Maybe it was 1997
We were not wealthy. We still aren’t. But in 1997, I took Patty with me on a business trip to Vancouver. BC. During breaks, we would wander around Vancouver. We strolled Granville Island. We also took an excursion that included a Salmon hatchery, Grouse Mountain, and the Capilano Suspension Bridge.
The views were breathtaking. Looking across the expanse covered by the bridge, I remember wondering, “How did they do that?”
Some years later, we visited the east side of Canada, Prince Edward Island. We rode a ferry from New Brunswick to PEI. We took a van over the Confederation Bridge on the return trip. We read the story of the planning and building of the Confederation Bridge. Amazing. The informative displays gave the answer to the question, “How did they do that?”
How did we get here?
Princess Diana died in 1997. Hong Kong reverted to Chinese rule. The Hale-Bopp Comet ventured close to the earth. The Stock Market crashed. Mother Teresa died. And Bill Clinton was President of the United States.
Bill Clinton. Another Baptist, Southern Baptist, President. By the end of 1997, Clinton had given enough material to the Moral Majority, the Religious Right, to vet our elected leaders for their character. Character matters.
Candidates were scrutinized for their decisions that would illustrate their character. Judge Douglas Ginsburg withdrew his name as Reagan’s Supreme Court nominee ten years later. He admitted to using marijuana while a college student and law professor.
Twenty years later, the counter to character matters, “We aren’t electing him pastor of the United States.” And, with apologies to Judge Ginsburg, more states had approved the medical or recreational use of marijuana since the year before Ginsburg withdrew.
By 2017 character no longer mattered to the same people to whom it mattered just twenty years earlier. I, like others, was told,
We are not electing pastor of the United States.
Ethics from Below?
Ten years before 1997, one of the first mega-church pastors wrote, Who You Are When No One is Looking. Ironically that same pastor would become disgraced for what he was doing when no one was looking. Cynically, I wonder how Christians who compartmentalize vocations into those where character does not matter avoid hypocrisy by only thinking character matters only for clergy. And often, the Christians to which I refer are among the clergy!
We are not electing pastor of the United States.
Is this the result of two-kingdom thinking? In the kingdom of this world, we assess character from below. We look for the best among us to be our example. From among those considered the best of us, we choose a leader. In the kingdom of heaven, character is tied to things spiritual, and so in the religious realm, the example of Jesus is the ruler.
Things political in earthly terms call for us to recognize human frailty and give it a pass, for we are only looking for the best among us. The same fault lines found in the kingdom of this world are handled differently when they show up at church.
The problem comes when a large segment of the Christian population prefers a leader whose fault lines are clear. Rather than apply an ethic from above, we shame other Christians by “don’t you know,”
We are not electing pastor of the United States
This compartmentalization of human behavior in this way means two separate ethical systems held in tension within the same person. When talking with church folks, the leader must uphold the example of Jesus. When advocating for his or her favorite candidate, the Christian leader defaults to a system rooted in the example of the best of us from below. Put another way, ethics from below begins with our anthropology. How we assess our anthropology, high or low, shapes our ethical possibilities.
Ethics from Above?
Oddly or not, this issue came to mind while reading a couple of books discussing Karl Barth's theology. I use oddly for two reasons. In the way back time machine, my influencers dissuaded any reading of Karl Barth. They read Barth as neo-orthodox. In Barth for Armchair Theologians, my friend John Franke provides a section at the end of his little book that outlines the two primary ways Barth was received. One of those ways was neo-orthodox. So it would be odd for me to take up reading about Barth, much less Barth himself. In Conversations with Barth on Preaching, Will Willimon gives a brief sketch of Barth’s theological development, similar to Franke.
I use oddly not only that I might be reading about Barth but also that Barth has his own fault lines ethically when writing about ethics. I need to finish Eberhard Busch’s biography. But recent assessments of Barth raise questions about his marital fidelity. Rather than apply an ethic from below, and say that Barth, as a theologian, was among the best of the twentieth century but had this one flaw. I would hold Barth to his own ethics from above.
Better readers of Barth may argue how well he held to his own theological project. But for this piece, I want to draw out that ethics is best from above, where Jesus is the revelation of God to and for all humanity. Dallas Willard argued in The Divine Conspiracy that Jesus was the smartest person ever to live. From there, Willard contended that Jesus is the True Human One. That is, Jesus reveals what it is to be truly human. Anything less is de-human.
The revealed God in Jesus Christ gives us the means to ethics from above aimed at our own humanity. That is, we discard any idea of a two-kingdom ethical system and find in Jesus an ethics from above for human beings. Put another way, ethics from above begins with Christology.
What Say You?
How did we get here? Did we shift the subject and object of and for our ethical framework?
No matter where you begin your Christology, it would seem to lead to ethics from above.
Discuss.
Hey Todd, this is a topic worthy of considering. I'll have to wrestle through some of your paragraphs, but certainly agree with the assessment of the whole "pastor of the United States" thing. I think you end at a great point -- Christology.