Posted on 02/12/2006 5:26:34 PM PST by Tailgunner Joe
I received a phone call from a friend who goes to a conservative Baptist church. She asked one of the assistant pastors to help promote Justice Sunday. The purpose of Justice Sunday is to involve Christians in the political process. The pastor argued that Christians should not be involved in politics or social issues because Jesus and the disciples did not vote, rally support for social issues, or argue for Christian involvement. Christians who view the New Testament as normative for Church life are committing a significant theological error.
In the New Testament era, Israel, and by extension the Church, was a captive nation under judgment with no voice in Roman affairs. The inscription on the tribute coin given to Jesus (Matt. 22:1522) read: TI[berius] CAESAR DIVI AUG[usti] F[ilius] AUGUSTUS, or, in translation, Tiberius Caesar Augustus, son of the deified Augustus. The inscription was virtually an ascription of deity to the reigning emperor. . . . The irritating presence of the coin was a constant reminder to the Jews of their subservient condition.1 The Jews showed their true allegiance and the reason for their foreign domination when they cried out in Pilates court when their Messiah was presented to them, We have no king but Caesar (John 19:15). Not to be involved is neither religious nor political neutrality.
First-century Christianity developed in a time of political oppression, but this did not stop the church from making a religious-political statement that was perceived to be a threat to the status quo. The church was rightly accused of upsetting the world, saying that there is another king, Jesus (Acts 17:67). As long as the churches were not viewed as a political threat, they were treated with indifference by the Roman government. Churches could talk about religion and its spiritual dynamic on the soul, but there could be no talk regarding who was god.
We should be reminded that the rallying cry of the early church was Jesus is Lord (Acts 16:31). This was a political statement. The Roman provincial authorities would not have been concerned with what they considered to be a Jewish sect (Acts 24:5, 14) as long as these Christians (Acts 11:26) had maintained that Jesus was a lord, subservient to the Roman Emperor and just one god among the many gods already part of the Roman pantheon. Of course, if Christians had presented Jesus to the Greco-Roman world as another God, their faith would long since have gone the way of Mithraism.2 The declaration was that there was only one God, and Hes not Caesar!
You cannot serve two masters. If Jesus is indeed Lord and King (Rev. 19:16), then even Caesar would have to bow before Him (Phil. 2:911; cf. Matt. 2:118). The Emperors saw the consistency in this view, many Christians do not.
As citizens of the United States, we do not live under Caesar! This may come as a shock to Christians, but its true. In principle we are to render unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar only when we define our Caesar. We live under the Constitution of the United States at the federal level in which we have multiple freedoms, including the right, according the First Amendment, to petition the government for a redress of grievances. The Tenth Amendment to the Constitution informs us that the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.
We are also under the constitutional jurisdiction of the state where we live. There may be additional laws at the county, borough, city, or parish level. These are our Caesars. As citizens, we can vote, express our political opinions, start political parties, support political candidates, campaign and lobby for the enactment of legislation, freedoms that did not exist in first-century Jerusalem or anywhere else in the Roman empire.
2. Rodney Stark, For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 1
Gary DeMar ping (again)
We have images of Americans on our currency, not some self described
deity in Rome. Way back in Judea the government was an alien entity from an alien land. In America the government is of, by and for the people, not of, by and for Cesar.
Then, by that pastor's logic, they were also full of sh#t - because the Bible doesn't mention any one of them ever 'taking a dump' either.
Stupid assistant - she should have gone right to the top man.
Are you sure its not the Gullible church? LOL
How to hogtie a conservative!:)
Hope this is not true for it was a good laugh, but sad it real!
Ahem! Jesus WAS a social issue. Why do they think he knocked over the tables in the temple? Exercise?
Thanks for the DeMar bump, and passing it right along...
And here's another one by DeMar, RW. Hope you're well. 8~)
The political threat to the status quo from well-organised churches with large congregations, which the MSM has dubbed "MEGA-church," is compelling liberals to find some means to quash the "MEGA-church" revolution world-wide.
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