Theologian Miroslav Volf writes, “I’ve come to believe … that the Christ of the Gospels has become a moral stranger to us.” He adds, “If you read the Gospels, the things that profoundly mattered to Christ, they marginally matter to most evangelical Christians. And the things that really profoundly matter to them marginally mattered to Christ.”
These last days Mike Huckabee, former Southern Baptist pastor, then governor of Arkansas, now President Trump’s ambassador to Israel, suggested the president consider bombing Iran. God had spared him from an assassin’s bullet “to be the most consequential president in a century — maybe ever,” Huckabee told Trump.
Stephen Shoemaker
And then he likened Trump’s hour to that of President Harry S. Truman in 1945 (when he decided to drop nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.) And all this in the name of Jesus, who taught nonviolence as his way.
Last week a Christian “pastor,” Vance Boelter, graduate of Christ for the Nations Institute in Dallas, shot and killed Minnesota State Rep. Melissa Hortmann and her husband and wounded State Sen. John Hoffman and his wife. In the words of New York Times columnist David French, “Boelter wasn’t just a political assassin; he was a Christian assassin — and a person deeply connected to one of America’s most radical religious movements.”
One might well say such Christian extremism is an aberration and this man is mentally troubled, but the readiness of evangelical Christians to take up arms to make America a “Christian nation” has grown alarmingly, with PRRI finding 23% of Americans believing “true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.”
Jesus has become a moral stranger in our land.
“The readiness of evangelical Christians to take up arms to make America a “Christian nation” has grown alarmingly.”
In 2 Corinthians, Paul warned of the “the false gospel of another Jesus.” Some of the marks of the false gospel in American religion include the willingness to take on violent means to achieve religious goals, racialized attitudes toward people of color and hostility toward immigrants, worship of the American flag and adoption of the America First agenda of our president and turning public worship into a political precinct.
Are progressive Christian churches vulnerable to false gospels? The practical and practiced making of the political realm the ultimate realm is a temptation. Will Campbell and James Holloway saw this coming decades ago in their book, Up to Our Steeples in Politics, and with their chapter titled, “Politics as Baal.”
The abandonment of the transcendent plane in favor of the horizontal plane of human affairs is a worry.
What about the true gospel of the real Jesus of the Gospels? He was a healer.
New Testament scholar Obery Hendricks writes: “Throughout his ministry, Jesus treated people and their needs as holy by healing their bodies, their souls, their psyche.”
He was a moral teacher whose moral teaching in the Sermon on the Mount made enemies as well as friends those we are commanded to love. “Turn the other cheek” is now seen as impractical by many Christians. He taught nonviolent resistance to the evils of justice and hate. He challenged the religious leaders who tithed their little tithes and yet forgot “the weightier matters of the teaching: justice, mercy and faith.”
He crossed the boundaries of religion, nation and ethnicity to being the love of God to all. He ate and drank with the kinds of people not welcome in most churches. His compassion was boundless.
He was Jesus the Friend who brought and brings to us the divine friendship.
From the temptations in the wilderness to the last day of his life, he refused to wield the political power of the state and its sword. He rebuked his disciples on the night of his arrest who wanted to defend him: “Those who live by the sword, die by the sword.” He chose to die by the sword rather than take it up in the name of God. He refused the political crown offered by Satan in the wilderness, a crown some evangelical leaders are sick with longing to wear.
He brought God to us and us to God and so was and is the reconciliation of God. He was, in George Buttrick’s matchless words, “surprise of Mercy, outgoing Gladness, Rescue, Healing and Life.”
This is the Jesus who is a moral stranger in our land. He is the love we first had as a church and which, like the church of Ephesus in the book of Revelation, we can abandon.
Stephen Shoemaker most recentl served as pastor of Grace Baptist Church in Statesville, N.C. He previously served as pastor of Myers Park Baptist in Charlotte, N.C.; Broadway Baptist in Fort Worth, Texas; and Crescent Hill Baptist in Louisville, Ky.