Church is Responsible for So Much Injustice
This week’s discussion on Chapter 4 was written by Veronica Netzer.
______________________________________________________________________________
In chapter 4, Keller addresses the behavior of Christians using three main issues:
- Character Flaws – he recognized that people would be put off by the idea of Christianity based on the Christians they’ve met or things they’ve heard about Christians. Why would someone be a Christian if they can be a good person apart from the Christina faith?
- War and violence – how/why could someone be apart of a religion that supports/promotes violence? Many people are quick to bring up something such as the Crusades to defend their reason for not being a Christian.
- Fanaticism – why would someone want to be associated with such self-righteous people?
I related most closely with the first issue. I was raised in a church where people called themselves Christians, but they were only identified as such on Sunday. Because of this, I was witness to what many would call hypocrisy. I never believed Christians should be perfect, but as a teenager especially I realized there were a lot of people in the church who indifferent to caring for widows and orphans, loving their neighbor, or doing anything else that would inconvenience them. Instead these people focused on causing strife in the church, gossiping about the latest happenings in the church office, and turning their back when someone came into Sunday service not dressed in their finest attire.
Recently I’ve had conversations with someone who I know loves the Lord that looked like this:
Friend: Would your church hire someone who is homosexual?
Me: If they knew that person recognized homosexuality as a sin, and was seeking to find freedom from it?
Friend: But what if they sinned again?
Me: Well, we are all struggling with something, right?
Keller said the church is “filled with immature and broken people who still have a long way to go emotionally, morally, and spiritually…The church is a hospital for sinners, not a museum for saints.”
One Sunday, Todd read a letter from someone who was disappointed with some of the attire they saw young women wearing on Easter Sunday. They felt like the attire was inappropriate not just for Sunday, but for any day. In response, Todd talked about a church being full of people all across the board in regards to their maturity. He concluded that the church needs to have immature people; otherwise the mature are not doing their job!
Having such a large church full of people who “still have a long way to go emotionally, morally, and spiritually”, I believe Keller’s following statement applies to Watermark so well:
“It is often the case that people whose lives have been harder and who are ‘lower on the character scale’ are more likely to recognize their need for God and turn to Christianity. So we should expect that many Christians’ lives would not compare well to those of the nonreligious (just as the health of the people in the hospital is comparatively worse than people visiting museums).”
Discussion Questions
- Was there one particular issue that you have found yourself resonating with?
- Can you remember a time when you judged someone who called themselves a Christian but didn’t act like one?
- If you call yourself a Christian, can you recall a time when you did something that may have turned someone off to the church?
2 responses so far
1. Whenever I hear someone talk about not liking the church because of something that was done hundreds of years ago (e.g. Crusades) or something done more recently (Army of God attacking abortion clinics), I know there is nothing I can do to right those wrongs. It motivates me to challenge their thinking of what it means to be a Christian by the way I love them. It is really cool to talk to someone who in general doesn’t like the church, but maybe worked with someone once who called himself a Christian and really loved that person. When someone is genuinely loved by another person, they are changed.
2. let me count the ways… (unfortunately)
3. see #2. I try not to live with regret and I know that condemnation comes from the devil, but godly sorrow [over my past sins] brings repentance 2 Cor 7:10
One of the guys in our foundation group likes to talk politics and in the same way as religion, people who have an opposing viewpoint always like to bring up people of your ideological camp who have made mistakes. In a discussion like this, he says, try to get them to talk about the issues and each party’s ideals rather than each party’s leaders. If someone has a problem with what someone else has done in the name of Christianity, try to engage them on the principles of Christianity (love, forgiveness, mercy, salvation). Jesus did not come to judge the world, but to save it. John 12:47
[Reply]
I think Keller handled this chapter wonderfully, and it thus stands as an excellent primer for diving into these very complicated issues.
First, my thoughts on the macro level: violence done by a collection of Christians in the name of God.
Though the breadth of the chapter necessitated such an ethereal and largely philosophical approach, Keller indeed acknowledged that the “violence done in the name of Christianity is a terrible reality and must be both addressed and readdressed” (56). For many skeptics (as we’ll refer to them in deference to Keller’s title), such a pithy response without adequately dealing with specifics such as the Crusades or Inquisition will be deemed inadequate. Indeed, Keller does an excellent job pointing out that religious violence is not limited to Christian circles. Such examples should be clearly identified and understood by those who engage in conversations on these issues.
It seems that in America, for some reason, the Crusades seem to be at the forefront on people’s minds when we discuss Christian violence. Perhaps this has to do with an association of Billy Graham’s revivalist vernacular or even the negative connotations stemming from George W. Bush’s 16 September quote, “This crusade, this war on terrorism, is gonna take awhile” (which so dangerously played into the Muslim extremest call for a rebirth of Saladin). We see even popular Christian writers Donald Miller asking forgiveness for such acts lifetimes after-the-fact in a makeshift college campus confessional. For some reason, the echos of this ancient warfare still screams into our Christian conscience. I was pleased to see Keller quote Rodney Stark’s work on Abolition, and thus I recommend the reader who would want to learn more truly the facts enveloping the Crusades to examine his work “God’s Battalions: The Case for the Crusades.” A must read for those interested to engage this space.
To truly engage this conversation, one must be able to separate the modern reinterpretation of history with the events themselves. The 21st century American is in no way equipped to understand or speak to events of a millennium past without serious thought and study. There is so much entangled with worldview assumptions, church-state issues, education and information dispersion, etc. that must be accounted for. Christians, most of all, should understand this, for no serious-minded Christian would say that a 21st century American could pick up a Bible a read a letter written 2000 years ago (or of stories thousands of years even before that) to a specific context and Eastern audience so polar opposite to our own and truly understand what the author was saying. Thus, we’re familiar with this (or at least we should be). The same goes for the rest of history. Our post-enlightenment modern/post-modern western capitalist minds must cross many Rubicons to effectively dialogue with history, and we do so effectively only through the guidance of tutors who are with us and those who have gone before us. So, let’s shake hands and agree to do that.
Second, my thoughts on the micro level: individual hypocrites.
I was also impressed with Keller’s argument for the Christian to be…well, more Christian – a call, as Keller points out, voiced famously by the great Martin Luther King, Jr. Here we see the assumption that God’s answer to evil is simply more of Himself, as He is good. This again, is where we again turn to Samuel Wells for the answer to evil and into necessitating the basic understanding as evil as privation of the good (see my comments on chapter 2). Where evil exists on behalf of the professed believer (both I and Keller are intentional in such phraseology), such is not a working of Christ. Where good does reign, no matter through the faithful or the secular, Keller points out that this is of God, a gracious gift of common grace. If, however, we did have evidence of a believer doing good without exception, we would have nothing less than a modern-day Christophony, and unless this person was the physical return of Christ, we all know that such a person will never be found this side of the great eschaton, which is the great hope of the Christian – God’s completed action in bringing the world to rights.
So, all Christians, even the best of them, are flawed in their flesh.
Consider three famous murderers: Moses, King David, and John Calvin. The latter two of these men likely represent the worst of violence among those claiming God as their own king. And yet, for David at least, we know that he was been declared right with God, for his heart longed for God. His life, however, is barely distinguishable from that of his predecessor, Saul, when evaluating morality and ethics. All these men also had unprecedented power and influence to bring about the will of God, which makes them all the more a target for they label “Hypocrite” by society. In more modern times, I point to Woodrow WIlson, who while still a professor and not yet President of Princeton wrote in “On Being Human” -
‘…Great masses of our fellow-men are shut out from choosing, by reason of absorbing toil, and it is part of the enlightenment of our age that our understandings are being opened to the workingman’s need of a little leisure wherein to look about him and clear his vision of the dust of the workshop. We know that there is a drudgery which is inhuman, let it but encompass the whole life, with only heavy sleep between task and task. We know that those who are so bound can have no freedom to be men, that their very spirits are in bondage. It is part of our philanthropy—it should be part of our statesmanship—to ease the burden as we can, and enfranchise those who spend and are spent for the sustenance of the race…’
Wilson saw the United States as God’s sovereign hand to work His will across the world (in fact, it was immersed in this assumption that Wilson, when he was not anymore President of Princeton but of the United States, sought the formation of the League of Nations to rid the world of violence and evil, for such an abolition is the very definition of good and from God). When writing this, it was seen by Wilson as the duty of the preeminent Christian nation to emancipate men from a life of drudgery, and in this essay’s context, from urban servitude. Yet, we know that his roots in Southern Presbyterianism left an inner racism in Wilson that drove him to reverse any and all progresses made for African Americans in Capital Hill once he was inaugurated as President of the United States. Thus, as a brilliantly minded Christian and leader of a supposed Christian nation looking directly at the opportunity to accelerate the inclusion of African Americans into proper standing within society and economics at a time so ripe – and having been on record through such writings as above in favor of such as stately (virtuously synonymous with “Christianly” in WIlson’s mindset) – he, in fact, did the very opposite, the most unchristian, uncharitable thing. Sanctification is a process, and as Keller points out, starting points figure significantly into the equation, especially being born into four generations of Southern Presbyterianism. So again, all Christians, even the best of them, are flawed in their flesh.
Such brings us to the correlate that many Christians today are, at best, level with their secular counterparts when assessing morality. Frustrating? Yes. Counter to the Gospel? No, for this is in itself a confession that we all need the Gospel and God’s grace which flows from it. All have fallen short. All. If there was no need for grace, there would be no need for Christ.
So, do we accept grace and run to a life of antinomianism? Certainly not. Paul says “May it never be!”
Benedict XVI, most recently in his brief book on St. Paul but in many other writings as well, makes the case that faith finds definition in love, in charity. Faith operates, i.e. works, in the sphere of love. It is in faithfulness to the Gospel that the believer finds communion with God, the author of love, and it is through our response of love, of charity, that Christ finds greater presence within us. Such is the sanctifying cycle of faith working through love, all a process of grace. Combining this thought with some classic N.T. Wright, it is through the practice of love, of charity, that the Christian shares in the mission, the call, of Christ and participates in the redemptive process. As Christians, we are called to be faithful to the Gospel, to walk in the works prepared for us. We are redeemed as objects to be agents of redemption. We are reconciled with God yet remain where we are in time to be outposts within a groaning world, a vision of Christ to a hurting community. As Mike alluded to in his own comment, the world will know we are His by how we love one another. This is the call – this is the Christian testimony. This is why James says that faith without works is dead. There is no faith without love or charity. An absence of love is the testimony of separation of God. Christ says as much when he correlates our love for another with our love for and belonging to the father.
So while Christians might display acts of evil, those acts are in no way Christian. Such is merely the believer being unfaithful to Christ and the call to love.
[Reply]