Friends and respected Westminster Seminary graduates are sharing and “liking” The Gospel Coalition and Brett McCracken’s “We Need Prophets, Not Partisans.”
In a time of increasing poverty and oppression McCracken does an excellent job of warning the believer against becoming conformed to the positions of our major political parties. His failure? Not pointing believers to a just alternative.
I want political influence. I want the same ideas that are reforming my mind to transform my neighbor.
I agree with Aristotle. Politics is the master science that organizes all others. I also believe God is sovereign over every sphere of life … including … “politics,” that part of ethics having to do with the science of government (Webster’s 1828).
I also agree with the Dutch theologian and former Prime Minister, Abraham Kuyper . “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine!”
I think I’m consistent with McCracken when I write I’m to avoid making a major political party my transcendent. That would be negative tribalism, to organize around unjust law. I fail to be salt and light when I do so. I fail to properly love my neighbor when I do so. I fail to “conserve” higher law when I do so.
There is a “tribalism” coherent with the covenant given the twelve tribes of Israel that coheres with the will of our sovereign king.
There is a higher law from I AM that “every man” must submit from Romans 13:1.
What political philosophy transcends the major political parties yet coheres with my faith?
Classical Liberalism. Full stop.
Natural Rights. Law as a defensive instrument for protection of inalienable rights. Not as a progressive or offensive weapon for socially engineering our neighbor.
Classical liberalism transcends the false choice narrative of two party politics.
Classical Liberalism coheres with “the laws of nature and Nature’s God.”
It out rights the Right by more consistently conserving principle and out lefts the Left by upholding the rights of our greatest minority- the individual created in the imago dei.
Classical liberalism allows the unbelieving Cicero, Thoreau and Ayn Rand to coexist in peace with the theology of Kuyper, Machen and Schaeffer.
There is a much needed place for prophets in the political sphere.
Our communities desperately need a blueprint with a track record for delivering authentic reformation.
The believer should be the most thoughtful speaker in the town square with a theology that transcends and fuses across academic disciplines (law & economics).
The prophetic and transcendent ethics a believer can uphold in the civil sphere are:
- All men equal under the law (imago dei)
- Property rights (6th & 8th, Locke)
- Immorality of initiation of aggression (consistent with nature of Christ)
- Limited Government. Sphere Authority. See Kuyper’ 3rd Stone Lecture at Princeton. 1898.
It’s one thing to point out the error of following the media and “tribalism.” It’s another to not offer a just alternative. Revolution is only half the solution. It’s what the believer posits to replace it that’s key.
“One of the greatest injustices we do to our young people is to ask them to be conservative. Christianity is not conservative, but revolutionary.” – Francis Schaeffer