No good American mother would fail to warn her child about politicians. For our culture, the politician is much like the forest witch of old European wives' tales-the last person you can trust to be sincere. The politician will say anything to benefit himself; his nose is as long as the list of his lies. Even his silver tongue is forked. The political leaders we do admire are praised for their unpolished straight-talk, that is, how unlike a politician they actually appear. [1]

The idea that politics cannot be sincere is especially clear in our perception of history. As modern Christians, the last thing we want to entrust to politicians is conversion. How can you save a soul through politics? This is the mindset we have while examining the early Church. It is easy for us to recognize heroism in the stories of Fox's Book of Martyrs; but we cannot stomach how the first Christian Roman emperor, Constantine, muddled everything up by making conversion to Christianity financially and politically advantageous. He committed the sin of giving the Church success. And so, he is one of our worst embarrassments. He is the man secularists like to point to in order to warn everyone else what happens when Christians get their way.

Yet, for all this, the early Christians did not share our phobia.

Joseph Farah goes after talk show host Hank Hanegraff for making the following claim in a recent anti-Left Behind novel:

"Much of American Middle East policy is influenced by a huge voting bloc of evangelicals who are taught not to question Israel's divine right to the land," says Hanegraff. "God is not pro-Jew. He is pro-justice. He is not pro-Palestinian. He is pro-peace. Only a gospel of peace and justice is potent enough to break the stranglehold of anti-Semitism and racism fueled in part by bad theology."

Farah reacts:

What Hannegraff and Brouwer are saying and writing is dangerous. It is untrue. It defies history. It defies logic. It defies common sense. And it makes both Americans and all of the people of the Middle East less safe and less free.

When John F. Kennedy was running for President in 1960, he made a shrewd political move. As one of the first Roman Catholics to actually have a shot at the presidency[1], he had encountered a great deal of resistance to his church membership, particularly in the deeply Protestant South. In order to assuage the fears of potential Southern supporters, he delivered a speech to the Southern Baptist leaders in which he declared:

I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute -- where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be a Catholic) how to act and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote.

Apparently, this was assurance enough the democratically-minded Baptists, and Kennedy went on to capture the vast majority of Southern electoral votes.

See Reformed News.

A little stale now, but worth it:

The fundamental issue here is of much greater importance than arguments about the justice (or lack thereof) of this particular war. Weigel would have the church effectively abdicate its moral judgment in matters of war to the leaders of the nation-state. It is hard to imagine what could do greater damage to both church and nation. If the church does not have an independent process of discernment to bring the gospel to bear on matters of war and peace, then any hope that the Prince of Peace will be heard over the din of self-interest and fear will be lost. History is already littered with the wreckage caused by Christian capitulation to reasons of state.

From the new issue of First Things: What is Anglicanism?" by the archbishop in the middle of it all--Henry Luke Orombi of Uganda. I don't think it's possible to read this essay and not feel moved.

For four hundred years Anglicanism represented both the theological convictions of the English Reformation and the culture of the Christian Church in Britain. The sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Anglican divines gave voice to both: English Reformation theology (doctrine) and British culture (discipline). The Anglican churches around the world, however, have ended the assumption that Anglican belief and practice must be clothed in historic British culture....

Take, for instance, the traditional Anglican characteristics of restraint and moderation. Are they part of doctrine, as Anglican theology, or discipline, as British culture? At the recent consecration of the fourth bishop of the Karamoja diocese, the preacher was the bishop of a neighboring diocese whose people have historically been at odds with the Karimajong (principally because of cattle rustling). At the end of his sermon, the preacher appealed for peace between the two tribes and began singing a song of peace. One by one, members of the congregation began singing. By the end of the song, the attending bishops, members of Parliament, and Karimajong warriors were all in the aisles dancing.

The vision of Christ breaking down the dividing walls of hostility between these historic rivals was so compelling that joy literally broke out in our midst. At that point in the service, I dare say, we were hardly restrained or moderate in our enthusiasm for the hope of peace given to us in Jesus Christ. Did we fail, then, in being Anglican in that moment? Was the spontaneity that overcame us a part of doctrine or of discipline? Surely, African joy in song and dance is an expression of discipline. Yet our confidence that the Word of God remains true, and our confidence that it transforms individuals and communities—all this is part of doctrine: the substance of the Faith that shall not change but shall be “kept entire.”

John Armstrong just blogged about the three Christians who were arrested for interrupting the first Hindu prayer in the Senate.See the video. He raises several interesting questions:

Are these three Christians in the Senate chamber acting courageously? Are they right in what they actually pray? Should they have been there taking these actions in this place? What do their actions say about who we all are as Christians today. How should we appropriately respond to the presence of numerous non-Christian religions that now share the public religious platform with us in modern America? What should a genuinely missional Christian do in the face of modern pluralism and the various false teachings that confront the one true faith as it is revealed in Jesus Christ alone?

Of course, the way this is going to break down is that the fundamentalist evangelicals will argue that the protesters were completely justified (the same way that Operation Rescue workers were in the 1980s and 90s); the younger, emerging crowd will say the protesters got everything wrong--Christians must be humble and loving to woo the new pluralistic world.

I don't see an easy answer. But I can see warnings to each side. First, we can't be afraid of giving offense, if that offense is the gospel. There's no doubt that the protesters were completely right on substance. They believed they were following the example of John the Baptist or Elijah. But the other question that remains, then, is whether it is the time to be Elijah or the time to be Obadiah. The Christian protesters, as true and noble as they were, come across as shrill, to say the least. It's one thing to call down fire from heaven to consume the Baalites. It's another to act like an embittered ex who can't believe that her former boyfriend has run away with that slut. In effect, that's what we're doing. We've loved and nurtured and fed the ego of America for so long, that we feel a sense of entitlement -- regardless of the fact that our nation was founded on the principles of Enlightenment pluralism. We get angry that George Bush won't declare holy war back on the Islamists, instead playing patsy -- but our second president, John Adams, did the same thing. Our ex has been cheating on us from the beginning, and we're just starting to wake up to the fact.

As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Mussulmen; and, as the said States never entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries. -- Treaty of Tripoli, 1797

From an older (excellent) article on justification:

It is false to say that I suggest that Paul would have seen the hopes of Israel in 'political' terms; in our world, that word carries the overtones of 'and therefore not religious'; whereas my point is that, as is easily provable from almost any second-Temple Jewish writing, the 'religious', the 'political', and for that matter the 'personal' and the 'communal', are cheerfully mixed up together in ways that baffle post-enlightenment readers (and so much evangelicalism is, alas, still in complete thrall to the enlightenment), but were obvious to people in that day. When it comes to the word dikaiosune and its cognates, it isn't a matter of 'what Wright thinks the word would have meant then', but what serious historical lexicography tells us....

Let me risk labouring this point by adding the following. What I am doing, often enough, is exactly parallel, in terms of method, to what Martin Luther did when he took the gospel word metanoeite and insisted that it didn't mean 'do penance', as the Vulgate indicated, but 'repent' in a much more personal and heartfelt way. The only way to make that sort of point is to show that that's what the word would have meant at the time. That's the kind of serious biblical scholarship the Protestant Reformation was built on, and I for one am proud to carry on that tradition -- if need be, against those who have turned the Reformation itself into a tradition to be set up over scripture itself.

Hilarious 1993 essay by N.T. Wright on a "scholarly" interpretation of the Gospel of Thomas (thanks to Matt Colvin):

As Michelle pondered this, she was reminded of Winnie-the-Pooh who, in his search for Woozles, went round and round the same clump trees following his own footprints in the snow, and using the extra sets of tracks, each time round, as evidence that the quarry was more real and numerous than before. How did it go? Early Thomas and Early Q give a ‘sapiental’ portrait of Jesus the Cynic or Jesus the early Gnostic; these are the earliest sources, therefore that’s what Jesus probably was probably like. Once round the trees. Why are Early Thomas and Early Q early? Because they contain no apocalyptic and are sapiental, or Cynic, or Gnostic. Twice round the trees. Why is the absence of apocalyptic a sign of earliness? Because Jesus and the earliest church weren’t into that stuff. Three times round the trees. How do we know Jesus and the earliest Church weren’t into that stuff? Because of Early Thomas and Early Q. As Michelle thought of the ever-increasing footprints in the hermeneutical snow, she didn’t exactly feel that the circle was vicious. That wasn’t a nice thing to think about one’s implied author. She did, however, have an uncomfortable feeling that the circle was shy: that is to say, that any virtue it might possess remained well hidden behind a thick veil of hermeneutical modesty.

Biblicism. Certainly frightens me.

See Lane Keister's post on this as well.

As you’ve seen, George Herbert’s The Country Parson is the work of a very devout man who both had a supreme confidence in God and a high view of the minister’s calling. When we look at The Country Parson together with his poems from The Temple, it’d be easy to get the idea that Herbert lived in a time of peace and that his rural parish never had to worry about economic, political, or theological unrest. But that’s actually false. The England of the 16th and 17th centuries was probably the most tumultuous age that Britain has ever known. This something I’d like to address later. But first, I’d like to look at the content of The Country Parson—analyze it’s structure and some parallels to the Temple. After this, we’ll return to this issue of the paradox of Herbert’s pastoral concerns juxtaposed against this tumultuous era of English history.