Posted on 05/09/2006 7:08:10 AM PDT by Mr. Silverback
Note: This commentary was delivered by Prison Fellowship President Mark Earley.
Throughout America last week, more than a million illegal immigrants poured into the streets. They took the day off from work, forcing many businesses to close for the day.
They got everyone’s attention. However, it appears they only inflamed an already overheated debate. And the early polls are not showing any change in public opinion.
We need to pause and take a good look at the roles of the Church and the government here. They are different and, in some ways, conflicting. But this is not the first time such a conflict has arisen, and it is possible to formulate a thoughtful Christian perspective that takes both roles into account. Many Christians are giving it serious thought and coming up with good analyses.
First of all, as Christians, we are to care about the poor, widows, orphans, strangers, and that means aliens in our land. That’s explicitly commanded in God’s Word. Leviticus 19:33-34 is a good example. It says, “When an alien lives with you in your land, do not mistreat him. The alien living with you must be treated as one of your native-born.”
That settles the question of how we personally, as Christians, and how the Church at-large treats illegal aliens in our midst. But what about the other question of their legal status in the country? Those are two different things.
The Bible has something here to say as well. It states that government’s job is to preserve order and do justice. St. Augustine famously said that peace flows from order. As a former attorney general, I can tell you that enforcing the rule of law is very important to order and peace.
Congress needs to provide the resources for proper immigration control and establish a program that enables us to process those who have earned the legal right to stay as citizens. In the meantime, we must abide by the law. If thirty years of prison ministry have taught us anything, it’s that we can’t cave in to those who take the law into their own hands. Such disrespect for the law sets a terrible example to everyone. We have to look at what the law says and enforce it.
The hard truth is, if people come here illegally, they cannot be granted amnesty. That simply encourages millions more to cross our borders. Of course, securing the borders is vital to national security. It’s also important that immigrants come here, but through an orderly, established legal process. And employers cannot be allowed to continue to ignore the law against hiring illegal aliens. If we do not enforce the law, we are teaching millions a terrible lesson. We are telling them the law does not matter.
Failure to enforce the law has created this problem, and the ironic aspect is that the very blessing illegal aliens come here to secure for themselves is precisely a result of an economy and society made strong by the rule of law.
It’s true that an unjust law is no law at all, as Martin Luther King famously said. But this is not a case of an unjust law. To secure our borders and to provide for an orderly process of immigrants is a just law, and the Church needs to respect that law even while it administers aid, compassion, and love to those in our midst.
FYI, My Bible says stranger, not alien which IMHO is not the same. KJV.
What an excellent point. I've never heard it put quite that way before.
It's not true because the United States is not populated by Hebrews (!)
It's not a close analogy because, if you're talking about people forcefully entering a land that's already occupied by somebody else, the immigrants in that scenario are the Hebrews, not the Canaanites.
Oh well, ha ha, aside from all that, you say Americans are the Chosen People regardless, because USA is the most moral country on earth? The most moral country on earth?
LS, that really doesn't work.
We have an EXTREME pro-abortion law: any mother can kill any or all of her unborn babies, at any age, at any stage of development, for any reason or for no reason at all, and our Supreme Court says that's enshrined in our Constitution. In terms of extremism, our law is second only to Communist China.
We have 400 million pornography-related web pages on the Internet (more pages of porn than we have population.) We are major, world-wide exporters of both abortion technology and pornography.
At present, an American film which states that "almost everything we were taught about Christ is false" is being gleefully distributed worldwide.
What a uniquely God-pleasing nation!
You wrote: "Oh, and don't forget, they [Mexicans] were the ORIGINAL child killers (Aztecs) in their previous incarnation."
There hasn't been Aztec human sacrifice in Mexico for more than 485 years. Since you, however, are judging nations by their previous (er) "incarnations," would you care to have typical Euro-mix Americans own up to the child-sacrifice committed by Vikings, Druids, and Franks?
Rather than stretching, tailoring, and twisting things around to fit into an elaborate but unlikely occupation-of-Canaan scenario, I think most of us know the right things to do. Individuals and churches should treat people humanely. The government should enforce the laws.
Just as the Mark Earley article very simply stated it.
Well said if you run a boarding house.
Especially one near the border.
Do you have access to a concordance and/or lexicon? If so, please advise what the original Hebrew word is.
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Helping a poor person (even a criminal poor person) is not the same as excusing their behavior. It is a model of the grace God affords us while we are in the depths of the greatest possible spiritual poverty.
One of the things that Constitution guarantees is the right for believers to push for government policies that agree with their beliefs. There is no endorsement in this article of unconstitutional or extra-constitutional policies.
Roger that! I'm 100% against amnesty, but if I had a choice between a tough domestic immigration policy and a secure border with a loose domestic policy, I'd take the latter. That said, they both need to work together: We need a fence that works and a plan that removes a lot of the incentive to come here.
Actually, it is estimated that Red China already has as many Christians in the house churches as there are in America.
Not that that diminishes us, I'm just saying that they're as big and growing.
My son is homeschooled, and we're in a section about the Germanic and Celtic tribes in his world history book. Today he learned about the German habit of sacrificing people to the goddess of fertility by strangling them or cutting their throat from ear to ear and them burying them in a peat bog.
I really don't think I (Celtic descendant through Ireland and Scotland) and my wife (German descendant) should have to pay for that idol worship and murder, so I'me sure not going to hold the Aztecs against the Mexicans.
You're added! See you tomorrow.
Sorry...Sounds more like the Roman Catholic perspective...using sound bites to garner more donators...and fill the land with more RCs...
These folks aren't aliens in our land....they are illegal alien invaders...against whom the state's job is to protect us...for the church to sanction criminal activity is immoral and not Christ like...
You wanna be a missionary and take care of poor Mexicans and OTMs...go to Mexico or OTM to take care of them....Do not help them invade my home...make my family go without and force me to pay for them and neglect my own ...with my own earned money
The bitterness this immoral act causes is not only un Christian it is anti-Christ
The Marxist Jesuits I am sure are tickled to death to see the USA invaded by the criminals and diseased and taken down...
imo
Think as you wish. I think Early is a little off, and could do with a little more Bible study.
Noted. Also, I mentioned proportion, because there are several nations, even a couple in Africa and Latin America, where the % of practicing Christians is very high. Still, on almost any poll about God, Christianity, or whatever, Americans are among the highest in the world.
On March 29, 1994, leading evangelicals and Catholics signed a joint declaration, "Evangelicals and Catholics Together: The Christian Mission in the 3rd. Millennium." Contained within the document, which attempts to bring ecumenical unity, are some seriously compromising agreements regarding proselytizing and doctrinal distinctions.
The 25-page document, originated by Chuck Colson and Catholic social critic Richard John Neuhaus, was signed by 40 noted evangelical and Catholic leaders including Pat Robertson, heads of the Home Mission Board and Christian Life Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, Bill Bright - founder of Campus Crusade for Christ, Mark Noll of Wheaton University, Os Guinness, Jesse Miranda (Assemblies of God), Richard Mauw (President , Fuller Seminary), J.I. Packer and Herbert Schlossberg.
_ It called for Catholic and evangelical cooperation on social and cultural issues where both traditions share common goals, one example being the fight against abortion. The accord also stressed mutual allegiance to the Apostles' Creed, world evangelism, justification "by grace through faith because of Christ," and encouraged "civil" discourse over doctrinal differences.
Chuck Colson has been fervently criticized for his part in this accord and in his defense I can only say he has a desire to see Christ's high priestly prayer (John 17) maintained. He said in his publication, Jubilee, "All true Christians are one in Christ. That has to be. That isn't just a theological proposition. That is a statment of ultimate reality, because God has created us all, and those He has regenerated and called to Himself all belong to the same, one God. Disunity is a condition that God does not want; it defies what God has done. Therefore it is an affirmative duty on the part of every Christian to work for unity among true believers, never compromising truth, of course, but always to work for unity.
The challenge, as I see it, for Mr. Colson and others working toward true Biblical unity of the church is the dillution of their own faith. While I believe there are most likely "born-again" saved people in the Catholic Church whose faith in Christ transcends the teachings and doctrines of the Church, there is a danger of losing sight of the fact that the Catholic Church promises salvation apart from the finished work of Christ on the cross.
The distinction is not in the common words they use, but in the definitions of those same words. While Catholics and non-Catholics may agree with the Apostles' Creed, they don't necessarily share the meaning. While Catholics may say they agree with justification "by grace through faith because of Christ," their actions sometimes shows otherwise. While "civil" discourse over doctrinal differences may be good, if that civility reduces the impact of world evangelism and bringing the lost to Christ (including non-saved Catholics), it does nothing to advance Christ's prayer for unity and hinders the responsibility of believers to spread the gospel throughout the world.
Subsequent Developments
Colson and other signers later agreed to a five-point statement clarifying Protestant distinctives that were not clear in ECT. Critics claimed that the statement blurs doctrinal lines on key issues, including salvation by faith alone. John MacArthur, pastor of the independent Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California, told "Christianity Today" magazine his greatest concern was the apparent disregard for "evangelical doctrinal distinctives." _The new statement says cooperation between evangelicals and "evangelically committed Roman Catholics" on common concerns is no endorsement of the Roman Catholic "church system" or "doctrinal distinctives." It affirms the Protestant understanding of salvation and legitimate evangelism efforts.
Excerpts of the followup agreement include:
_"We understand the statement that 'we are justified by grace through faith because of Christ,' in terms of the substitutionary atonement and imputed righteousness of Christ, leading to full assurance of eternal salvation; we seek to testify in all circumstances and contexts to this, the historic Protestant understanding of salvation by faith alone (sola fide).
_"While we view all who profess to be Christian--Protestant and Catholic and Orthodox--with charity and hope, our confidence that anyone is truly a brother and sister in Christ depends not only on the content of his or her confession but on our perceiving signs of regeneration in his or her life.
_"Though we reject proselytizing as ECT defines it (that is, 'sheep-stealing' for denominational aggrandizement), we hold that evangelism and church planting are always legitimate, whatever forms of church life are present already."
In November '97, a group of evangelicals and Catholics led by Charles Colson and Father Richard John Neuhaus released a statement, "The Gift of Salvation," in which they say together, "We understand that what we here affirm is in agreement with what the Reformation traditions have meant by justification by faith alone." The statement says, "We agree that justification is not earned by any good works or merits of our own; it is entirely God's gift, conferred through the Father's sheer graciousness, out of the love that He bears us in His Son, who suffered on our behalf and rose from the dead for our justification."
Only 35 short years ago Roman Catholicism was included among the "modern Cults" about which Harold Lindsell warned his students in a course by that name at Fuller. Today, in spite of its false gospel of works and ritual which millions of martyrs faithfully opposed to the death, Catholicism is embraced by our most trusted evangelical leaders.
_While ECT and later agreements may allow some "convergence and cooperation" between evangelicals and Catholics in many public tasks, there remains some important differences including "the meaning of baptismal regeneration, the Eucharist ... diverse understandings of merit, reward, purgatory, and indulgences; Marian devotion and the assistance of the saints in the lives of salvation..."
One often hears the naive expression, especially in justifying the new ecumenical acceptance of Roman Catholics as Christians, "I embrace all those as brethren who 'love Jesus' and 'name the name of Christ.'" Yet many cultists profess to love Jesus and almost all "name the name of Christ." One must discern what is meant by such words. The gospel of God's grace is denied by every cult and false religion, including Roman Catholicism, where infant baptism removes original sin and makes one a child of God, salvation is in the church and its sacraments, redemption is an ongoing process of perpetually offering the body and blood of Christ upon its altars, and good works merit acceptance with God.
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