Prevailing Winds "For the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is there is freedom . . ." 2 Cor. 3:17, TNIV

September 16, 2009

Looking Biblical, Sounding Conservative, And Not Even Remotely Christian

Filed under: Uncategorized — keelyem @ 7:04 pm

To continue my analysis of “Biblical” calls for abolishing “government welfare programs,” let me summarize Reconstructionist and Wilson admirer Chris Witmer’s assertion that the answer to our nation’s healthcare crisis requires both repentance for our sins — presumably individual and corporate — as well as restoring the care of “the least of these” to the church and family, doing away with any tax-supported social safety net. His quote, taken from a comment on an earlier post, appears in my “A High Price To Pay” article. I think I’ve done it justice here.

I gave my “short answer” in that post; I hope it provoked some consternation, because it deserves to. There are many issues at play in this discussion, not the least of which is the tragic insistence of some Biblical conservatives in wrongly, and callously, dividing the Word of Truth in the name of fidelity to Scripture — with tragic, and most un-Christian, consequences.

Where to begin? Witmer is right when he observes that injustice and inequality, as well as economic catastrophe, will continue until God’s people repent and seek his will — although Witmer and other Reconstructionist types haven’t exactly distinguished themselves as champions of justice or equality. Nonetheless, the people of the United States, and particularly those who claim the name of Christ, must humble themselves — I must humble myself — and seek God’s forgiveness for our multitudinous sins. But I imagine Chris and I have an entirely different idea of what those sins might be, and therein lies a key to our disagreement.

We have sinned as a nation, as a “Christian” nation, in allowing, perpetuating, and benefiting from injustice that we’ve watched seeping into public policy, contemporary culture, and civic affairs — when, that is, we haven’t actively poured the toxins of racism, sexism, classism, incivility and idolatry ourselves. The Church has stood silent in condemning the “I’ve got mine, screw you” attitude that destroys community and fouls the integrity of the Gospel; worse, it often embodies it under the guise of “Christian” Libertarianism, Reconstructionism, and a post-millennial, Covenant eschatology fawning and undiscerning in its admiration of an unfettered free market.

And while most Christians are grieved at the loss of life represented by abortion, this believer, at least, refuses to equate the tragic decision of a desperate woman to have her unborn child killed with that of the 9/11 terrorists who slaughtered more than 3,000 people out of nothing other than blind, seething hate. While 3,000 aborted babies a day is a horror, it’s a symptom of things our Covenant patriarchs and Reconstructionists embrace — poverty, a “pro-life” movement enamored of war, gender inequality, and a theology of male headship in the home that dishonors Scripture and imperils women. The nation, and the Church within its borders, carries a tremendous sin debt against a holy God, and only repentance and faith in the Perfect One can erase it.

But Witmer’s idea that the United States also must eliminate “all government welfare programs” and return complete responsibility for the poor, sick, and suffering “to the family and to the church, to which they rightly belong,” has the advantage of looking Biblical, and its conformation to the written instructions given the early Church seemingly argues for its validity. Nobody, Christian or not, would suggest that families and their faith communities carry no responsibility for one another, and most Christians would extend that responsibility to “the least of these” outside the church walls. Most, not all; the American Church has many thousands of saints who minister tirelessly to the poor and sick, but the churches you more often hear about minister tirelessly to pastoral power, the already converted and comfortable, and general contractors who profit from enormous buildings and ambitious growth. Still, it’s not incongruous to think of “Christian” and “church” and “ministry to the poor,” although you might, in some areas, have to furrow your brow a bit. Nonetheless, you cannot read in Witmer’s words a mandate for Church-sponsored benevolence without also considering his call, and the call of most “Christian” Libertarians, for the elimination of any government action on behalf of individuals in need.

And that ought to sicken your heart and scare you to death.

It would be absurd to argue against the truth that the Church has a Biblical, moral, tangible responsibility to care for the needy, whether in the pews or outside the sanctuary’s doors. In fact, I’d like to see a whole lot more of it. I’d be delighted, for example, if the largest Christian church in Moscow decided to spend four days in September ministering to the community around it — collecting and distributing food, hosting a Sabbath dinner for the hungry and homeless, preaching a Gospel of class-shattering freedom in Christ — instead of indulging in a self-congratulatory and culturally-insulated “Celebratio” featuring bad theology and worse practice dressed up in family activities, concerts, and lectures downtown that don’t reach those outside of Christ Church, Logos, NSA and Greyfriars — and aren’t intended to.

(Side note: Perhaps Wilson, et al, might consider hosting a “Charitatio” of outreach to his neighbors, or a “Communitatio” that offers a wary and weary Moscow an opportunity to interact with him regarding his interesting views on the Confederacy, slavery, women on school boards, the root causes of 21st-century American poverty, the stoning of gays, evangelism, and voting rights for non-male non-property owners. I’m afraid, though, that that would lead to “Absentatio,” or a duck-and-cover that would have them scurrying back to lectures on the breathtaking social relevance of Calvin’s passion for singing the Psaltery, a topic of urgency only for those who figure that their being in the Covenant requires no particular interest in or engagement with those presumed to be outside of it, God be thanked and sweater vests be donned).

To advocate for a Biblical view of government, one that recognizes the State as God’s perfect will for civic order worked however imperfectly through imperfect human institutions, it’s necessary to acknowledge that modern society differs enormously from first-century Rome, Palestine, and Greece. Ours is not a pre-industrialized, New Testament world where serious illness usually ended in death, medical care was based on equal parts hope and herbs, families encompassed two or three generations living together, and life expectancy was significantly less than it is today. It was easy to expect that families and the Church would, as Paul’s epistles command, take care of the poor, sick, and aged in their midst — so they wouldn’t be a burden or bad testimony to the world. The early Church sought out those the larger society considered “aliens and strangers,” the social “Other,” and invited them to become an entirely different kind of alien and stranger, pilgrims whose hope and suffering in this world were enlivened by their hope in the sufferings of Christ Jesus and the promise of life eternal. They went out, suffered with, brought in, worked among, and provided for. They didn’t decide that Covenant numbers were set in such a way as to relieve them of responsibility for going out and preaching the Gospel, and they didn’t consider arrogance in judgment of the less fortunate or disenfranchised a pastoral virtue.

The early Church, then, modeled the fruit of the Holy Spirit in welcoming and caring for the poor and sick. However, while the blessing of modern medicine and the range of social inequalities and crises experienced today make that a noble imperative still, it’s unreasonable — and, frankly, utterly callous — to expect that any church or family shoulder the entire cost, both financial and emotional, of caring for those most in need, whether because of a sick body or a sick economy. In the early Church, serious illnesses were confronted with extraordinary hope tempered by insufficient medical knowledge and resources. A child born with a hole in her heart, a woman dealing with ovarian cancer, a man mangled on the job, a young person stricken by mental illness — all might have been deeply loved and valued by their families and their church, but without a miracle, death was generally inevitable. Now, encouraged by enduring hope in Christ, we can ask for healing and very often see it happen, whether by instantaneous miracle or by the steady, God-given skills of the doctors he has graciously gifted us with.

That help isn’t cheap, though, and often results in the financial ruin of those who benefit. For families, one malignant biopsy result or MRI report can result, these days, in economic ruin, even with private insurance. It’s true that entire churches don’t suddenly get laid off or hurt on the job; still, one layoff or injury can devastate not only a single family, but also a church struggling to keep its people from the evils of government welfare. A church that relies on its own congregation’s benevolence to the sick can incur thousands upon thousands of dollars of costs just from one congregant’s illness — no less grateful for the medical advances that heal, yet overwhelmed by the expense of heart surgery, chemo, physical therapy, psychiatric, neonatal, or chronic care, and other gifts from God. His gifts of advanced medical care are, in his providence, freely given; at the same time, they can be enormously expensive in their realization. It’s easy to call for the elimination of “government welfare” for the sick when the church’s and the family’s care for them was limited to tonics, poultices, herbs, and bed rest. It’s easy to scold that “he who doesn’t work, shall not eat.” It’s another thing entirely when the good news of advanced medical care, or the bad news of innocents suffering for the vagaries of unjust economics, comes with a price tag beyond what families and their congregations can ever pay.

And that’s really at the crux of Witmer’s point, I think. Families who can afford private insurance, which he presumably is not opposed to, are at much less risk of ruin from the emergence of serious medical problems, although even they struggle with the capriciousness of the profit-driven “managers” of their medical care. But even having health insurance is a sign of relative affluence and security. The uninsured frequently become very sick — profoundly and expensively sick — precisely because they lack the money required for preventive care, routine exams and tests, and early treatment of disease. And since calls for an “only church and family” approach to medical care and aid for the poor come from those who appeal disingenuously to the Proverbs for reasons to condemn the poor, it’s clear that even the Bible-believing Witmers among us draw a terribly cruel line in the sand when it comes to ministering to the unfortunate and underprivileged. They often get sick because they can’t pay for health insurance; they’re buried under medical expenses that suck the joy right out of God’s healing them, and yet the Church to which they appeal for help is too often more interested in parsing the Proverbs to explain why their poverty is because of their failures — failures that shouldn’t, they conclude, be rewarded by the Covenant community to which they aren’t often seen as members anyway.

Perhaps Witmer’s church would be interested in funding mammograms and Pap tests for low-income women, or “adopting” the family of a breadwinner injured and unable to work. I’d love to see churches sponsor dental clinics for poor children, provide free lunches for laid-off job seekers, or joyfully pay off a single mother’s medical bills. Many of them do, and many Christian individuals worship the Lord by ministering this way to his people — not in spite of the sufferer’s poverty, but because of it. I’m sure Witmer would like that, too, if the recipients were deemed worthy of help and innocent of offense against the Covenant.

Of course, there would have to be rules. Not Biblical principles derived from the balanced, context-appreciating hermeneutic of a loving, Spirit-filled heart bathed in humility, but wooden, literal, inviolate instructions from both the Old and New Testaments, adapted not one simpering, feminized liberal whit for the world today. Ants scurry and gather, poor people apparently didn’t, and there you have it: a benevolence policy for the Church, right there in black and white — although, curiously, not in the red. The sayings of Christ tend not to guide the Reconstructionists, but that doesn’t make his words hard to understand.

But maybe Christian Libertarians, to make sure that the most literal Biblical hermeneutic isn’t violated, could develop a criteria for which illnesses and conditions the Church should offer financial support — a good Libertarian approach to managing costs. I wonder if that would include, for example, denying one of the brethren financial support after a heart attack brought on by years of Friday morning breakfast platters buried under ham, sausage, bacon, eggs and French toast, or shooing away another whose troubled real estate investments crash. A congregation dedicated to providing the benevolence that families can’t surely must take into account one’s culpability for his own health and pocketbook — the kind of “personal responsibility” extolled by the Scriptures and embraced by its most passionate adherents. I hope for good health and abundant provision for Christian Libertarian families across the nation — particularly if their call for a slashed-and-burned social safety net comes true. And a summer’s worth of Blog and Mablog wrist-slapping of those father-hungry souls who worry about saturated fat, food allergies, and whole foods probably ought to offer its author, in the spirit of Biblical literalism, the opportunity to chip in for their care if it turns out that prevailing medical wisdom is correct. After all, the Proverbs that diagnose poverty also preach against gluttony and excess, and pastors are especially charged with not causing their flock to stumble. The wood from a doggedly literal, context-absent interpretation of Scripture, employed to bolster Libertarian politics and dismissal of both government and the poor, splinters both ways.

A proud insistence on not ever shrinking back from Scripture can easily, and has here, become a proud insistence on cultivating the skill of walking over the poor and sick while never wavering from a detailed hermeneutic of self-rewarding insouciance in the face of suffering. The priest who ignored the man beaten and robbed prided himself on being right in ignoring him; the Samaritan who helped the victim simply was righteous. Jesus ignored the letter of the Law in healing a blind man on the Sabbath and in not declaring unclean the bleeding woman who touched his robe; He is Lord of the Sabbath and the fulfillment of the Law, and we can be like him in revering the entire meaning of the Word of life, or we can devote our energies to studying only the words and missing the Word. The issue here is not “charity at gunpoint,” as Witmer and his pals call taxation and social services. The issue is simply this: What will most benefit the ones Christ died for, and benefit them in his name and for his glory? The answer, I’m afraid, isn’t going to be found until we look up from the text and seek to apply it all in the context of Christ’s amazing, astonishing, powerful redemptive Word.

1 Comment »

  1. The problem here of course is that both you (Ms Mix and assorted leftists) and those you chastise (Pharisaiacal, legalistic Christians and assorted conservatives) are missing a crucial bit of information.

    Neither of you know what the poor want.

    Why not? Neither of you can understand them. Sure, you may talk to them for a bit – but you will only get the sound bites they reserve for patricians like yourself. The poor will tell you what they think you want to hear. They will not tell you what THEY want. You are not one of them.

    But to be one of them you must give up your wonderful house and your expensive car and actually go live in the slums. And you must endure their distrust for a couple of years before they start trusting you. And then they will open up.

    Alternatively, you could examine those places where the poor are actually in a majority – hence politically valuable and courted by numerous power-mongers. THERE you will know what they want.

    One such place is India. Poor and democratic. There the poor have a voice. What are they saying? What do the poor want?

    They don’t want food stamps. They don’t want hand outs. They don’t want charity. They are FORCED to SETTLE for these things.

    What they WANT is the opportunity to earn a living wage.

    The most successful scheme implemented in the villages of India is the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme where the Government guarantees each household 100 days of employment per year. Everywhere this scheme was implemented, the ruling party was returned to power – with an increased mandate.

    THAT tells you something about want the poor want. Listen!

    Comment by Ashwin — September 17, 2009 @ 2:08 am

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