On Knowledge

I must confess, prior to writing this present investigation, to be a lover of that which I will soon describe to be my subject. While that might not seem a big confession, or even on that is necessarily due, given that writers write what they know and they know, often, what they love, or in defense of that which they love and write in opposition to its opponents, I think in this given instance it is important for me to disclose my prior association.

The reason for this disclosure is I aim to write about Knowledge and Knowing, concepts which invariably are tied to the concept of Truth and carry with them something of terms like “Subjectivity” and “Objectivity.” In the context of philosophy, and in light of the modern scientific vogue, the former of these terms is treated with a measured level of suspicion and the latter is seen in a light of something more akin to “Truthful.” A more thorough discussion of Subjectivity and Objectivity awaits my writing elsewhere, but I bring those terms to bear here because it is important for me to observe that the mere confession – or profession – of a “love of knowledge” has an effect on how my discussion of Knowledge should proceed.

Which is to say, that if someone were to press me to become “Objective” regarding Knowledge, I would say that what they ask me to do is impossible. There is no way for me to Know about Knowing outside of Knowing it, and to Know it is to be Relational, i.e. Subjective, with that thing. This will become even more clear as I describe what I view to be the eternal character – that is, the essential character – of Knowledge. Yet for some this “un-Objective” method of engagement is discouraging; they would rather that I would be able to put Knowledge in a box, say that I have mastered it, say that I “have” Knowledge or “get” Knowledge or “control” Knowledge.

Yet a person can be a master of something without having “total Knowledge” of the thing. This is the funky thing about “Knowing” in that “to Know” implies some sort of mastery – “I Know how to play piano,” “I Know how to make scrambled eggs,” “I Know basic Calculus” – one might even describe that mastery in ascending layers of Knowledge: “I Know how to play a little piano,” “I Know how to play piano, fairly well,” “I Know how to play Beethoven on the piano,” or “I Know how to play anything of any difficulty on piano.” Even that final term of mastery, what we might call “the greatest piano player” or whatnot, there are limits: there are pieces that the pianist does not yet Know, albeit has the confidence he or she could play them (after all, Joseph Haydn wrote 60 piano sonatas; how many of them does our pianist know off-hand?); there are pieces that have not yet been composed that the pianist has no way of playing; and, even more abstractly, there are pieces that will never be composed or which have not been composed because they are technically impossible, and etc. etc.

It is utterly appropriate for us to call the master pianist a master, however, and to say that he or she truly Knows the Piano. This is deeper than a competitive “Knows the Piano better than me,” for instance. Our master pianist does not need to provide the Socratic paradox to confess this gap in his or her Knowledge and Total Knowledge. We do not need to over-analyze the impossibility of him or her “having” Knowledge. It is just sufficient to note that this person, who beyond doubt Knows the Piano, is still confronted with the Mystery of not “Having Knowledge” of the Piano. We could go further in this sort of analysis, of course, a describe how the master pianist, unless he or she is also a physicist, has no understanding of the physics underneath sound or the engineering mechanics of the piano beyond its basic structures.

All this goes to say that there is something Relational about Knowledge, even its most basic of forms. I say Relational because when we are faced with another Person, say one’s wife or husband, or a friend or brother, with whom we are well acquainted, we can easily say “I Know Such-and-Such.” In the parlance of the Hebrew Old Testament, we observe that the Hebrew yada’ is used to connote the intimate relationships of man and wife, so that the statement “I Know My Wife” implies a fundamental, sexual level intimacy. Yet – whether we are discussing general or sexual relationships – we all understand that to Know another Person is to come face-to-face with Mystery. After all, however much of their Person they have disclosed to us, their real natures are always hidden. We see their faces, we see their body language, and in the case of sexual intercourse a Person literally experiences the other Person, yet there is a fundamental part of their nature that is utterly hidden from us.

It would be foolish, in my opinion, to assert that this lack of Knowledge implies something of an agnostic relationship with that person. A nihilistic view on this regard, such as the solipsism of Walter Pater, says that we can never truly Know another Person. Experience tells us differently on this regard. Sure, there are some people who are so dynamic or so unsettled or so random that they can be hard to pin down – but there are just as many, if not more, people in our lives with whom we regularly enjoy company and with whom we can give account of their characters and persons to others. “So-and-So is a kind soul who enjoys movies and is one of the best listeners I know.”

This is not false Knowledge, nor is it deception. There are claims here that might not be temporally bound, of course: So-and-So might grow out movies later on in his or her life, or maybe they will become a grumpy curmudgeon in their old age and cease to be an effective listener. There are claims here that I might be mistaken on: maybe So-and-So has been lying to me this whole time. But, actually, since So-and-So here is built on a real Person that I personally really Know, I can confess that doubting So-and-So’s character in this way is not only ungracious to that Person, but also not the way that we implicitly engage with people. But “How do we ‘Know for sure’ that So-and-So is this way?” Maybe the right phrase is to say that “We take it on Faith that he or she is this way.” If I follow the term “Faith” in its proper Greek origins – as the term is used as a translation of Paul’s pistis – then this word means something like, or like unto, “Trust.”

The problem of Knowledge that we are navigating here can also be unfolded through the helpful aid of pre-Socratic philosopher Zeno. Zeno’s most famous paradox, of course, is that well-known story of Achilles running, and the impossibility of Achilles to reach his end-destination due to the ever-decreasing halves that he has to overcome to reach the end. “Before Achilles can reach point 1, he first has to reach point ½, but before he can reach ½, he must first reach ¼.” And so forth and so on.

We could say that there is a similar phenomenon when we discuss Knowledge in the ways that we have been discussing Knowledge. One could view Knowledge in the gross general fashion: “I Know 50% of the facts regarding X, Y, and Z, and that is what makes me somewhat Knowledgeable about the topic.” (Of course, good luck in defining what makes a singular “fact” so one can do the calculation there.) The reality of this version of the theory of Knowledge is that it falls into Zeno’s paradox: “Before I can really Know something, I first must Know these things; but before I can Know those things, I first must Know these things…”

Yet, we all Know, implicitly, that Achilles has no problem with running. (There is a problem in his heel, but that’s another story…) Actually, we Know, by experience, that Zeno’s whole algorithm is nonsensical. You and I have no problem crossing to a particular point. And, at this point in history, we Know, by mathematics, that there is a way to calculate the whole circuit based on these subdivisions (re: integrals). What Zeno teaches us is that we Know how to walk even though we don’t Know how walking really works. The pianist does not “Know X% of the Available Knowledge of the Piano,” but “Knows the Piano,” in a way that is not too distant or distinct from the way a Person might say “I Know So-and-So,” or I might say “I Know My Wife.”

Thus, the modern way of describing Knowledge in terms of “acquisition” or “having” or “getting” does not make sense in light of the lived experience of Knowledge. This is not to say that there are not deceptions. Since this present study is an attempt to describe something of the character of Knowledge, there is an implicit connection between this writing and the historical conversation on the topic of epistemology. Without diving too much into what previous thinkers have said about Knowledge – and they have said a lot – I think it’s worthwhile to observe the ways in which the fear of deception, the fear of being “taken in,” affects epistemology. René Descartes, famously, having “read the book of the world,” fled to his cottage to find Knowledge. While I have much I could say about Descartes, it is his idea that he could find Knowledge in isolation, removed from the world, removed from the Other, with implicit trust in his own self-reflections that seems to me more deceptive than the possible deception of the world or the Other.

There are deceptions, of course, and these are deeply problematic, especially in the modern world of social media, false information, or what has been recently dubbed “post-truth” (which seems faulty, given the long-term existence of “post-truth” sorts of thinking). Yet the search for Knowledge cannot be found in its antithesis: the flight from deception. There’s a logic argument to be made there: to find Knowledge, one must search for Knowledge not for not-not-Knowledge.

Another, perhaps more convincing, argument against the sort of epistemological program that I have been circling about is the one made by Jean-Paul Sartre in which he describes how the human being acts and believes in “Bad Faith” with himself. That is, we are all self-deceived, and if we are all self-deceived, then how can we put any stock in the experiential Knowledge that I have been providing throughout this argument as “trustworthy”? I won’t tackle that argument for now, but I will say that as a Christian I find Sartre’s claim of self-deception more winsome than Descartes’ radical doubt and resultant self-knowledge. Descartes’ answer to the Delphic Oracle is “I think, that is how I know myself,” but Sartre’s is “I think I know myself, but in reality I lie to myself.” The latter is, surprisingly enough, the more Christian answer.

So, the discussion up to this point can be summed up like this: that Knowledge is more a Relationship with a Mystery than it is a quantifiable substance; that to Know something or someone does not require utter mastery in common parlance nor does it require absolute Knowledge; that the request to Know “in an objective way” is built on a false premise of intellectual distance; and, yet, that there is a problem, which I have not yet addressed, regarding the trustworthiness of our faculties regarding Knowledge. The answer to deception provided by Descartes falls flat for us because it does not edit out Descartes himself from the process (as he professes!).

One vitally important going forward from here, then, is the term of “Faith.” When I say “I Know you,” I take it on Faith that you are not lying to me, that you are not deceptive, that you are, in fact, the sort of Person that I take you to be, as you have revealed your character thusfar in our Relationship. If I truly “Know you,” actually, then this Faith in your character is not simply sufficient for me to say “I have a sense of who he or she is,” but is actually wholly sufficient for me to say “I am absolutely confident that their character implies X, Y, and Z.” For the people that I Know well, those with whom I confide my closest secrets and values, the term of Faith here does not imply a “blind following” or “uncritical belief,” but, instead, implies a deeply-true trust in their nature, that they are who they say they are.

In other words, since it is clear – and modern epistemologists agree on this – that the Objective view of Knowledge is unsustainable, then we are left with something more akin to a “Subjective” view of Knowledge, where to Know is to put oneself into some sort of (yet undefined) Relationship with some sort of (yet unclear) Mystery. Descartes’ worry about Deception undoubtedly follows us: “How do you really Know?” Meanwhile, Sartre contends that our Knowing is a self-manufactured falsehood. In order for this conversation to proceed, then, we must find the ways in which Faith, the term that undergirds our Relationship to Mysteries, overcomes Deception in a sure manner. That will be our next topic.

On Post-Evangelical and Post-Charismatic Millennials.

It seems to me that there are folk out there who are trying to make sense of why Christian millennials are so deeply anti-Trump and so "unorthodox" with the party politics of our forebears. (For some that means "they lean Left," while for others that means "they reject partisan politics altogether." Some millennials remain conservatives but deeply reject Trump anyways.)

Here are some interpretations of my generation I've seen. According to the far right, these millennials (including myself!) are:

+ Deceived by their universities (that's a big one)
+ Poorly educated in the Bible
+ Spiritually imperceptive
+ Unintelligent
+ Swayed by peer pressure
+ Lied to by the mainstream media (MSM)

For me, at least, I find these assertions to be more than a little bit patronizing and a lot belittling, especially that last one (I hate peer pressure of all kinds). It's like they seem to be attempting to diagnose an illness without seeing the patient face to face. Where is their image of a millennial coming from anyways? Are they talking about millennials they know, personally? or some stereotyped image of them?

Can I tell you a bit of my own story? How I got "here"? I plan on writing another blog where I can give more flesh to some of these claims, but here's the outline of how I never got sucked into conservatism (or liberalism) in the first place:

Bipartisan Role Models: I've had role models who are both conservative and liberals, and I refute the claims both sides make about the other's immorality. And I know deeply godly Christian people who are conservative and liberal.

Christians of Color: I've made friends with Christians of color, and realized that their politics were totally different from the politics I heard at church, even though we're theologically similar.

Rejection of Obama-Hatred: I have always been thoroughly and totally disgusted by how I've heard Christians talk about Obama. And liberals in general. That sort of hatred and dehumanization is foreign to the Gospel. (Some might say: "We don't hate people, we hate the policies," but their words speak for themselves on that matter.)

In-Depth Scripture Study: I've studied the Scriptures regarding matters like race and God's vision for a multiethnic, multicultural kingdom. I've found most evangelical conversations on race to be deeply disconnected to the Bible (and very rooted in politics).

Taught by Kingdom-Workers, Evangelism-Champions: I learned a lot about matters of race and justice not from those liberal universities but from an evangelical organization (IVCF), an organization that also first taught me the centrality of evangelism. In a moment in history in which evangelical churches are often more interested in politics than mission, I found in IVCF a direct and clear call to spread the Gospel that I was hungry for and never hearing evangelicalism (ironically enough).

Disgruntled by Spiritual Abuse: I've seen conservative Christian leaders advance political causes with an inappropriate use of their spiritual power and influence, something that made me very disconcerted. (RE: passing out voting fliers with only conservative candidates, praying for only certain candidates, endorsements, &c)

Discouraged by Poor Theology: Beyond this I've seen churches and church leaders take hardline stances on political matters (for example: Obamacare) and yet leave more critical theological issues and problems (for example: Christology, mission and evangelism, Trinitarian theology) up in the air. When asked, I've heard "Well, we don't really know for sure about those things. Are they really that important?" Yes, they are.

Less Mainstream Media, More Bipartisan Media: I've always found CNN and FOX and MSNBC and The Blaze and whatnot to be a bunch of politically-charged blowhards. A lot of millennials believe this too. In fact, we're the generation of podcasts, of multiple news medias, of complex viewpoints. We're more likely to listen to This American Life than The CBS Evening News or whatnot. I listen to a lot of NPR, and, I gotta tell you, I'm sometimes a little freaked out about how multi-partisan they are. I've heard them interview Glenn Beck, or Floridians who were pro-Trump, or deeply progressive social activists. And NPR treats them all well - even the Trump folks. (NPR should get an award for being professional in an unprofessional year.) At a time when the MSM is becoming less and less a newsource and more and more an entertainment venue, me and people like me are fleeing to real news. We aren't even partially swayed by the MSM; we don't even pay attention to it.

My Democrat Family: Beyond all this is my family. I come from a family of Democrats on both sides. Sure, I don't see eye to eye with them on everything, but I can tell you the truth that from what I've heard about liberals in evangelicals circles they'd have me think that my own family was a bunch of God-hating, immoral psychopaths. That's not who they are. They are moral people - and some are Christian people! - who taught me how to care, how to treat people with dignity, how to debate an idea, how to raise a family in love. They are also proud union-members, and that's given me some things to think about too. Not too long ago, the Democrat / Republican divide was about unions more than anything else, about workers' rights. When the super-conservatives have made political conversations about very specific things (i.e. gay rights or abortion, etc.), my normal, liberal family members have focused on things that matter to them (i.e. education, workers' rights, etc.), and that has given me a different perspective on politics in general, and made more open to the diversity of opinions in politics.

Rejection of Liberal-Hating: In light of my Democrat family, I have to confess that I have always been deeply bothered by my far-right conservative folks' description of Democrats and liberals as some sort of evil anti-Christain boogeyman. They sling words around like "Leftys" and "SJWs" that are intended as invectives. I've heard them say that "those teacher's unions ruin the schools" or that "those teachers that are brainwashing our children" or whatnot. I come from a family of teachers who are in teachers' unions... Do you think that I don't find that offensive? This sort of rhetoric, maybe even more than it's easier manifestation of Obama-hating, is part of what drives me (and others like me) away from strictly-conservative Christianity. If that's how you'll treat my family, why would I want to hang out with you?

(If I didn't make this clear already, I know some incredible conservative people who are deeply committed to their political claims and who aren't jerks like some of the above claims observe. My claims are in response to specific subsets and specific groups of generally far-right Christian people, and are not representative of all conservatives. I even admire a good handful of godly conservative people who give me hope for a future conservatism not driven by hate.)

In Other Words: I Have My Reasons...
So, what makes me more of a "principled moderate"? Not "godless education," not peer pressure nor bad theology. Rather it's been because of mission-loving, evangelistic Christians, because of Christians of color, because of my disgust with the abuse of power within conservative evangelicalism, because of the idol of conservative orthodoxy, and because I come from a loving family that defies the labels that I've heard attributed to liberals.

It should be clear that this post is not in opposition to conservatism. Again, as I've said before, I know some incredible conservative people. But I write it to let you know that Christians like me - post-evangelical and post-charismatic - are tired of the ultra-conservative assumptions governing our movement, and I suspect that others who identify this way would resonate with at least one of the points I've shared above. We're not abandoning the faith, we're not committing heresy, we're not rejecting the evangelical call to witness, we're not being deceived or pressured into some false ideology, we're not being taught nonsense and believing it...

Instead, post-evangelical / post-charismatic Christians care deeply about God's people, His Church, His Missional Work in the world, and the advancement of His Kingdom, and we think that a conservative-only Christianity shoots itself in the foot and has the temptation to be swayed and allured by offers of power from the State. For many of us, we see the collusion between the Religious Right and DJT as a final representation of this temptation - although for me I have been on this path for more than five years now - and we want nothing to do with it, for the Lord's sake!

It would be a mistake to identify this group of Christians as "seeker safe" (we balk at such unbiblical nonsense) or "emerging church" (we long for deeper, authoritative orthodoxy and Bible-centered theology). In fact, a lot of us still *are* evangelical or charismatic, based on the usual definitions of those terms. But we're finding the hegemony of conservatism harmful to our Gospel-witness, interfering with our hearing the voice of God, inconsistent with the words of the prophets (both ancient and modern), and... unbiblical.

I hope what you get out of this, if you're still reading, is this:

If you're a conservative-only Christian: Hear that we exist. We do not accept your political claims, and we have a little bit of a different political theology than you. We want to be part of your Church, we want you to be part of our Church. We want our liberal brothers and sisters to be in this Church too and not branded as heretics because of politics. We want for all of our ideologies and politics to be held accountable to Scriptures, and that includes your conservative claims that have gone unchecked for a long long time. Be open to us.

If you're a post-evangelical or post-charismatic Christian: Have hope! Take heart! God made a remnant long ago, and He's making one now too. You are not alone, and you are God's people. We're with you.

If you abandoned Christianity because it was too conservative: Stop thinking that politics defines the Christian faith! That lie was told to you long ago and it made you dissatisfied with the hypocrisy that you saw in it. There's something better. Jesus brought a whip to money-changers who thought that the Temple was just for Jews and had plopped their markets in the midst of the Gentiles' worship area. He wants to make space for you to worship Him too.

If you're a liberal-only Christian: HEY! I didn't talk about you in this post. But keep an open mind. Don't just lambast the conservatives because their conservatives. Hold them accountable for the political choices they've made. Keep up that pressure. But hold yourselves to the same standard. Again: Our politics do not define our faith. Our faith defines our politics and it often will lead us in complicated, diverse, and differing directions. Don't make that argument central! But keep up the holding of that 80% to the claims of DJT. We need that sort of rebuke right now. We need grace in that rebuke too. Love is complex.

Kent Reflections XV. A Letter to My Younger Self I. On Rebuke.

(While at work, when I have times I tend to write some of my thoughts down in a running Word document. These notes I have called "Kent Reflections," since my work is in Kent Laboratory at the University of Chicago.

What follows is a letter I wrote "to myself" sometime last week regarding Rebuke. It is not to be read as a proclamation or description of a theology of rebuke. This is more human than that. It is the thoughts and words and ideas and problems that I have been wrestling with as I grappled the Christian problem of Rebuke: When do I rebuke? Why? In what context? Who? What topics are within the domain of rebuke? And etc. It is also notably incomplete... It doesn't really "end" conclusory like I'd like. But I like that about this bit of writing, and I like the epistolary style. Maybe I have read too much Petrarch and am too addicted to letter-writing. Hmm....

In case you find this essay TL;DR, I have even encompassed a basic thesis in the opening paragraphs for you. The rest flows from there.)

XV. Kent Laboratory, November 3^rd, 2016:

A Letter to My Younger Self I. On Rebuke.

Perhaps I have read too much Petrarch, or fancy myself too much like him, that I have undertaken to write you – myself of eight years ago – a letter. You are a lot like me, of course: idealistic in good and bad ways, romantic in the German way, uninterested in monetary gain in general, and deeply in love with a man named Jesus of Nazareth. You are a little different, a little less politically moderate (though definitely not “conservative” or “liberal”!), a little more Pentecostal, a little less uncomfortable with the Charismatic wing of Pentecostalism, a little more uncomfortable with the non-Pentecostal evangelical world. But you aren’t really that different than the me who is writing this right now.

I have undertaken to write you regarding the topic of rebuke, and I think it would be well for you to listen and to hear what I have to say to you, because I think you might find it a little bit of a shocking claim. Here is the thesis: Rebuke – godly rebuke, that is – is a true expression of Compassionate Love and Care toward our Christian family. If you do not Rebuke when you ought, you reveal how little you actually Love them.

Mark this, there will be some Christians, Christians whom you know and love dearly now, that you will be tempted to write off. They will behave in ways clearly un-Christ-like, they will act out of the fruit of the flesh instead of the Spirit, and you will be tempted to say “I want nothing to do with you.”

But that temptation is the devil’s offer, it is not of God. These men and women are your flesh and blood, whether you like it or not, and they have been bought by the same flesh and blood as you. They are family, and you cannot write them off so easily. You cannot just block them on Facebook, or ban them on Twitter, you cannot just quiet them and make them shut up about their heresies and their deceptions. At times, you will feel very angry about them, you will think “Surely, you too are not the same as me, surely you are not one of the redeemed.” And their unredeemed mouths might make you think that way.

But even Jesus did not give up on the Pharisees. We like to read into His rebukes the sort of harshness and authoritarian power that we think leadership looks like, we pattern our rebukes on a false image of His rebukes, but we miss the Compassion and the Care which undergirds His Words. In the American Church, a power vacuum in the realm of authority (caused by our Protestantism and our Rebelliousness, I’d say) opens the way for the powerful and the charismatic to woo our headship. The less structured denominations and movements (re: Charismatic and Baptist) have the danger of false prophets jumping into their pulpits and demanding exacting sacrifice, total submission to the “Word of God,” and implicit trust in the leader. But Christ does not lead that way.

Yet still those rough words – “brood of vipers,” “Herod, that fox,” “whitewashed tombs” – resonate out of the Gospels. We tend to think Jesus is being mean (and then we allow that to justify our own being mean). He’s actually being gracious. The Pharisees have blinded themselves in their “knowledge” and their special privileges, so blinded that they cannot see Jesus for who He is – their awaited Messiah. But Jesus does not give up on them. He pulls away their stained clothes full of blood and fecal matter and reveals their nakedness to the world and to themselves. If He didn’t care, He would let them wallow in dirty garments, thinking themselves clean.

Rebuke, I’ve learned, is a measured sort of caring love. It isn’t a hammer that we use to punish the ungodly, nor a weapon at all. It is, ideally, a manifestation of the Love of God, who is not interested in our self-deceptions and our wicked ways. So, He points out the holes in our arguments and the holes in our clothes, rather than let us go on our merry way thinking ourselves “all-right.”

So, do not write them off, these Christians you might be tempted to call “pseudo-Christians,” or “weak Christians,” or even “baby Christians.” You have a responsibility to them, if you truly love them. Some of them will think that their faith is something lived and performed in a vacuum, that they can believe whatever they want to believe without any accountability. They might loathe this sort of love. Remember, in that day, how much you loathe this sort of love when it was directed at you – when Luke rebuked your impetuousness, when Chris rebuked your antinomianism, when Dylan rebuked your weak soteriology. But “iron sharpens iron,” so they say, and those who love rebuke, Scripture notes, are wise. Sometimes they – these “weak Christians” – will surprise you with Grace and they will respond Graciously, and you will turn to the Lord in Joy and thank Him… not because “you were right” – which is prideful – but because they truly are your brother and your sister, and their repentance brings you to mind of their salvation. You will know, in that moment, why you cannot write them off, why you cannot leave them be to their own devices, why you cannot cease from holding them accountable to the same Scriptures they ought to hold you accountable to.

Remember, of course, that we American evangelicals have a weak accountability structure. We hate it when other people tell us we’re wrong. We don’t have the humility of the Catholics to go to our pastors day in and day out and say “Father, I have sinned.” We’d rather strut our soteriologically-sound assurance in front of our pulpits and altars and pretend that our heavenly-bound justification (which is true) makes us naturally pretty, like a peacock. For our neighbor, our brother, our friend to point out our hidden nakednesses feels embarrassing in that sort of culture. It’d be better if he went about looking to his own issues, rather than bothering ours!

But remember, too, Paul’s instructions to Timothy and to Titus, the reminder about overseers being “above reproach.” The statement isn’t, of course, to set the episkopos in a state of unassailable dignity – as though that were possible – but to give them credibility when they stand in clarification, correction, and rebuke before the ekklesia. (And excommunication, should that dreadful consequence need manifest.) You cannot challenge or rebuke unless you have first checked and double-checked and triple-checked yourself, after all, being “sure of yourself” is the first step to deception, and to falling into the same boat as those whom you are responding to.

A friend of mine (and yours, but not yet!) reminded me recently about how crucial it is to first see what there is of merit in the oppositional argument. And even if that oppositional argument is totally rubbish (and sometimes it most definitely is), what of the spirit behind it is of merit? And even if that spirit is utterly demonic (and sometimes it most definitely is), what of that brother or sister’s character is of merit? A good man or woman, even a godly man or woman, might believe a “wind of doctrine” from the devil and be backing it because they say they love the Truth. They do not hate the Truth simply because their logic or argument is faulty, or because they do not understand Christian epistemology well, or because they believe certain anti-Christian presuppositions! They may well love the truth and just happen to be really bad at discerning it. Have mercy and grace with them and do not call them “foolish” or “evil” or “haters of the Truth” – unless they prove themselves to be clearly those things.

The truth is, unfortunately, that the Reformation, needful though it was, has created incredible, at times insurmountable, rifts in our theologies. Martin Luther was not interested in creating a denomination but in transforming the Roman Church from her Pelagian pitfalls. He did not hate the Roman Church, but loved her, and he risked his theological credibility by challenging her in loving rebuke. Erasmus was not his enemy, but his interlocutor.

But be mindful of this: because we American evangelicals hate accountability, your friends and brothers and sisters will do more than just balk at your challenges. They will begin accusing you of being “judgmental” or “bringing harsh judgment” or of “being deceived” yourself, or even – and this has happened to you and me – of being a “Marxist,” a “leftist,” a “progressive,” a “liberal,” a “statist,” as though your challenge against their inconsistent Christian witness has something to do with politics! I won’t tell you about what’s been happening in 2016, because it will terrify and sadden your apolitical, idealist, hyper-positive soul. You will see a glimpse of it in 2012, though, and that will be enough to convince you that there is a dangerous Kool-Aid in evanelicalism called “political ideology.” Be wary of it.

When they say these things, don’t forget to check yourself – again! It never hurts to go over your proofs, your arguments, your claims. Sort out their grounds, the way the arguments function, sort out your Scriptures. Compare your heart to the heart of Christ – do you say what you say out of Love or out of a desire to Hurt? Are you more interested in caring for your “opponent’s” (not “enemy”!) well-being than in “getting them back,” or are you committed to getting in “the last word”? Be careful of the desire to “get even,” to retort your own “rightness,” to express your “perfect, holy orthodoxy.” Be open to a broader diversity of opinions than your opponents, because then their accusation of your “narrow-mindedness” becomes hypocritical and unsustainable.

But when you have done all this, when you have checked your own soul, confided in your wife’s wisdom, leaned into the wisdom of your Christian friends and brothers and sisters and allies, and you are still convinced that your friend and brother and sister with whom you argue is not only wrong, but wrong in such a way that hurts their Christian morality, then stand firm! Do not waver at that juncture. Remember Ezekiel, whom God told to sound the alarm and let the people face the consequence if they do not listen. Remember Jeremiah, who was hated for the Word of the Lord. Remember Isaiah, who went before the Holy Throne and said “Here am I!” only to be given a impossible task: “Say to this people, Be ever hearing and never understanding, ever seeing and never perceiving.” You are not accountable to how “nice” people perceive you to be – although doing all this in a spirit of kindness really gets under some folk’s skin – but you are accountable to the Truth revealed to you by the Spirit of God. To waver on that is not “judgmental” or “mean,” but is actually Loving and True in the deep sense of the terms.

You’ll find the hypocrisy deeply frustrating. One minute you will see these Christians make an undue judgment regarding a matter of no actual importance and based on little to no real evidence – matters on politics or social conversations, often – and later when you challenge them on something of real importance and based on Scriptural evidence – matters on theological and moral topics – they will accuse you of being judgmental. It is at times infuriating. You will want to give up again. You will want to just “cast them out to Satan.” And some you will have to just ignore because they are so unteachable, and you will wait for them to grow in humility, or hope that their pastoral headship speaks to them (which is, unfortunately, not likely).

This last group is the vast minority, though. You must Love, you must Care, and to Love and to Care you must lean in to the nonsense your friends and loved ones say. You cannot dismiss it as you would dismiss the theoretical crap coming through the news media (which is what you should do with the theoretical crap coming through the news media). These are your people, the ones that God has set in your life and you in theirs. Whether long-distance or short-distance, your Calling is to Care for them, holistically.

The False Dichotomy Dictated By Ideology: Using Althusser to Read the Changing Epistemologies Underneath Modern American Politics

Switching Epistemologies: Conservatives
A striking divergence has made itself apparent to me of late.

I noticed it first amidst the conservatives. In light of Melania Trump's plagiarized speech at the RNC, there was a surprising amount of right-wingers who came to her defense in order to claim that "she did not plagiarize." While a certain amount of political defense is always expected in matters of major social contortion, the expected response in this sort of situation should have been more to the point of "she did not mean to plagiarize" or "she and her speechwriter miscommunicated something that was intended to be quoted" or "she was quoting and left off the quote because it was Michelle Obama's words and we're Republicans." No, rather, the response was initially "she did not plagiarize," a claim which, unlike the aforementioned defenses, falls into the category of "objective statement that can or cannot be backed up by evidence."

After all, whether or not the American people are educated in the academic circles which have long defined plagiarism, that definition still holds true when discussing its verifiability - that definition being "the practice of taking someone else's work or ideas and passing them off as one's own." To verify or falsify, then, the claim of the Trump campaign ("she did not plagiarize") would be to identify whether or not Melania Trump did or did not take someone else's work or ideas and pass them off as her own.

When one discusses the matters of "subjective" or "objective" truth / factuality / facticity / &c., while those terms are philosophically-contestable there are certain socially-accepted usages of them that might be useful for the claim I am about to make. To say that something is "objectively true" is, in the common parlance, to say that something is "provable," in a scientific sense. We can take evidence, apply that evidence to an experiment, and then make conclusions based off of that evidence. In this case, Melania Trump quoted the words of the First Lady without citing her (which could be, honestly, a rookie mistake - Melania is not a seasoned speaker the same way that Michelle was when she spoke at the DNC in 2008) and then applied those exact words to her specific context as though they were always about her context. The words she used were not the sorts that one would normally quote and then say "As so-and-so said..."; rather, they were common, everyday words that Michelle Obama had used to describe her husband and her family which now Melania was using to describe her husband and her family.

This is definitionally plagiarism. It is, dare I say it, objectively plagiarism.

Whether or not Melania plagiarizing in this situation actually matters or not is to me an unimportant question. What is more striking is the distinctly subjective response of the Trump-defenders. By saying "she did not plagiarize" they claim something that is distinctly oppositional to objective criticism. Of course, this is not the only moment where the objective truth of a matter has been wholeheartedly ignored by the Trump campaign. If one were to define this campaign, actually, one could describe it as one large propaganda machine that is churning objectively true principles into matters of subjective moral relativity.

What is most shocking about that is how the GOP has branded themselves over the course of the past several decades as the guardians of "objective truth." The association between the GOP and conservative Christian evangelicalism is grounded, in part, as a reactionary response to the liberal pursuit of what the right calls "moral relativism" which is a "subjective" view on truth. But here we see, in an anecdotal way, how the Trump movement signals a bizarre shift in the right's undergirding epistemology. They are becoming "subjectivists" (to coin a phrase) and leaving objective truth behind.

Switching Epistemologies: Liberals
But, as I began, I said "I noticed it first amidst the conservatives." The same thing is happening to the liberals. As observed by Jonathan Merrit earlier this year, the supposed "moral relativism" of the left is actually disappearing (if it ever truly existed). In a season of American history in which battle lines are being drawn for how we define the American culture, certain claims are revealing themselves to be the "orthodox standard," as it were, of the left. Is homosexual activity okay? Should welfare exist? Does racism and sexism exist? Questions that used to be matters of critical reflection - and then became solidified as distinct, calculated responses - are now treated almost like a new moral catechism of the liberal movement.

Despite a claim that views morality as a thing of the Victorian past, it seems evident to me, at least, that my liberal friends hold almost precisely identical views to one another, arrived at through no particular reflection or challenge, and stated with almost evangelistic zeal. A few vignettes should make this sort of intellectual hegemony clear: my liberal friends were unilaterally opposed to the Brexit, and, more locally, my liberal friends are currently unilaterally opposed to the University of Chicago's policy against "trigger warnings." Neither of these topics seem (to me, at least) within the central purview of liberal politics and liberal policy, and yet uniquely identical conclusions are being made about them as if those conclusions were "absolute truth." If moral relativism represented a subjective mode of truth that once claimed the epistemological center of American liberalism, then it has been supercessed by a new objectivity that claims orthodoxy over the liberal mind.

In other words, and to sum up this opening argument: the popular thought of the conservative and the liberal political communities within this nation while aspiring one mode of epistemology simultaneously enact the opposite mode of epistemology without being aware of that switch. Taking a cue from Jean-Paul Sartre, I would say that the conservatives and the liberals regard their own ideologies with "bad faith" - they believe something while simultaneously denying that belief through an oppositional belief.


Since the words "objective" and "subjective" here have served their purposes, I am going to discard them. I've pushed their colloquial definitions as far as I can, trying to avoid confusion with their philosophical / epistemological definitions. But since the following part of my argument is about to become a little more formal in its critical tone, those terms are no longer appropriate. In their place, I will call the truly subjective relativism of the conservatives "the Unorthodoxy of the Right" and the truly objective truth-claims of the liberals "the Orthodoxy of the Left." It should be clear that the use of "[Un]Orthodoxy" here is not, as far as I am concerned, actually about who is "right" and who is "wrong." Instead, it is to signify how the right has abandoned stationary social / ethical mores for relativistic mode and how the left has abandoned relativism for its own brand of "absolute truth."

Totemism / Ideologies
Around three years ago, I wrote a little essay about seeing the American political system through the eyes of totemism. In that essay I noted one problem that I keep coming back to time and again: that is, the way that American tribalism seems to demand obedience to certain "totems" (or "gods"), as it were.

Here's a little view into how that tribalism functions, using myself as an example: I firmly believe that there is a problem in this country regarding the police and how African-Americans are treated by institutions supposedly representing justice. As such, I will often comment or tweet or post - or however I engage the social media world - and tag on "#BlackLivesMatter." And, inevitably, one of my conservative friends will come along and, in some manner or another, insinuate that I have been "taken in" by the liberal media machine, that I have been brainwashed by the liberal university, or something to that regard.

(Nevermind them that I learned about social justice through an evangelical Christian organization doing incredible exegesis on the first few chapters of the Book of Genesis, or that I heard about African-American sorrow firsthand from my black brothers and sisters in Christ.)

On the same regard, I hold firmly the view that life begins in the womb, at conception, and thus am adamantly opposed to abortion in all regards. As such, when the occasion arises, I will make a comment to that end around my liberal friends, and inevitably they either try really really hard to make me see how abortion is a women's right issue [and there are women's rights issues surrounding the topic, no doubt], or they will say that I have been "taken in" by the collusion of conservatism and Christianity, or that I believe some sort of oppressive theology made up by the conservative spokesmen of this world (the Pat Robertson folks) that I can't reject because I've been raised in it.

(Nevermind them that I learned about the unborn from reading the Bible after I became a Christian, since I didn't grow up reading the Bible, or that I have thought very intently about the philosophical and ethical consequences of the pro-life movement, including the importance of post-birth support.)

I do not fit into the simple structures of political ideology that exist within this country. For my conservative peers, if I were to call myself a "conservative" (which I reject), they would call me "a Republican in Name Only," as they do with anyone who is not ideologically "pure enough" for them. For my liberal peers, if I were to call myself a "liberal" (which I reject), they would call me a "reactionary" with "Victorian ideals of sexual morality," or something like that [which, by the by, I saw a liberal peer say about this article by Prof. Ruddick of UChicago... and it seemed to me a very inappropriate label to slap on the Chair of the English Department!].

What these anecdotal, hypothetical name-callings reveal - and what the real-world, actually-occurring, name-callings demonstrate - is an unwillingness for the vast majority of the American electorate to accept structures of identity that are outside the hegemony of our current [totemic] system. In other words, as they say, "the nail that sticks out gets hammered down"... or it switches sides altogether, which in the ideological world of Christian politics (for instance) is how a blogger / thinker like Rachel Held Evans is created, or, by contrast, conservative speakers like Allen Hood who left mainline Protestantism for the Charismatic Movement. It is like a simple code in binary, which cannot accept anything but the inputs of 0 or 1.

The whole world, instead, gets re-defined by terms of "ideological purity" - either by the deceitful-commitment to the Unorthodoxy of the Right or the blind-worship of the Orthodoxy of the Left. Those who do not fit [within 5% of the scale of purity?] are identified as "radicals," as sleeper agents from the "other side" who are "not really one of us." They are "one of them."

An academic friend of mine - a liberal - once told me about how he voiced opposition to the public school system and found himself outnumbered by also-liberal detractors who found his claim... conservative. He, of course, had a different end-goal in mind, and through his critical reflection decided that the current state of affairs would not serve his vision. He improvised. He created. He challenged the hegemony.

Althusser's Ideology and the Invasiveness of Modern American Politics
I use the word "hegemony" in these instances very seriously. After all, in the back of my head I cannot shake a different definition of Ideology than the one I've been using so far. That is, the definition presented by the Marxist-Structuralist Louis Althusser.

While summing up Althusser's definition of Ideology in one paragraph might be a too adventurous claim, I'll try to do so anyways: Althusser said that Ideology is the way our ideas become material [= real, in Althusser's case] reality, continuing to support the structures and systems that already exist. Through Ideology, Althusser was able to point out the ways that society doesn't just reproduce the producers of labor (that is, humans under capitalism), but actually how society reproduces the always-already means and relations of production. To put in less "Critical Theory" terminology: Ideology is what ensures that a society continues producing, even though the ideologies, perspectives, worldviews, and epistemologies within that society might be vying against each other or against the society itself.

How this word is useful in the current context is to point out the increasing invasion of the private in American social life by - not the public, I must hasten to add - the Political. I propose that the Political Ideology of the modern American moment, capitalizing on the new technologies of social media and handheld Internet access which define the hyper-information age, desires the same sort of hegemonic influence as Althusserian Ideology, and that its methods of reproducing the modes and relations of its production are through the aforementioned modes of totemic identification.

This Political Ideology (or Ideological State Apparatus, to use the Althusserian term; ISA) aims for its preeminence by pitting its two "wings" against one another. By creating an ever-narrower gate through which citizens must properly identify their ideological purity, the Political Ideology sets up new subjecthoods. Citizens are no longer "concerned individuals" or "nuanced moderates," but, instead, "conservatives" and "liberals," with a smattering of "libertarians" who think they've escaped Ideology, but instead have simply crafted yet another pre-written subjectified template to experience the world through.

As it should be clear from my introductory remarks regarding the hackneyed and confused epistemological grounding underneath both ideological realms (and I am sure I could point out confused epistemologies in the libertarians as well, going from Descartes to Ayn Rand, ;-) ), this dichotomy between "Right" and "Left" is an enormously false one because it sets up the individual for major philosophical failure. Either accept the surface-claim of objective, absolute truth presented by the Right and end up being swindled into its true Unorthodoxy of relativism, OR follow the Left's relativistic road and end up with a iron-clad, unshakable Orthodoxy of ideals. If one rejects these paths, the Political Ideology course-corrects... "No, you're actually a liberal," or "You're truly a conservative" come the social voices.


I have no critical or investigative thoughts that lend me to the answer of the necessary question following this sort of study. That question, of course, is: "Knowing that this is the way things are, knowing that the Political Ideology desires to inhabit the daily lives of the American person, how should we respond?" That 'ought' is a complicated and difficult one.

But my contention, and, at the very least, the goal that I aim at with this post and with other posts, is that the free mind is worthwhile, and in order for a mind to be free it must cast off the masters that wish to dominate it. (Of course, I would also argue, as a Christian, that total freedom in the intellectual realm is only possible through "the renewal of the mind" mentioned by Paul in the Book of Romans.) To think critically is the answer and antagonism to the enclosing circle of Political doctrine. The free-thinking person is not pre-committed to his or her "party," but is instead challenged to consider each thought and idea on its own merit.

(It also strikes me that this is one of the claims of the Libertarian movement in this country - from their association with Ludwig von Mises, to "Reason.org," and etc. Some day I will write an essay as to why the Libertarian's "Free Mind" is just as submitted to Ideology and to the Political Ideology as the Conservative and the Liberal. It has to do with a flawed vision of the word "freedom," which is at the very root of their thought.)


This is an anticlimactic claim after a long, long essay: to think freely and to think critically is to challenge all of the Political powers-that-be. It is to call "fault" on truth-claims backed up by relativistic epistemologies, and to call "fault" on relativism backed up by absolute truth-claims. These epistemological digressions and dichotomized views of "Either/Or truth" are an affront to those who find Truth - actual, real, legitimate, divine Truth - to be worth defending. And to think freely and critically is to challenge the popular orthodoxy of the Right and the Left.

In those terms, to think freely and critically is to become a heretic in the eyes of the Political Ideology.

An Open Letter to the Charismatic Movement on the Deceitfulness of the Big, Loud Voice.

If I say, 'I will not mention him, or speak any more in his name,' there is in my heart as it were a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot. 

                                                                                (Jeremiah 20:9)

There is something of a classic misreading of the above verse from Jeremiah within Charismatic circles. Often, it is interpreted as saying something like: "The Spirit of God is so heavy on me that I cannot but help evangelize, prophesy, sing songs, &c." Someone will start preaching, and we'll say "He's got a fire shut up in his bones;" or someone will have a word of knowledge, and we'll say "She's got a fire shut up in her bones."

Yet the Scriptural context of this passage is to be found within the entirety of the Book of Jeremiah: Jeremiah has been regularly called by the Lord to speak the Word of the Lord in due season to the apostate people of Israel, and they have regularly rejected him. Here, at chapter 20, he reflects on how he feels wearied by these continual rejections. He says:

O Lord, you have deceived me and I was deceived; you are stronger than I, and you have prevailed. I have become a laughingstock all the day; everyone mocks me. For whenever I speak, I cry out. I shout, “Violence and destruction!” For the word of the Lord has become for me a reproach and derision all day long. If I say, “I will not mention him, or speak any more in his name,” there is in my heart as it were a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot. 

                                                                         (Jeremiah 20:7-9)

Jeremiah is weary from speaking God's prophetic truths to God's people, and he's weary of being God's chosen messenger in a season of such spiritual decay in Israel. Yet, he will continue to speak, unable to resist because God's Word burns within him. The Word of the Lord must be said, even though it brings its messenger discomfort (and, eventually, a ticket to solitary confinement in a cistern, left to die).

I feel like Jeremiah is the perfect analogue for this (political) season in the American Church. There are some among us who, like Jeremiah, feel a fire shut up in our bones concerning manifestations of evil within our community, places of true spiritual idolatry in which things other than Jesus have taken precedence over His Glory. And, like Jeremiah, these voices go generally unheeded.


It is with heaviness that I come to this keyboard. In the past I have talked about (whether on this blog or in more personal contexts) what it means that my wife and I have begun considering ourselves "Postcharismatic." To re-clarify, what that term means, in part, for us is that we love and will always consider ourselves as Charismatics within the broader spectrum of the Charismatic Movement and within the specific wing of Pentecostalism. And yet, we have witnessed certain ecclesiological and missiological abuses within that movement that we no longer feel comfortable with and that we feel morally compelled to distance ourselves from. I have not intention on delineating those issues presently (though I have many-a-time considered writing a list of 93 of them to post on some random megachurch somewhere...).

I think it is vital, though, to emphasize that for all of the various point-by-point issues which we have noticed within the Charismatic Movement and that we would love to see addressed by the Charismatic leaders, we do still feel emotionally and spiritually tied to the Movement. When we attend our local churches (in Wood River, a Restorationist church; in Chicago, a C&MA), we go with the sort of tacit acknowledgement from our friends that "Hey! there are the Charismatics of our church!" Sometimes during Bible Studies, I have the tendency to say things like "Well, as a Charismatic I think..." We raise our hands in worship a lot more than other folks tend to. Sometimes we silently speak in tongues during times of prayer. Et cetera. For us, being Charismatic is part of our Christian DNA, it is part of our story, and it is part of our family - many, many of our friends are Charismatic Christians. We deeply love and care for the Charismatic Movement, its well-being, and its future.


Thus, it was with incredible sadness that I watched "radio silence" from the leadership of the Movement back during Ferguson October... Not because I desired those leaders - that is, the leaders of the "flagship" streams, Bethel, IHOP, and Morningstar - to take some sort of political stance, but because I knew so many of my black brothers and sisters whose souls were in deep anguish over the state of race-relations in our nation. While leaders from other major (and conservative) denominations - the Southern Baptists, the Assemblies of God - took up their voices to offer consolation to the black members within their communities, the leaders of one of the largest and loudest chunks of American Christianity today were entirely silent.

Thus, it was with great dismay that I heard this past fall that Mike Bickle, pastor and director of IHOP, formally endorsed Sen. Ted Cruz for the presidency. That is, that a leader so prominent and influential would 1) endorse a presidential contender (something that pastors - especially nationally-recognized pastors - should never do*); and 2) of all people, describe as a "righteous leader" a man whose entire career has been built on being uncooperative and hard to work with and whose character has been described as "brutal," traits which are hardly reflective of Christian service.

Yet it is with ever-the-greater frustration and lamentation and, as I said earlier, heaviness that I must observe this recent tweet from one of Bethel Church's senior pastors, Beni Johnson (wife of Bill Johnson):

"Is Trump perfect? Nope, who is. Am I voting for him? Yup. Crazy uh. He's the only one I see who can beat Clinton." (3/19/16, 11:36 PM)

This is something very, very different. I don't actually even know how to speak, having to retype that tweet in order to write this post. It oozes off the fingers like some Exxon slime.


Before I say what's "on my heart" (as we say in Charismata), let me address some objections:
1) Can't a Christian person vote for whomever they want?
2) But... isn't keeping Clinton out of the White House a worthwhile goal?
3) Can we make a moral, theological judgment off of one tweet? / Can you judge another person's walk?
4) Isn't Trump a Cyrus sent to deliver us from our Babylonian captivity and who will rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem so we can finally hang up our harps and stop singing sad songs?

Some thoughts:
1) Can't a Christian person vote for whomever they want? Absolutely. Except, of course, in our current culture a Christian person who votes Democrat would be viewed as a heretic [I know many theological conservatives who vote politically liberal]; or a Christian person who votes for an establishment candidate is viewed as 'part of the problem'. I mean, either a Christian is free to vote as they feel, or there are theological-moral obligations which they are committed to. You cannot have both.

2) But... isn't keeping Clinton out of the White House a worthwhile goal? ... ... ... ... The fact that I must answer this objection is ridiculous to me. Yet it seems to me that keeping Clinton out of the White House has been a prime motivating factor of many of Trump's camp, including the evangelical bloc of his voters. I do acknowledge that, for some folks, there might be a moral quandry of "choosing between the lesser of two evils" concerning Clinton versus Trump, but the bigger issue with this question is that my post is addressing the words of a Christian pastoral leader here, not a political strategist.

3) Can we make a moral, theological judgment off of one tweet? / Can you judge another person's walk? Good point. Solid objection. But it is certainly one of those modern misreadings that we have digested the "Thou shalt not judge" rule in our modern Christian context to mean that we cannot critique the declarations of leaders who live in the public spotlight. Jesus said, instead, "Make right judgments" (Jn. 7:24), and the Apostle John tells us to "discern the spirits" (I Jn. 4). For information's sake, Beni posted many, many, many tweets defending her position in various ways, and (thanks to the power of the Internet) we can go back in time to a tweet in 2011 in which she lamented that Trump was not running that year. She is clearly not simply an "anti-Hillary" kind of supporter; she actually wants Trump to win.

4) Isn't Trump a Cyrus sent to deliver us from our Babylonian captivity and who will rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem so we can finally hang up our harps and stop singing sad songs?No. Cyrus was a Medo-Persian king who ruled between the years 570-530 BC and whom God anointed to accomplish the first part of rebuilding the city of Jerusalem. There are certainly pagan kings who can be used for God's sovereign and good will, like Cyrus or Nebuchadnezzar, as the "Cyrus argument" runs. There are also pagan kings like Pharaoh, Belshazzar, and Sihon and Og who have through blasphemy set themselves in direct opposition to the purposes of God. Trump fits best into this latter category, as I will demonstrate.


What shall I say? I don't think that Theology is too difficult to apply to our lives. I do think that Political choices can often be morally vague, and that certain things are good for certain people and certain things are bad for others. I generally dislike making big either/or claims concerning political authorities - either they're a Hitler or they're a Jesus-sort of thing. Yet sometimes there appears a Big, Loud Voice that everyone is drawn to, and this voice pricks what everyone's "itching ears want to hear" (II Ti. 4:3), and they do not know they are being hypnotized. I do not think that the content of the Big, Loud Voice's message is the "morally vague" sort of Politics. And, in fact, I don't think that the content of this post constitutes a Political claim at all; instead, I'm really discussing something Moral and Theological. Compare these two lists from the Bible:

And he opened his mouth and taught them, saying:
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
“Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.
“Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.
“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.
“Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
                                                                                   (Matthew 5:2-10)

But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty. For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power. Avoid such people. 

                                                                                   (II Timothy 3:1-5)

These are basic, theological, and Christian principles. The group in the former list are those who are called "blessed" because they represent the nature of Christ and reflect His Kingdom values. The group in the latter list are those who are representative of the kingdom of Satan and who reject God's Kingdom and advance their own kingdom instead. It should be clarified, too, that Paul is specifically warning Timothy not of the "common sinner" but of the Big, Loud Voices that want to come and invade the Church and pervert its doctrines (cf. v. 6).

Compared with the Big, Loud Voices, Jesus elevates and highlights the Still, Small Voices. In other words, He identifies as blessed those souls which exemplify His Nature. Those who are "meek" will inherit the earth because Jesus is meek and He is the King of the earth. Those who follow Jesus, we know, are imbued with His Holy Spirit, who is also called the Spirit of Jesus, and He will, through the process of sanctification, empower us to become meek, weak, small, little, humble, slow to anger, slow to speak, quick to listen, quick to repent, quick to pray. We have a Spirit of Power who manifests in us a quietness of character which is a bold rejection of a kingdom that pursues its own way.


This is why my various personal statements against Trump are not intended as a political scheme. I am not all that interested in who is elected President in our temporal country which will last as long as a flower in light of the Kingdom of God. I tirade against him because he represents an obvious "spirit of antichrist"; that is, to redeem that term from our Charismatic End-Times lingo (i.e. I am not saying Trump is the harbinger of the end of the world), he represents everything that is opposite of what Jesus represents. This is not some idea I received from television or the big media companies (because I don't watch television, and I don't care for the media); this is an obvious interpretation when one compares the Big, Loud Voice of Trump with the entirety of Scripture: from Pharaoh's hard-hearted refusal to repent, to the rebellion of Korah, to the obstinance of King Saul, to the slimy and insidious deceitfulness of Elymas, to this list of descriptions from II Timothy 3, to some specific descriptions of the antichrist given in Scripture (to name a few: Ez. 28:1, Da. 7:8, Rev. 13:5). To be exhaustively clear: I am neither calling Trump the Devil nor the Antichrist; just that he is obviously operating in an entirely anti-Christ direction, method, and worldview. I am also not saying that he is not the Devil or the Antichrist. I'm holding off that discernment for now.

(And, if my general description of "the Big, Loud Voice" aren't specific enough, one could also look at the way Trump discusses women, people with disabilities, Mexicans, Muslims, &c. - but I think his rhetoric speaks for itself without needing to enter into a moment-by-moment analysis of his words and actions. We have all seen enough from the debates to know what his character is like.)

Thus, it is excruciatingly disappointing that a sister in Christ, a leader in a major portion of the Charismatic Movement, and someone who, I would hope, is desiring to pursue and see God's excellency in Christ would so actively and forwardly support and encourage the work of a man whose very character is so vitally out-of-sync with the entirety of the Christian character, value, message, belief, and doctrine. When we look at what this man represents and what his character reveals, we see that we are not in a situation where we could say "Is Trump perfect? Nope, who is" - there is a difference between a leader being a flawed, sinful human who makes mistakes, and a figure whose words and actions reveal a lifestyle of hatred, which is in 180-degree opposition to the Kingdom of God.

And this is excruciating because, in many ways, it reveals something of a broader theological-moral-Gospel crisis within the Charismatic Movement. How can this Movement last when its leaders so brashly support a man who so clearly represents the opposite of the Kingdom of God? How can this Movement be spiritually healthy and successful in the transformation of people's lives when they actively support leaders who are "strong" and "harsh" and "brutal" and "loud" and admire them? How can this Movement ever expect to see a national Revival - which it proposes to do - when they find themselves so easily swayed by anti-Christ-like leaders? I ask these questions in part because I personally don't quite understand the ideological-theological hoops which some of my Charismatic brothers and sisters are attempting to jump through concerning Trump.

And this is excruciating because there are those of us "out in the middle" (politically-speaking) who love the theologically-deep, spiritually-vibrant, and politically-complex Church and who appreciate the various gifts that the different movements of Christianity bring to us. At this point, Bethel Music has overtaken Hillsong as the folks who make modern Church music. The Charismatic Movement is influential, even in cessationist churches, and Charismatics can bring with them some vital vibrancy to the rest of the Church. Yet, to see a prominent leader within that movement support Trump is like seeing dead leaves on a branch of a tree: something is rotting here. This should be an alarming moment that creates a gut-check for my Charismatic brothers and sisters.


... And yet, I suspect that when I inevitably post this on Twitter and Facebook that I will receive comments that are knee-jerk responses to one or a few of my premises (which, of course, I don't discourage, necessarily). A friend recently observed that I post things just to "bring out the sharks." Maybe. I actually hope that I post things because the Spirit of God has placed His Word on my heart and, like Jeremiah, I cannot hold it in any longer. In other words, I don't write this to create a controversy; I write this because I love God's Church, I long to see us walk together in the true unity of the Gospel, and I hate to see ideologies which are so distinctly contrary to that Gospel being supported from our public stage.

It seems to me that somehow Trump's own rhetoric has turned inwardly of late. First, he created a campaign against "political correctness," and then he instituted his own sort of "political correctness." Under the new political correctness, any claim that observes his nature and character as wicked must be surely wrong and an attempt by mainstream media to discredit him because he represents a threat to their hegemonic system. Under the new political correctness, this post is some sort of threat to the Big, Loud Voice, and, thereby, must either be disregarded or deflated. Under the new political correctness, critique of a person's evil character which is obviously in line with Scriptural descriptions of that sort of character is "judging" or "being politically correct," ironically enough.

In conclusion, I will say this: Do not trust my words. First, do a heart-check. Read the Sermon on the Mount (Mt. 5-8), read Paul's warning (II Ti. 3), and read the entire Book of I John (it's short), which deals with the spirit of antichrist and discerning the spirits. Compare and contrast for yourself: What is the character of Jesus and His Kingdom? What is the character of the Devil and his kingdom? Ponder this too: knowing what you know of God's character from His Word, does He ever manifest His Kingdom-Purposes in the form of the Big, Loud Voice? Does God reveal His Kingdom in Loud, Prideful packages, or in Small, Humble ones?

I say this because I want to challenge my friends - especially my Charismatic friends - to take another look at the Word of God and to let the Word challenge us, rearrange our hearts if need be, and have a fresh look at the world around us. How does God's Kingdom manifest?



* I perhaps should make an entire post about why pastors should never endorse a President / political candidate - I've been meaning to ever since 2011 - but now is not the time. The quick summation is simple: Pastors wield spiritual authority over people's lives, and they can, through their influence - especially so in the Charismatic Movement - override the free-will choices of their flock, even unintentionally. That's not good.

Heretics: Introduction, or A Definition of the Word and an Apologetic for Its Use In Christian Discourse.

In 1905, G.K. Chesterton published a collection of essays altogether entitled Heretics. In it, the Christian author abstracted and deconstructed (to reclaim that term) twenty public figures, writers, philosophers, and political activists of his day in order to reveal the various theological implications of their beliefs and systems. G.B. Shaw, H.G. Wells, and Rudyard Kipling (one of the few in that era not to abbreviate his first two initials) all came under the scope of Chesterton's sweeping criticism.

One of the things that I admire about Chesterton's book is how, despite his polemic and despite his rhetoric, he still manages to honor the person whom he is criticizing. At times he can seem a little heavy-handed; but, then again, rebuke is a heavy-handed thing. It is not pleasant, nor easy. But throughout Heretics, one gets the sense that Chesterton is attempting to be extraordinarily balanced. As a Christian, he cannot afford not to be.

The reason for that is because Christian Love demands, first and foremost, Grace. This is at heart of when Jesus says "First get the log out of your own eye!" So criticism, even judgment (when appropriate), from the Christian must always be a weighed and careful affair. But criticism and judgment, too, must be a direct, thorough, and, in some sense, painful affair, and that is because Christian Love also demands an accounting before a perfect, awesome, glorious God. Solomon says that "Better is open rebuke than hidden love," (Proverbs 25:17) because an inactive, hidden love is not truly Love at all. If my brother or sister has built their faith upon a faulty foundation, then my silence is not love; but if, with Grace first, I approach my brother or sister with a rebuke or correction (by the guidance of God's Holy Spirit), then I clearly Love them.

Even so, that whole rebuke thing is very difficult. I find myself continually wrestling through - as this issue and that issue come through our ever-revolving doors of stories - how much is or is not appropriate for me to engage, rebuke, correct, and the like. I too need rebuke and correction. I think that Chesterton knew this in writing Heretics; and throughout the book one sees him giving "praise where praise is due," sometimes saying good things about surprising groups of people. For Chesterton, the enemy is not the "heretic" per se, but the structure or belief that that heretic presents.

It must be added that this sort of response - the rebuke - has thorough biblical precedent. In the days of Jeremiah, there was a priest who said that the people would return to Jerusalem quickly; God told Jeremiah to declare judgment on that teaching. Paul time again writes his letters to respond to the spiritual crises in various churches brought on by rampant false teachings: whether they be antinomianism (Corinth), racial hostility (Ephesus), the Judaizers (Galatia; and the region thereof), or simply bad eschatology (Thessalonica). John, in writing to several unknown churches, specifically gives his audiences some wisdom about teachers:

"Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world. By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you heard was coming and now is in the world already. Little children, you are from God and have overcome them, for he who is in you is greater than he who is in the world. They are from the world*; therefore they speak from the world, and the world listens to them. We are from God. Whoever knows God listens to us; whoever is not from God does not listen to us. By this we know the Spirit of truth and the spirit of error." 

       (I John 4:1-6)

(John defines "world" earlier in chapter 2: in effect, the world is all of the systems and desires within man to create a life outside of Christ; thus, always lusting with the eyes and the flesh, and boasting of a life separate from God. I present this as an alternative to the commonly-used notion of "world" as "pop culture." No doubt there are "worldly" systems within "culture," but the two are not interchangeable in light of Christian views of the Greek word kosmos. But I digress.)

This means that part of our orthodox Christian walk is to discern when voices are spirits of the world, rather than spirits of Christ. And this distinction, it is to be noted, is not as easy as "Christian" / "non-Christian." When John warns the churches of antichrists in I John 2, he says that they had come out from the church. When Paul warns the church of Galatia (and the region thereof) of the Judaizers, they had come from the church. On the contrary, when Jesus is talking with the woman of Syrophoenicia and with the Roman centurion, he applauds their faith, even though they both, up until that moment, believed entirely pagan worldviews. Likewise, Paul in Athens doesn't reject the Athenian philosophers for their rhetoric: he accepts their rhetoric and uses their own pagan poets to explain the Gospel.

For me the importance of this matter is deeply integrated with my calling in the Lord. God has called me to be an apologist for His church, one who learns the languages of those Athenians known as "Academics" and attempts, through my life and through discourse, to communicate the Gospel clearly and directly while in their midst. That's my missionary calling.

But in the course of that mission, in the course of that call to evangelism, I continually find myself running into unnecessary road-blocks which make the proclamation of the Gospel more difficult than it is and than it should be. Instead of the way being made clear for the lost, as Isaiah cries out: "Go through, go through the gates; prepare the way for the people; build up, build up the highway; clear it of stones; lift up a signal over the peoples." (Isaiah 62:10), the way for academics is full of obnoxious, and unbiblical, obstacles. At first, these obstacles seem like part of the package: "Well, when you become a Christian, you always vote for pro-life candidate because that's the most important issue to vote on," or "Well, as a Christian you can't listen to anything that Darwin says cause he's dumb."

And some - I have to be insistingly clear here - are absolutely part of the package: as a Christian we have a Scriptural sexual ethic, we have a call to a community church, we trust in the authority of the Bible, &c. &c. I don't think that we help anyone ever by "watering down" the Gospel (as some would claim we should). But I do think that what Isaiah is getting at in saying "clear [the way] of stones" is that there are obstacles in the path of the Gospel that are neither the Gospel itself nor a part of it, and that it is the job of the evangelist (or the apologist) to make that way easier by clearing away those unnecessary roadblocks.

These are the issues that Paul and John take to task in their epistles: they clarify the deity of Christ, the importance of having a future hope in His Return, the necessity of Faith over Works (like circumcision; cf. Galatians), &c. These beliefs were roadblocks for both Christian and non-Christian in the early church. Now, I'm not going to go in-depth right now - that will be another post - but there seem to me to be a good handful of heresies going around in the church, especially the evangelical church in America, that are neither founded on Scripture nor should be treated with the fundamental value that Scripture is treated. Some of these are simply unbalanced beliefs, where one sort of belief (political, social, philosophical, economic, &c.) informs theology rather than the other way around; some of these are clear contradictions to apparent core theology in Scripture. Some of these "heresies" are the result of conservative politics, some are the result of liberal politics, and some are the result of entirely non-political forces. And, to be clear, what I will hope to enumerate will neither be an exhaustive nor completed list or overview of heresy in American Christianity; I only hope to observe and compare the power of certain Voices within American Christianity to the more important Voice of the Bible. In some cases I think that these comparisons will need no further extrapolation from me.


To be perfectly and utterly clear: I do think that there is a big difference between a Diversity of Views within orthodox Christian thought and Clear Heresy. This is different than the ways the word "Heresy" is often described by loud voices in Christianity. I personally come from an Arminian (but not semi-Pelagian), Charismatic, Egalitarian, and Premillenial tradition within orthodox Christianity, but I don't think that I have enough Biblical credence to charge Calvinists, Cessationists (although on that point I strongly disagree with them), Complementarians, and Postmillenialists with Heresy. On even further subdivisions of belief, one could list ecclesiological matters like Pedobaptism / Credobaptism, Episcopal / Congregational / Presbyterian church structures, and matters of the like. Heresy is a strong word; I don't think it's appropriate to bring it to theological matters with such diversity within the orthodox, Bible-believing breadth of Christian faith.

(This, by the by, is an important descriptive matter for evangelical ecumenism and nondenominational / interdenominational interactions; orthodoxy, "right-belief," is an important, theologically vital matter for Christians. As such, we can't take such distinctions lightly. But I would argue that the above Capitalized terms are all systems of Christian belief that we can find and constitute a substantial argument for using the Bible. "Heresy," on the other hand, as I will use it here, are non-Biblical beliefs, ones that are self-evidently not in line with God's Word.)

With that all in-hand, I think it's vital to discern and disseminate various "Voices" whom, for some reason or another, have been accepted, in this or that demographic, by the Church and whose voices are distinctly (that is, self-evidently; any honest comparison, looking outside of ideologies, could see that they are such) non-Biblical, and, in some instances, we shall see, actually anti-Biblical and fulfilling what John said was antichrist.

That, of course, will be a matter for another post... ... ...





(One final note: If you are non-Christian and reading this, you might find it strikingly polemical, or over-complicated. I apologize for not writing a more accessible post, which I usually attempt to do. I love and recognize the presence of my non-Christian readership, and I would love as much as possible not to isolate you, but to include you in my blog posts, Facebook conversations, and other social media engagements. I take this privilege of words, conversation, discourse, very very seriously; and I'd prefer, as much as I can, to include everyone in conversations.

But "Heresy" is actually not an appropriate term to apply to non-Christians. The etymology of the word even goes back to notion of "picking and choosing," and in the Christian context it is mostly appropriately used for the "picking and choosing" of non-Biblical beliefs within the Church. As such, I would never approach a non-Christian and say "You are a heretic," no matter how much I disagree with their belief. But I can (and morally ought to, as I said above) approach my brother or sister in Christ and engage them from the authority of the Bible.

Thus, the language in this post is a little heavy, my rhetoric is a little intense, because the intended audience is family and with family one can - and sometimes must be - a little more heavy and a little more intense. This is especially true when the members of your family are hurting people in ways inconsistent with the faith that you share with them. Out of love for my family, and out of love for the non-Christians who are being hurt by my family in various ways, as a Christian I have a responsibility to wade into deep, complicated, difficult, and heavy waters with my family. Sternness here should be understood as a deeply committed and loving sternness, without bitterness, without animosity (except, of course, toward false teachings themselves!).

That being said, I certainly invite you to engage as well nevertheless. As I said earlier, I approach this conversation because I am an apologist and because there is a media-driven image of Christianity (from both "liberal" and "conservative" media) that is not reflective of Jesus. I love Jesus, and I'd love to share Jesus with you, and maybe while I'm refuting the Voice of, say, Donald Trump (to pick low-hanging fruit; we'll hit more popular - and less controversial - figures too) I can share with you the Jesus who stands in direct opposition with that line of belief. The beautiful, lovely, radical, world-changing Jesus, you know, the one that you think really-should-exist-and-then-wonder-why-so-few-people-talk-about-Jesus.

In that way, I hope you too can enjoy engaging in this matter, even though I target it as a conversation for the Church. You are certainly welcome to listen in.)