Dividing Politics and Religion

Spirituality Column #261
November 8, 2011
Current in Carmel – Westfield – Noblesville – Fishers
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Dividing Politics and Religion
By Bob Walters

On this off-year Election Day, let’s take an off-beat tour of America’s mix of church and state. The Bible gets first “ups.”

Jesus separated church and state long before the eighteenth century secular humanists identified and attached the inalienable rights of man to modernity. Rights, by the way, are not in the Bible; responsibilities are.

One can consider the entirety of the New Testament and understand the unique moral and creative wholeness of Christian freedom in Jesus Christ.

Or, one can take the common Gospel verse “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (Matthew 22:21, Mark 12:12:17, Luke 20:25), and see that Caesar (specifically here “Caesar’s money” or euphemistically “Rome’s man-made government”) and God play on different teams.

The apostle Paul declares the primacy of our “citizenship in Heaven” (Philippians 3:17, 20), but also invokes his own Roman citizenship in order to be heard (Acts 21:39) and then not to be executed (Acts 22:22ff). In Romans 13 Paul says government is ordained by God and that if we “owe taxes, [then] pay taxes” (verse 7).

While Paul seems to indicate the scary proposition that “Government is God,” he doesn’t, and it’s not. Jesus Christ is God, and Jesus plainly says that while both He (Jesus) and we (Christians) are “in the world,” neither He nor we are “of the world” (John 15:19, 17:14, 16). Christ commands that God is first, and that we are to love God and our neighbors as ourselves (Matthew 19:19), and even to love our enemies (5:44).

What the United State Constitution and all it amendments describe is a political context within which the creative freedom of man and the God-ordained morality of “love others as we love ourselves” can prosper and thrive. Over 224 years they have mostly – though not always – thrived, but it is only in the Christian moral context that this kind of document is possible.

Democracy demands moral responsibility, which is different from the “fair” (read “blind”) application of “religious freedom” the secular modern world mistakenly equates and jingoistically describes as “all religions are the same.” They, um, aren’t.

Moral discernment is the first casualty of secularism, which replaces God’s moral truth – Jesus Christ – with man’s moral relativism.

To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, “Under God” we enjoy freedom and defend a “government of, by, and for the People.” It certainly can and will “perish from the earth” lest we understand, and understand soon, the indivisible equation of our citizenship both in Heaven and as Americans.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) recently read about and laments Europe’s cultural disestablishment of Christianity. He is sure we’ll either learn from Europe’s example, or die the same spiritual death.

Mark: Succinct for the Romans

Spirituality Column #123
March 17, 2009
Current in Carmel (IN) newspaper
Current in Westfield (IN) newspaper

Mark: Succinct for the Romans
By Bob Walters

John Mark, a close associate of the Apostle Peter, is credited with writing the Gospel of Mark between 50-65 AD somewhere in Italy.

With its succinct, active, and direct style – an apt metaphor for the Roman way of life – Mark describes what Christ did more than what Christ said.

Scholars regard the book of Mark, which not surprisingly focuses on persecution and martyrdom, as a portrayal of Peter’s teaching and sermons to the Romans.

Tradition suggests Peter lived his later years in and around Rome and was martyred there. John Mark – who we see elsewhere in the Bible as the man who ran naked from Christ’s arrest in the Garden (Mark 14:51), deserted Barnabas and Paul (Acts 13:13), and later regained Paul’s favor (2 Titus 4:11) – was, like Luke, not one of the 12 Disciples.

This is the kind of scripture background available from a standard study Bible.

When I first read the Bible a few years ago, it was an edition with a minimum of notes because I wanted to focus on the scripture and not have my eyes and thoughts jerked around a maze of notes, footnotes, citations, charts, and maps.

A study Bible is an entirely different animal. I often have to look twice to find the actual scripture amid the above-mentioned maze of study material.

The variety of information especially facilitates a curious phenomenon that befalls every person who reads any Bible on a regular basis: With each reading, new bits of insight and previously unnoticed facts fairly jump off the pages.

I like to think this is the Holy Spirit’s way of keeping our thirst whetted for continued scriptural study and a deeper relationship with God through Christ.

A new insight? It occurred to me that Jesus’ famous statement about money and taxes, “Render unto to Caesar …” (Mark 12:17), positions money as an earthly thing, not a divine thing. That sort of knocks a hole in the popular prosperity preaching that promotes “God wants us to be rich.” Hogwash. How many rich Christian missionaries do you know? Money rich, I mean.

A typical study Bible note? Mark 6:3 is the only place in the Bible where Jesus is referred to as a carpenter.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com), in honor of St. Patrick’s Day, notes that Mark 16:18 is the “snake handling” scripture. You can look it up. Next week: Luke.

Caesar Oprah!

Spirituality Column #76
April 22, 2008
Current in Carmel (IN) newspaper

Caesar Oprah!
By Bob Walters

Has it ever really sunk in how completely un-famous Jesus Christ was when He was alive on earth?

He was the Son of God, yet very few knew Him. His resurrection didn’t make the public records, only private letters.

His job wasn’t to tell us He was God. Jesus’ job was to tell us we have eternal life with God if we believe in Him as the Christ. Jesus did not have to bluntly say, “I am God.” There is no doubt that He was, and is.

He knew we’d figure it out … and believe. We have.

Subsequently, Jesus has been very, very famous for a long time.

During Jesus’ life on earth, the Caesars were immensely famous and powerful; people thought they were gods. They are all dead now. Jesus died and now lives – so we can live – and scripture breathes that truth.

This brings me to the errant theology of Oprah Winfrey.

Bright-eyed and savvy, Oprah, like the Caesars, is immensely famous and powerful.

There are plenty of preachers around who think they are entertainers. Oprah has become an entertainer who thinks she is a preacher.

Have you been following her Christ-stifling foray into spiritual enlightenment?

Oprah says there are a million ways to salvation. Her guru imagines there is nothing after death. She has completely botched the concept of God’s jealousy for us (God's jealousy is a good thing, folks; not bad). She is preaching about feelings and breathing. She infers that belief is a sucker’s gambit: to wit, God just “is,” therefore we should not believe. Huh?

I wonder what the meaning of “is” is, here.

Oprah is telling us that Jesus was mistaken when He said, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the father except through me.” That’s John 14:6. It’s fairly famous. Jesus is famous because lines like that have endured for nearly 2,000 years in a famous place, the Bible.

If you want to see a list of Oprah’s scriptural incursions and misinformation, go to www.seriousfaith.com (Brent Riggs’ blog) and search “Pastor Oprah.”

My point is this: scriptural canon has survived intact for 1,600 years. I have a hunch it is going to survive Oprah.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) figures Oprah will fool very few Christians, but her New Age nonsense is sure to screw up some very sincere seekers. It’s a shame. Pray for her return to Christ.