Hosted by Jared Luttjeboer| Guest: Dr. Alan Strange, Mid-America Reformed Seminary
Jared: Welcome back to MarsCast, the official podcast of Mid-America Reformed Seminary. I'm Jared Luttjeboer, and this is episode 2 of our four-part series on political exhaustion and the church.
Last time, we explored the pastoral challenges of leading politically divided congregations — the warning signs that politics has become an idol, the difficult discernment about when to speak to political issues, and how to engage people who've made political positions into tests of orthodoxy.
Well, today we're going to go a little deeper and answer the question: What does political exhaustion reveal about our theology? Back with me is Dr. Alan Strange from Mid-America. Today, we're using cultural fatigue as a sort of diagnostic tool for deeper theological problems. We're going to examine confused eschatology, a kind of misplaced hope, and the sorts of resources that the Reformed tradition offers for navigating these challenges.
Jared: So we want to start with the theological problem beneath political exhaustion. Dr. Strange, political exhaustion — I want to be clear here — we're not talking about just being tired of news cycles, weary of social media, or of debates and arguments that take place there. But often political exhaustion signals something that's much deeper, and that's a misplaced hope. When you see Christians completely devastated by election results, those who are frantically anxious about Supreme Court appointments, treating political victories as vindication of the kingdom of God, what theological category errors are usually at work? What are people getting wrong about the nature of the kingdom of Christ, the purpose of government, or the trajectory of history here?
Dr. Strange: Well, let me say first, Jared, as I always like to, that it's a pleasure to be with you. And our wonderful listeners — we do very much appreciate your support, your prayers, your gifts, your use even of these podcasts as we speak together about these things.
To your question specifically, there's a lot to say here. I think maybe a good way to start getting at this is to recall a conversation that we had — Jared, you and I — when we were at CrossCon down in Louisville at the start of the year. There was a very earnest young man who spoke to us a number of times. And you may remember that at one point he asked me, he just threw the question out this way: he said, Are you optimistic?
And I told him I didn't know enough — and neither did anyone else — to answer that question. Because one thinks that to answer the question Are you optimistic? you have to be able to say something like, "Will my party carry the day in the midterms? How will the stock market do? And what I've invested in — how's that going to prosper?" Those kinds of questions. And I said that optimism as such, speaking in those terms, that's not really a biblical or theological way to think about things. Here we have the whole category errors in all of this. Because he was asking me spiritually — he was asking me even something about my eschatology. And my answer to that is optimism as such was a fleshly matter, not a spiritual or biblical one.
I said, the Bible talks about hope. So the category of optimism isn't something that I, as a theologian, can address. I mean, I get all kinds of stuff in my inbox telling me, because this is what the stock market is doing, I should be pessimistic, or I should be optimistic, or I should buy this or get that. You know, we all deal with that sort of thing.
But I said, hope is what we have as Christians. I have great hope — which is not to say everything's going my way, to quote the great song from Oklahoma. My dear late mother — I grew up hearing that she liked to sing a variety of things, certainly hymns and psalms, but she would also sometimes sing things from Broadway and give them her own twist. And I heard her — she had a beautiful alto voice — and I heard her more than once sing, if it was a really lovely day out and we were down in the south, and it was often very lovely. Not something we see as much here in the winter, but though it's pretty nice right now. But she would sing: "What a beautiful morning. Oh, what a beautiful day. I have a beautiful feeling. Everything's going..." And of course, my way is what the musical says. She would say, God's way.
And that really — I mean, you could say, that's hokey, that's corny. Well, I still remember it. I mean, I heard her singing this as a little child, and it impressed itself on me. And she actually lived that way. She had — like all of us — many things happen in her life, many trials, many difficult — like we all do. But she kept that hope. So a lot of people would look at her and say, "Oh, she's very optimistic." I mean, she's full of hope, which is something rather different.
So yes — even with Drag Queen Story Hour, down perhaps at the local library. And I'm not saying that that's something as Christians we should not oppose and seek to bring to an end — there's a lot of good things we can do about that. But in the meantime, we always have to remember, no matter what's going on in the political scene, that God is truly in control. And He's working out His perfect will. And all of these things are in it.
And there's great hope because of the first coming and the second coming of Jesus Christ, whose kingdom is not of this world — John 18:36. And who, when He said that, was heading to the cross. And of course, if you're going for optimism — if you were to interview the apostles, say, after the arrest — and say, Are you optimistic? They would be like, "Are you kidding? I mean, this is all coming crashing down. Jesus has been arrested!"
But what He was doing on their behalf — which is to say in their place, in our place, in your and my place — condemned He stood as He was before Pilate. He took judicially upon Himself the guilt that was ours and suffered the wrath of God. And in the cross was made to cry out in dereliction: "My God, why hast thou forsaken me?" All of that was for our salvation. And that's the very basis of all of our hope — that He defeated Satan, death, hell, the grave. And that's why we have hope. Optimism? I don't know what's going to happen tomorrow. We may have terrible disasters come upon us. But I think we have hope. All who trust Him will live forever with Him here and hereafter. Here's our message of hope to this poor, sin-benighted world.
Jared: Amen. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. Now let's talk about the Reformed tradition's resources for addressing these things. I think the Reformed tradition has always maintained that the kingdom of Christ is distinct from earthly kingdoms, yet we're called to seek the welfare of the city. What is this framework — whether that's of Kuyper or of some two-kingdom approach, whether modern or older models — what does that offer an exhausted Christian that contemporary political theology — and that could be Christian nationalism or progressive Christianity — often misses?
Dr. Strange: Well, we are indeed called to be concerned for the welfare of the city. I'm glad you brought that up. We seek to bring always — as believers — we seek to bring all of our faith to all of life. So we don't believe in a naked public square. Many are familiar with that kind of language.
And we believe that the Christian, as part of the city of God — to use Augustine's metaphor — the City of God is a large work, but it's really, it continues to be for us now very instructive about these things. And the city of God is not to be indifferent to the city of this world. No, we care deeply for our neighbor and his welfare in every respect. But we don't think that we are to turn the city of this world into the city of God. The two remain distinct, though we're always inviting — in both the church as an institute and as an organism, as we go out into the world and work in it and do everything we do — we're inviting those in the city of this world to abandon that and to come over to the city of God. For those in the kingdom of darkness, to come into the kingdom of light.
That's the most basic two-kingdom reality — that we're in one or the other, but not both. And we invite — we're in the kingdom of light, and we invite those in darkness to come into that. But as we say, we're also, in another sense, in that kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ that is not of this world, while we're in this world, while we labor in it and with it — we're not of it. So we call among the nations; we're to go out into all of the world and call all to come to Christ. And those who will be thus gathered also to be perfected in Him, and they come into His kingdom.
Now, one of the problems with some modern two-kingdom approaches is that there's no integration point as there was in the older approach — Calvin's, for example — in which Christendom provided an integration point. We don't want an approach that, on the one hand, is right-wing, like Christian nationalism, or, on the other hand, left-wing, like progressive Christianity, that sees political outcomes as paramount and puts the church in the service of that, either on the left or the right.
And I end my book, Empowered Witness, talking about — my last chapter especially — talks about all of this. And I say this as I talk about the spirituality of the church, which means that the church as institute should not be swamped with politics and political concerns. I say: the spirituality of the church properly does not mean and must not mean either that the institutional church or Christians fail to care for the world around them.
In the great tsunami of 2004 — some of you may remember that — Christian organizations and Christian churches responded with overwhelming aid. Hindus and Muslims, because of their different theological convictions, tended not to, viewing the destruction as, on the part of the Hindus, deserved karma (this was said in the press), or, on the part of Muslims, the wrath of Allah against bad Muslims. Christians must never respond in this way, but must respond with the compassion and self-sacrifice that befits followers of Jesus.
The spirituality of the church ought not to prompt us to say, "Be warmed, be filled, and go away." It frees us to serve God and each other. It does not make us those who flee the world, but those who are able to engage each other from the vantage point, and then I give a lengthy quote — and I would simply commend this to our listeners — B.B. Warfield's wonderful sermon, Imitating the Incarnation, and I quote that, and talk about the spirituality of the church as it relates to that.
And then I say: the spiritual independence of the church — the doctrine of the spirituality of the church — should never be taken to mean that the church may attend to its religious duties and fail to love its neighbors. No, the church must attend to those duties. Like the Good Samaritan, we must seek to be a good neighbor even to those whom we would rather ignore and not help. We must seek both to preach the gospel and to do good to all people, especially those of the household of faith, as Galatians 6 says. Not only is such a holistic approach not at variance with the spirituality of the church, but it's a part of the proper living out of the spirituality of the church.
And so I end by saying: the spirituality of the church needs to be helpfully recovered for the ongoing dialogue of how the church is to relate to the world in which it finds itself — both in how it distinguishes itself from the world and how it gives itself to the world. That's what we need to be about.
Jared: I think to round this conversation out, we need to examine the range of responses that Christians are adopting. I think we often frame this as a sort of binary — like Christian nationalism versus a sort of pietistic withdrawal. But are there other positions that Christians are adopting in response to political exhaustion that we're not talking about enough? What sort of emerging approaches are you seeing, maybe from younger Christians or from those who've left more politically activist churches? How should we evaluate these various responses theologically?
Dr. Strange: Well, as I've hinted at, there are various shades of Kuyper that may help us. Now, I need to say again, we can't really, in these little talks together, get at this as fully as I'm hoping to in my Christian and politics talks in the evening on Thursdays. So you're getting just a little bit of this.
But David Innes has a book from a few years ago called Christ and the Kingdoms of Men: Foundations of Political Life — it's a P&R book. It's a very good book. And it has a lot of food for thought politically. And so does David VanDrunen's book, Politics After Christendom.
Now, you can take the last as an example. David is a good friend of mine, but we differ on some things. In the first section of his book, he's talking about — it's more where his theory is — it's his political theology. And I have some differences with him in terms of the question of how to connect things and not just distinguish them, which I think Kuyper and others sought to do, particularly in a post-Christian context. Think of Sean Lucas' comment on D.G. Hart's Secular Faith — he says there in his review of Hart's book: we all agree on separation of church and state, but we can't separate our faith from anything. God and state are not to be separated. And I think that we want to keep these things in view.
And there's a lot that we can learn from. So, you know, a person may — wherever Innes may be coming from or VanDrunen — you may disagree with various things. That doesn't mean there's not plenty to learn. I think the second part of David's book, where he actually gets into the politics, I think he's happily inconsistent with some things in the first. That's my view of it. And what he actually gets down to in politics is really very helpful. We'll talk more about all of this in the course.
I've learned from many things. I've learned from Rushdoony's Institutes of Biblical Law. I'm definitely not a Christian Reconstructionist or Theonomist. But I would urge Christians to pick and choose, because what should define us is the Bible and our creeds and confessions. And so we can take some different political tacks. We need not — I always say this to my students — you don't have to self-identify. Some students feel like there's this urge: you have to self-identify as some particular political position. And you may choose to, but I don't think you have to.
Jared: Next time on MarsCast, we're going to shift from diagnosis to formation. We'll explore what proactive political discipleship looks like in the local church — how to form people's political imaginations during non-election years, what resources pastors can draw on to equip their people, and how the church can offer more compelling political formation than the algorithm provides.
If you found this episode helpful, share it with your consistory, your congregation, or anyone wrestling with these questions. This has been MarsCast, the official podcast of Mid-America Reformed Seminary. I'm Jared Luttjeboer. Thank you for listening. I'll catch you next time.
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