Trump has repeatedly called for the support of evangelicals and thanked evangelicals for their support (which is also a subtle campaigning trick to woo undecided evangelicals), and it is something very serious when the rulers who represent the spirit of this age call on the church to mobilize on their behalf.
..Trump has openly bragged about his adulterous affairs and sexual conquests. No other Presidential candidate has ever been such a bold proponent of adultery. He has been so base as to suggest that his daughter is fit to pose for Playboy and that if he was not her father he would be dating her.6 He recently described sexual desire towards his daughter7, and he’s even asked others if they thought she was “hot.”8 When his second daughter was a year old, he was already making comments about her body.9 His overall attitude towards women is highly sexual, misogynistic, and deplorable.
.. By simply looking at how the Bible describes a foolish leader, we can easily see that Trump is the embodiment of nearly every description the Bible gives of a foolish leader.18
.. To reapply a conservative phrase from the 1990’s – if Donald’s wife cannot trust him neither can we.
.. Christians deep down know that Trump is not a true believer and yet we fail to follow Paul’s clear instruction on what to do with such a man.
.. Jesus was clear that we are to evaluate men by their fruit. Until there is a genuine, public brokenness backed up by a radical change in demeanor, a commitment to repair past wrongs, and real fruit to demonstrate the truth of the commitment we should ignore any claims of an election conversion.
.. However, when a man is bold in his sin it is very different from someone who has failed and yet is repentant or at least is struggling against their sin. Trump is the opposite. He has said that he has never felt the need to ask for forgiveness because he and God have a great relationship and he doesn’t do much that is bad.29 This is a man who is brazen in his sin. He is not a broken man who has come short. He is not even trying to hide his sin because he does not even feel the shame of it.
.. when God’s people put their hope in political saviors God will give us more and more inferior leaders until he breaks our ungodly association with political saviors.
..
We found that evangelicals are drawn toward politics by messianic figures. Although Trump may not be Christ-like, the term messianic does have other synonyms such as “liberator” or “defender,” words that Trump supporters might easily use to describe him.
…we found out what did draw this group toward politics: strong, decisive leaders, not issues. They got involved in politics for the same reason they got involved with their church — because they were looking for someone to help “show them the way.” Evangelicals were drawn into politics by messianic leaders.[31]
.. The Lord is forcing the issue by presenting us with worse and worse leaders to expose where our true loyalties lie.
.. It is humiliating that the church bows to a man who is the opposite of everything we stand for because we have fallen prey to a political narrative that motivates us by fear. If we were truly free and truly found our hope and citizenship in heaven then we would not be so fearful and easily manipulated by the threat that if we don’t fall in line then another candidate will be elected.
..
“Though it’s common to talk about the Republican Party having been captured by white evangelical activists, if you really look at the way the two groups have interacted over the years, it’s more accurate to say that evangelicals have been captured by the Republican Party…Born-again Christians continue to laud Jesus as their King of Kings. But it is a strange sovereign who is so slavishly responsive to his subjects. Here Jesus is more pawn than king, pushed around in a game of political chess, sacrificed here to take down Obamacare and there to turn a reality-television star into God’s gift to America.
“The Trump candidacy is no outlier. He has not hypnotized evangelicals into forgetting the foundations of their faith. He is simply revealing the fact that their faith is now more political than theological. The white evangelicals who flock to his rallies like their parents once did to Billy Graham revivals know that he lives a life comically at odds with teachings of the Bible and the examples of the saints.”[32]
.. I think we aren’t giving the convictions of evangelicals enough credit. They know enough to know what Trump is saying and doing is wrong, and yet they are still supporting him.
.. Russell Moore closes his op-ed with a plea to evangelicals: “We ought to listen, to get past the boisterous confidence and the television lights and the waving arms and hear just whose speech we’re applauding.” But what if the boisterous confidence and the television lights and the waving arms are precisely what evangelicals have been trained to love? What if they can’t listen because they are enraptured? What if they applaud, not because Trump has given them a speech, but because Trump has given them what they love?[33]
.. Perhaps the Lord wants to use Trump to break our obsession with worldly power.
.. To say it another way, if we are in a generation when the Lord is humbling the nation, then Trump’s rally cry is essentially a rejection of what the Lord is doing in our nation. Trump is not defining greatness as goodness. He is describing it as power, might, and economics.
.. What if Trump’s entire platform is actually in opposition to the season the nation is in? What if we are in effect repeating the error of the religious leaders in Jeremiah’s day and assuring a man, and his supporters, that the Lord supports his agenda when in fact it is entirely the opposite?
.. If the Lord is humbling the nation, Trump represents something entirely different – pride, arrogance, and tolerance of sin. Promoting and embracing Trump is a statement of our trust in human strength at the cost of decency and morality.
.. When Jesus is declared in His beauty and in His glory, then we are neither awed by imposters like Trump nor fearful of leaders like Clinton.
.. Daniel was an influence in government and politics but he never put his hope in it and was therefore able to be a prophetic voice. He never confused Babylon with Zion and that’s why Daniel was just as able to serve under Babylon as under Persia. We should be equally able to be a prophetic voice to the Republicans as to the Democrats.
.. We are faced with two unqualified options because the Lord wants to break our search for a political savior.
.. Any man who sets himself up as the savior, threatens others, ridicules the vulnerable, and even threatens freedom of the press will not suddenly become a Christian in office.
N.T. Wright: Paul and Caesar: A New Reading of Romans
We have moved away quite rapidly in recent years from the old split, which was assumed by and built into the fabric of Western biblical studies, between ‘religion’ and ‘politics’. We have come to see that trying to separate the two in the ancient world, not least in the Middle East, is as futile as trying to do so in certain parts of the modern world. There is a quantum leap now being made from the old way of reading the Bible, in which certain political ‘implications’ could be drawn here and there from texts which were (of course) about something else, and the occasional concentration on rather isolated texts — one thinks of the ‘Tribute question’ in the synoptic tradition, and of the notorious first paragraph of Romans 13 — as being the only places in the New Testament at least where real ‘political’ issues came to the fore.
.. Now, however, we have all been alerted to the fact that the kingdom of God was itself, and remained, a thoroughly political concept; that Jesus’ death was a thoroughly political event; that the existence and growth of the early church was a matter of community-building, in conflict, often enough, with other communities.
.. There is of course a danger, not always avoided in recent studies, of seeing the New Testament now simply the other way up but still within the Enlightenment paradigm: in other words, of declaring that it’s all ‘politics’ and that to read it as ‘religion’ or ‘theology’ is to domesticate or privatize it.
.. Nearly a quarter of a century ago, Pauline studies received a shot in the arm which still continues to invigorate — or, depending on your point of view, a deep wound from which it is still trying to recover.
.. Sanders’ main thesis, which I regard as securely established in outline if not in all its details, is that the picture of Judaism assumed in most Protestant readings of Paul is historically inaccurate and theologically misleading: first-century Jews were not proto-Pelagians, and Paul did not attack them as such.
.. it was in some ways a plea to see Christianity from a modernist comparative-religion perspective rather than a classic theological one.
.. In the Mediterranean world where Paul exercised his vocation as the apostle to the Gentiles, the pagans, the fastest growing religion was the Imperial cult, the worship of Caesar.
.. With a long tradition of ruler-cults going back at least to Alexander the Great, local cities and provinces were in many cases only too happy to demonstrate their loyalty to the emperor by establishing a cult in his honour, and in need by vying for the privilege of looking after his shrine.
.. you don’t need such a strong military presence to police an empire if the citizens are worshipping the emperor.
.. where Rome had brought peace to the world, giving salvation from chaos, creating a new sense of unity out of previously warring pluralities, there was a certain inevitability about Rome itself, and the emperor as its ruler, being seen as divine. Rome had done — Augustus had done — the sort of thing that only gods can do.
.. where Rome had brought peace to the world, giving salvation from chaos, creating a new sense of unity out of previously warring pluralities, there was a certain inevitability about Rome itself, and the emperor as its ruler, being seen as divine. Rome had done — Augustus had done — the sort of thing that only gods can do.
.. None that I know of (myself included) have suggested that it must have been heard in Rome, and that Paul must have intended it, as a parody of the imperial cult.
.. The root of Jesse shall appear, the one who rises up (ho anistamenos) to rule the nations; in him shall the nations hope.’ Jesus’ Davidic messiahship, once more, is confirmed by his resurrection, and means that he is the true ruler of the nations. This cannot, I suggest, be other than a direct challenge to the present ruler of the nations, Caesar himself.
.. I now realize that this tendency also represents part of a depoliticizing of Paul, a desire to move his theology away from confrontation with the powers of the world and into the safer sphere of a faith, a religion, a theology in which the only thing one needs to say about the rulers of the world is that God has ordained them and that they must in principle be obeyed.
.. I have written elsewhere of how Philippians 2:5-11 and 3:19-21 can be seen to have explicit reference to the imperial cult and theme, with, once more, the main thrust that Jesus Christ is the true kyrios of the world, so that of course Caesar is not.
.. in 1 Thessalonians run the same way: when people say ‘peace and security’, then sudden destruction will come upon them unawares (1 Thes. 5:3). And ‘peace and security’, it has been argued, was part of the Roman propaganda of the first-century empire.[15]
.. Rather, I suggest that Paul’s anti-imperial stance is part of a wider strain in his thinking which has also been marginalized in many systematic treatments of his thought, but which should be acknowledged and rehabilitated: the confrontation between the gospel and the powers of the world, between the gospel and paganism in general.
.. Our struggles over the integration of faith and history, of church and society, of natural and supernatural, simply did not look like that in the first century.
Cherry Picking the Bible
Why do I want to ignore the judgement (wrath) of God?
Functional embarrassment about certain sections of the bible.
Topics
- Character of God: neglect his justice, holiness: we are making God in our image.
- Talk about heaven without Hell: Jesus spoke about hell more than anyone else.
- The same action (sin), but against the police officer, king, the magnity of God
- We all deserve hell
- Red-letter Christians: what did the new testament writers think about the old testament? They said if fulfilled the old testament.
Eugine Peterson: Doing the Right thing the wrong way
Every time there is an advance in technology there is a decrease in relationship.
God acts through relationship.
Every word of scripture is personal speech, to be answered with prayer.
Nothing happens to a glacier until it is 64 feet thick, but then it starts to move and nothing can stop it. The mountains around here are cut by glaciers.
Lets not have any God talk, lets just get on living (with relationships).