Thank you very much, Rev Jim Garlow, DBCJR and darrellmaurina!!
He had me at "Hello"... ;^)
Thank you, Jim, for the thanks. I had become concerned for several days that I could become a “zotting” candidate on Free Republic. I hope my intentions are now clear — bashing Gingrich is not and never has been my goal, though he's not my preferred candidate. On the contrary, I'm trying hard to make a Christian case that we have two acceptable candidates and people of good will can choose either one without compromising their convictions.
In doing so, I'm taking some serious heat in my own evangelical circles for defending the possibility of Christians voting for Newt Gingrich. Given that one of the articles in a nationally known Christian magazine on which I've been posting comments is written by a founding member of my local church and one of my elders is for some reason a Ron Paul fan, I expect an interesting discussion over coffee tomorrow morning at church. My church knows me well and nothing in my own local church will go beyond asking me some hard questions, and that's entirely legitimate to do.
However, this year's primary has opened up a serious division within the evangelical community that is becoming quite bitter. No matter who wins the Republican presidential nomination, many of us have hard work to do in our churches over the next few months and years.
The root issue, as I see it, is that evangelical Christians have become a major force in the Republican Party but often have followed the recommendations of our leaders without thinking through how we would handle a situation like what we face now. There's a lot of overlap between the secular Tea Party movement on the one hand, and the conservative evangelical Christian movement and conservative Roman Catholics on the other, and it seems quite clear that the leaders of the two movements are pulling their overlapping followers in different directions.
I come from the Dutch Reformed theological tradition with a long history of Christian political theory dating back at least to Abraham Kuyper, the prime minister of the Netherlands, founder of what became the country's second-largest denomination, founder of a Christian newspaper and Christian university, and the major builder of a pre-existing Christian political party.
Kuyper built a theological justification for understanding that the best candidate for political office is the person best able to exercise the sword of the civil magistrate in the sphere of the state (Romans 13), not necessarily the best person according to the standards for church office outlined in I Timothy and Titus.
I believe that is a very helpful thing for us to remember. We're electing a president, not a pastor, elder, or deacon. The standards of the church are helpful guides to knowing who would be the best candidate for political office, but they're not the only things we need to consider.
I've said many times here on Free Republic that the primary purposes of civil government is to protect its people against attack. That is why, for me, opposition to abortion and opposition to gutting national defense are key issues. Lots of other things are important, but those are on the list of non-negotiables.
As social conservatives, we need to recognize that it is not liberalism or compromise to select the candidate best able to win a civil election, even if he would be disqualified from church office. Political naivete is a serious problem among evangelicals (less so among Roman Catholic voters), and we need to think through what it means to have a candidate like Gingrich.
Thank you..bookmarking