Get Your Story Straight
The most common legal metaphor the New Testament uses for the role Jesus' followers are supposed to play in this world is witnesses. And in passages like Acts 1, Acts 22, 2 Timothy 2, and Hebrews 12, the New Testament writers are using this metaphor in ways they picked up on from the Old Testament, where God talks about his people being his witnesses to the world.
Witnesses are people who share what they've seen, what they know, and what they've experienced. As God's witnesses, we're not here to win or lose a case. We're here to give third-party testimony in the trials that other people are having in their hearts over the truth of Jesus' claims.
So what is the testimony that we're giving? What's the story we're supposed to be telling? And how do we give that testimony when we engage in politics and civic life?
Transcript
The Christian Story in Four Chapters
Rick Barry: Lots of church traditions have lots of different ways of explaining the gospel. I have a friend who left the church long before we met who describes the story that her church told her when she was growing up as going something like this: You are sinful. God would rather send you to hell, but Jesus died for you. So God is obligated to take you back even though you don't deserve it, and even though he'd really rather not, so you better be grateful and you better be careful.
But that's probably not the kind of story you are trying to tell to the people around you because it doesn't really illustrate God's character.
Instead, one of the most popular and influential ways of summing up the Christian story is to take the Bible and boil it down to four chapters: creation, fall redemption, and restoration.
This pattern is really common in a lot of different church traditions, especially protestant and evangelical traditions. We can see it reflected in the way a lot of worship services are structured with the call to worship, the confession of sin, the assurance of pardon, and the sermon, and then the benediction and the commission to go and do likewise. It's the basis for the A/C/T/S model of prayer—adoration confession, Thanksgiving, supplication—which is, in turn, based on some recommendations Martin Luther about an easy way of structuring your own private devotional life. It's the way a lot of evangelistic tracks are structured, like the four spiritual laws.
And since this is a fairly ecumenical way of explaining Christianity, let's roll with it for now and quickly look at what each chapter of this story might mean for the way we engage with politics.
Creation
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The Earth is the Lord's and everything in it. God is good and he made humanity in his own precious image.
Humans may be imperfect, which we'll get to in a minute, but in a very real, very important way that we can't resist and that the book of James tells us it's a sin to ignore, we reflect the best and most important thing in the universe.
This means that all people, even the people we despise, are worthy of honor and respect. It means that all people, not just the people whose logic we seem to understand, or whose hearts seem to be in the right place to us, have rich, complex, nuanced, multifaceted, inner lives.
Our opponents, the people on the other side, they aren't one-dimensional villains. They weren't written into history for the sake of making our heroes look better.
The story of creation also tells us that we're wrong to think that other people will only do good things if we make doing bad things inconvenient, or that they'll only hold themselves back from doing bad things because they'll be punished if they get caught.
Fall
This is the chapter of the story where the idea of sin gets introduced.
If you look at the full scope of scripture, sin is kind of a multidimensional concept, but in American Evangelicalism, we usually focus in on the Romans three version of sin. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. Sin as an action. Sin as breaking a rule. Sin as the moral failure that gets us disinvited from the Divine Party.
But when you're looking at the full scope of biblical testimony and when you're looking at the lives of Christians in other traditions, we can start to get a bigger perspective on sin. Not an ALTERNATE perspective on sin. It's not one understanding of sin versus another. Not either/or. It's not even both/and. It's more than that. It's both/and/plus!
Yes, all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. All are worthy of judgment. But Genesis three shows us sin distorting our relationships to one another—a vision that gets echoed in the New Testament, like in the relationship between the prodigal son and his elder brother in Jesus' parable of the father with two sons.
And it shows us sin distorting our relationship to God, like the prodigal son's relationship to his father is distorted at the start of the story, and the elder brother's relationship to the father is distorted at the end of the story.
Sin also broke our cultural life. The prophets and Jesus don't just denounce individual acts of sin. They also denounce the norms of entire communities and cultures and tribes and cities and generations.
Some church traditions focus really heavily on the fact that death was not part of the human experience until sin entered the world, and they focus on that as the biggest crisis of the fall. Precious is the death of a saint in the Lord's eyes. The sea will give up the dead that are in her. The last enemy to be defeated will be death.
Other church traditions also put a heavy emphasis on the fact that sin isn't just about us. It's also something we inflicted on the rest of reality. Cursed is the ground because of what you've done. All of creation waits and groans.
We could go on and on, but I want to zero in today on one specific dimension of sin and the fall. It broke the way our minds work. Theologians call this the noetic effects of the fall. The way the fall has hindered our ability to perceive, our ability to think, our ability to reason.
The Bible says that because sin has rendered our minds imperfect, there's a good chance we're wrong about things, even if we're absolutely sure that our solution is right.
Paul describes it as only being able to see the world around us through a glass dimly, through a smudged window or a foggy pair of glasses. And we're not gonna see clearly until the kingdom comes and we are made Perfect.
Chapter two of this story, the chapter about the fall, tells us that people who disagree with us are not inherently necessarily stupid or selfish or malicious, or if they are, they're not stupid, selfish, or malicious in some unique way, some way that we aren't.
And it tells us that the people we agree with and the people we like are just as likely to be stupid, selfish, and malicious as the people we don't.
Knowing about the fall means that we should be as cautious of the people we think of as our allies as the people we think of as our enemies.
Redemption
This is the part of the story where God's love seeks us out despite the fall, maybe even because of the fall.
Creation and fall tell us that we both reflect AND distort God's image, at all times, in every way. At the same time, redemption tells us that the degree to which we distort God's image does not stop us from being loved by him. If we're broken or warped mirrors, reflecting God's image back into the world imperfectly, then the chapter on redemption tells us that God doesn't wanna replace us with a different mirror. He sent Jesus to die for us so that he could get these mirrors back.
Our value, our worth, our existential validation does not depend on how good we are. It does not depend on how well we do achieving whatever it is we think is worth achieving in this world. Our ultimate source of comfort, stability, validation, our primary overriding identity does not have to rest on what teams, or parties, or tribes we're a part of——or what kind of people we aren't.
Our sense of worth should not come from what causes we fight for or what movements we fight against.
The story of redemption tells us that our sense of self, our identity, and our existential validation can and should come from being loved by God, pursued by Christ, and secured in them together by the Holy Spirit, not from not being one of those people.
Restoration
This is the promise that God's kingdom is coming no matter what we do.
The end result of everything, even the things that seem bad, is going to be the exact opposite of catastrophe. It's going to be healing and flourishing and beauty. It's going to be ultimate good.
And we want people to get excited about this part of the story. We want them to get excited about that ultimate good. We want them to get a taste of it, and understand it...so we don't have to hold ourselves back from trying to make things a little better where we can here and now. We don't have to hold ourselves back from pursuing what's called proximate good. Because pursuing proximate good is one of the biggest ways we can help people get an idea of what that future kingdom is going to be like.
And because we know that things are gonna get better, we also know that even when it feels like we're trying to ice skate uphill (as Blade put it), working for the common good now is never actually working in vain.
But we also never wanna let our historic imagination get lazy. We never assume that if we help make something better, if we help make something good happen, if we help achieve some kind of proximate good, then that question is closed and we can move on. We don't assume that anything good is going to be permanent and self-sustaining. We understand that in a fallen world, proximate good is a fragile commodity. Self-sustaining good is coming, but it's not here yet. For now, things still go wrong.
And when they do, knowing about the coming restoration gives us permission to lament.
We don't lament things that are wrong because we feel stuck or trapped or doomed to the way things are. We lament things that are wrong because, when we see things that are grievously wrong, lamentation is the proper response. Our laments are how we show other people how dim this world looks compared to the world that's coming.
And listening to OTHER people's laments is how we see effects of the fall that we hadn't noticed before. It's how we see through the eyes of people whose glasses are smudged in different places than ours are, and how we develop a broader appreciation for what Jesus has done for us.
So the story of the coming restoration tells us that Congress doesn't determine the doom of the world. We don't have to win. When we engage with politics, we don't have to dominate. We don't have to reshape politics into our own image.
There's nothing the American people can mess up so badly that Jesus is gonna look at what we did and decide not to come back, and there's no law we can pass that's so good that he'll change his schedule and come back sooner.
Where Do You Fit In The Story?
Which chapter of the story is most familiar to you? That is, which chapter is where most of the "action" is in your spiritual life? And which is the least familiar?
Let us know in the comments!