Defending Christian doctrine with sensibility
Listening to The Briefing this morning Albert Mohler described an exchange between Senator Bernie Sanders and President Trump’s nominee for the White House Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, during a Senate Budget committee nomination hearing. Mohler described the exchange as an attack on religious liberty, since Senator Sanders was declaring Vought unfit for office based on his religious convictions. While I’m sure Senator Sanders was trying block the nomination, I believe that the religious element of the attack was purely incidental.
Senator Sanders accusation of Vought centered around a blog post where Vought was defending his alma mater, Wheaton College, in their dismissal of a professor for statements regarding Islam that went against the Christian school’s core beliefs. Here is the line in the blog post that caused the controversy:
Senator Sanders declared Vought unfit for office because that type of statement is
As a Christian, I believe that Vought is correct in the ultimate sense that once we pass into the after-life, the followers of Jesus are the exclusive recipients of life and everyone else, including Muslims, is eternally condemned. However, outside of the Christian context, I think Vought’s statements have an entirely different connotation that at face value would make him unfit for government office. It is the statement taken outside of the Christian context that I believe Senator Sanders saw an opportunity. The opportunity was to exploit the contextual implications of Voughts statements in the blog post to bring him down. I don’t think Senator Sanders was trying to necessarily attack Vought’s Christian faith but rather use the statement out of context to paint an Islamophobic veneer over Vought’s reputation. Vought didn’t help himself in his responses.
I’m a Christian, and I believe in a Christian set of principles based on my faith. That post … was to defend my alma mater, Wheaton College, a Christian school that has a statement of faith that includes the centrality of Jesus Christ for salvation.
This type of statement works just fine within a religious context where there’s an understanding that the condemnation comes in the after-life. Vought however failed to note the contextual differences in being condemned in the eternal sense and being condemned as our increasingly secular society would take such a statement to mean.
This points to a larger issue within the Christian community where we largely ignore how our statements of faith are received outside of the Christian context. When you take out the Christian underpinnings, statements like being “washed in the blood”, “[Muslims and other non-Christians] stand condemned”, and “army of God” have completely different meanings and sound downright frightening. Inside the fold of Christianity these are perfectly fine statements but we need to be more cautious when we speak with non-believers because they are completely blind to the spiritual world where these statements make sense.
My eyes were opened to this idea when I brought my Indian and subsequently Hindu friend and her husband to church one week and started listening to the words in the service as she would hear them. I encourage you to do this sometime, listen to your church service and take everything said at face value as someone outside of the faith would hear it and see what types of reactions you have. If you aren’t a bit appalled and frightened then your church may not be taking Christianity seriously enough, but if you do get a sense of how weird it all sounds then I think that’s an excellent step towards understanding a perspective not shared by yourself and your church community. Anytime you can step outside your own world view you get better at thinking about your beliefs more critically and gain the ability to relate with people different than yourself. In our current cultural climate the ability to relate to people different than ourselves is perhaps one of the most important skills we can develop.