A Follow up to the Evangelical Gospel of Hiroshima

https://pilgrimunderground.blogspot.com/2024/05/the-evangelical-gospel-of-hiroshima.html

Someone suggested to me that in The Evangelical Gospel of Hiroshima I failed to properly take into account the question of the congressman's office and his duties and the obligations it entails. Tim Walberg would be remiss if he didn't take those interests into account - including hard questions of foreign and military policy. As an office holder he has responsibilities and tasks that are laid upon his shoulders and sometimes this would necessarily entail an appeal to a moral hierarchy.

For example an application of moral hierarchy would say that as a congressman Walberg faces a dilemma - on the one hand he is to love neighbour and turn the other cheek. But as an officeholder he bears the sword and has a duty punish evildoers and protect the good. While he personally can endure suffering it would be wrong for him to turn away from his responsibility and allow the good and innocent to suffer in order to fulfill this. It is incumbent upon him to bear the sword and appealing to the arguments and examples of history it would be appropriate for him to take a harsh 'Hiroshima' line with Hamas and the Palestinians. In fact it would be ethical for him to do so.

While there is some basis for an ethical hierarchy in Scripture, generally I find it to be subject to manipulation and abuse. In some cases it's utilised as a kind of justification for actions and in other cases such as this it is inapplicable in that there are various false assumptions at work.

Walberg faces no true dilemma but one of his own making. Ignoring the commands of Romans 12, he has misunderstood and misused Romans 13 - taking up the sword that Paul is actually forbidding the believer. Christ does the same in both passages such as the Sermon on the Mount and in the Garden of Gethsemane where he corrects and rebukes the apostles misunderstanding of the sword.

Walberg wrongly assumes Christians should hold office in Babylon and wield its power vis-à-vis the nations.

Also, the hierarchy argument at times distorts the choices by means of reductionism. There are other alternatives though thoroughly unappealing to the ethos of Evangelicalism. We are called to suffer to the glory of God and this can play out in many fields, but it's clear to me Evangelicals reject this basic New Testament calling and imperative.

Walberg in fact represents an ethic born of syncretism. Christianity and Scripture are appealed to and employed when convenient. Otherwise his ethics are born of Enlightenment idealism and clearly in the case of his approach to the Palestinians, the old as the hills pagan ethic of Lamech the Cainite. Even the measured 'eye for an eye' response of the lex talionis is set aside and replaced with an idolatrous form of punitive vengeance fed by a self-righteous effrontery and temerity. How dare these under-beings question our rights and privileges? How dare these worms challenge our status? They must be destroyed. Lex Talionis is sub-Christian, the Lamech-ethic of Walberg is demonic.

This can also be fed (in part) by a terrible (and in this case heretical) misread of Scripture which wrongly assumes the modern state of Israel is in continuity with Old Covenant Judaism - the Dispensationalist error that posits the Jews are still the people of God and that the Zionist state is a fulfillment of prophecy, even though this notion is completely repudiated by the New Testament itself.

The bottom line is this. Whether the appeal is made to office or supposed dilemmas resulting in an appeal to an ethical hierarchy, the end result is that such thinking produces Sunday-only Christians. On Monday morning these people put on a hat, uniform, or badge that allow them to live and act under the aegis of a completely different set of ethics and obligations. For some this 'hat' puts them in the realm of Wall Street and its rules, and their ethics are not shaped by Scripture but by market forces, the Social Darwinist dog-eat-dog sewer of capitalism, and the ethics of efficiency, maximized profit, and shareholder obligation. These ethics dominate the worlds of banking, insurance, and in the United States medicine as well.

In the case of Walberg and all those who are in government, military, and law enforcement, the rules are the law of the jungle - Lamech's rules, the art of war, and the wisdom of Caesar and other would-be beasts. For Walberg this means that on Monday morning he can don his congressional 'hat' and unashamedly call for mass murder.

This is the dark side of the Magisterial Reformation's doctrine of Vocation. And when combined with a gospel of cheap grace, the end result is a diseased counterfeit form of Christianity that results in anti-Christian (even demonic) ethics.

I call it apostasy. The fact that such ethics infected the Church some seventeen centuries ago with Constantine may make it venerable in the eyes of some but it doesn't make it right. And the Reformation, far from restoring the Scriptural teaching only made it worse - though Walberg has his antecedents in the Crusaders who destroyed Jerusalem in 1099, sacked Beziers in 1209, and in figures like Ferdinand II, and not a few Inquisitors - men who professed to know and serve Christ but were in fact slaves to the god of this world and all that he is and stands for.