Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli recently told a group of 250 pastors that the churches are not only permitted — but also expected — to speak out on political issues.
He encouraged the pastors to give “guidance on issues that fall in the political world.”
“Cuccinelli followed in the footsteps of those government magistrates in the Bible of whom [John] Calvin says that are praised for ‘taking care that religion flourished under them in purity and safety.'” writes Bojidar Marinov in a guest column on the website American Vision.
Bojidar is the co-founder of the Bulgarian Society for Individual Liberty and served as its first chairman. He continues:
Indeed, if the church is instructed to speak to governors and kings (Matt.10:18), then every governor or king that encourages the church to speak to him and advise him in his policies is obedient to his Biblical mandate in his calling before God.
Whatever Cuccinelli’s personal reasons for his encouragement to pastors could be, his call must be praised highly by the church as an example for biblically obedient magistrates, and the pastors must be strongly admonished to take Cuccinelli’s advice.
Bojidar goes on to say, in part:
In an article with the disparaging title, “When Churches Play at Politics,” Peter Wehner disagrees that the pastors should accept Cuccinelli’s encouragement – and Christ’s commandment, for that matter – to instruct governors. He summarizes his position with the words of Tim Keller, a prominent PCA [Presbyterian Church in America] pastor: “The church as the church ought to be less concerned about speaking to politics and more concerned about service.”
Education used to be a service provided by the church; today it is politics from beginning to end – laws, federal and state agencies, regulations, teachers’ unions, etc. Care for the elderly was traditionally Christian service, today it is politics – Social Security, Medicare, regulations and tax rules for retirement accounts, inheritance issues, etc.
Care for the poor has always been the responsibility of the families and of the church – as the Bible clearly states in both the Old and the New Testaments – and today welfare is the largest financial commitment of the modern civil governments, as well the major topic in all political campaigns, legislature sessions, and political debates.
Regulation of relationships between employers and employees, debtors and creditors, was the topic of many sermons in the colonial era and the early U.S. History; today these economic issues are entirely within the jurisdiction of the state.
So where do we stop? And how can the pastors oppose this absorption of everything by the state?
Keller doesn’t say; neither does Wehner. They do not seem to notice the trend; or if they do notice it, they do not seem concerned about it.
One could make a conclusion they welcome the march to statism. Eager to limit the pastors to their “spiritual” calling, they do not seem as eager to limit the politicians to their “secular” calling. Socialism wins by default in the outworking of such a theology in practice.
Wehner himself adds another argument against the pastors’ political involvement: Their lack of competence or insight. This is a serious issue, we must admit.
Wehner puts the buggy before the horse. He uses the incompetence of the pastors to justify his position that the pastors shouldn’t get involved in politics. The truth is, the incompetence of those pastors is the very product of Wehner’s theology taught in the seminaries.
The seminaries stand on the same foundation Wehner stands on: Churches should not “play at politics,” i.e. pastors should be silent on political issues.
Pastors indeed are incompetent. And Wehner and others like him bear the responsibility for it.
So, Cuccinelli is right, pastors must speak up on political issues. But we also need to understand that as long as the seminaries are captured by professors who refuse to preach the comprehensive Gospel of the Kingdom of God, the church will remain incompetent and unable to speak.
As long as the seminaries’ theology encourages the cowardly retreat from our obligation to build a Christian culture in obedience to the Great Commission, our land will be under the oppression of ungodly powers.
Competence comes only from the Word of God, and from a theology that submits everything under Christ and His Kingdom. Christians must stop listening to Wehner and his theological accomplices and accept their comprehensive responsibilities in the Kingdom of Christ.
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