Wednesday, 14 July 2010

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

No Sidelines

Written by Douglas Wilson
Saturday, June 26, 2010

God has fashioned the world in such a way that we always have to come down to the point. However much we might want to obscure the issues, however much we might build great universities with trained brains to cover everything in a dark mist, however much we reward those pundits who make ample room for our lusts and opinions, at the end of the day, we have to decide if we are going to do it God's way, or not.

Everything we do must be done to the glory of God. If a man argues in favor of a certain form of government, then a Christian must, in the final analysis, argue that God wants him to argue in favor of that form of government. If God doesn't want that, then why is he doing it? If God does want it, how does he know? And if, in his system of theology, God doesn't give a rip, why does he call his system of theology Christian?

So there we are. Say, just for a random example, a Christian wants to argue in favor of a secular government. I know, crazy talk, but sometimes you have to use extreme examples to make a point. That Christian either has to say that God doesn't want government to be secular, but that he, the secular Christian, wants it anyway, which is disobedience, or that God does want secular government, and "let me show you all the places in the Bible where God warns kings and princes about the importance of making sure they never acknowledge Him in any of their ways," which is exegetically incoherent, or he must show us in the Bible that some form of Deism is true, which is false.

Convoluted political theology doesn't like to be pinned down this way, but this is what it amounts to. If Baal is god, follow him. If YHWH is God, follow Him. There are no third party movements on Mt. Carmel. Everybody is in the game, and there are no sidelines. So what's it gonna be?

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