(Lecture given to the LCMS Florida-Georgia District president's convocation in Daytona, Sept. 24, 2008, and at Village Lutheran Church in Ladue, MO, Oct. 5, 2008)
By Uwe Siemon-Netto
In our Lutheran hymn, Praise the Almighty, my Soul, Adore Him, we sing in the second stanza.
“Trust not in princes, they are but mortal;
Earth-born they are and soon decay.”
This makes you wonder if there is any point in my speaking to you about us as sovereigns in a free land. Why waste your time thinking about the leaders you will elect next month if these leaders face the grim prospect of rotting away?
It takes a Lutheran sense of the paradox to make sense of this -- to square the concept of political priesthood in our secular reality with the hymn’s stark appraisal of the worth of rulers we elect:
Naught are their counsels at life's last portal,
When the dark grave doth claim its prey.
Here is my point. At -- life’s -- last –portals the counsel of secular leaders is indeed worthless. They are doomed like this whole dying world. It will disappear. It cannot be fixed -- never mind of what loudmouthed utopians on the left and right of America’s religious spectrum will tell you.
On the other hand, next month you will not elect leaders to exercise power beyond life’s last portals. They choose men and women to manage this world while it is dying – to rule the left-hand kingdom, as we Lutherans say. And that God wants this dying world to be managed while it is still around we know from Romans 13. So rule they must.
This year we face elections that could turn out to be the most crucial in American history. You will elect managers for a world in a calamitous economic crisis, which threatens our freedoms, possibly even democracy.
This is why I will now jump ahead of myself for a moment. Let me tell you right tout that this might be a kairos for the Lutheran Church, its God-given moment in history.
Now is not the moment to hide behind our two kingdoms doctrine. We have important things to say about this crisis without doing harm to our own theology.
Of course theologians are not called to opine on how to resolve this crisis.
But they do have the duty to say loudly and clearly that this situation was brought about by people acting exactly contrary to the ethos this presentation is really all about -- the Christian’ vocation in the secular realm.
This crisis was caused by greed and selfish desires. Greed is the very opposite of the neighborly love that is the foundation of all Christian action in the world.
I shall explore this aspect of the Christian’s role in the world more deeply in a few minutes.
But I would like to stress that you should not be fooled by a temporary drop in gas prices or by people telling you that America is swimming in oil and that there will be plenty of oil around for the next sixty year.
Maybe there is. But from the perspective of the Lutheran doctrine of vocation we must ask: “And after sixty years – then what? The global oil emergency will remain to be a grim reality that cannot be talked away. It is might bring major wars, civil disorder, starvation, a health care calamity of unthinkable proportions, and perhaps the disintegration of this nation we love.
“Waiting for the lights to go out,” ran the title of a terrifying essay in the Sunday Times of London four years ago. Its author, Bryan Appleyard, based his article on the prediction of Sweden’s Uppsala University that the world would start running out of petroleum within a decade.
Then he painted a tableau of stark prospects of wars over the last barrels of oil, of food riots, of a shortage of basic petroleum-based medicines and of surgery being performed on patients under hypnosis because without oil we cannot produce anesthetics.
Does this sound like scaremongering? Perhaps. Perhaps the situation is not as dire as Appleyard will have us believe – at least not yet. But then scaremongering is not a characteristic of the Sunday Times, a venerable and responsible newspaper.
I believe our Church with its twin doctrines of the two kingdoms and of the Christian’s divine vocation in the secular realm must take these warnings extremely seriously. More than ever it must remind Christians forcefully of the responsibility God has given them as they vote on November.
I won’t endorse any candidate. It would be improper for me as a foreigner and a Lutheran theologian to give endorsements. But as a Lutheran theologian I want to make three points.
. We are living in a democracy. In democracies, the citizens are the sovereigns. They are the conduits through which the rulers of a nation receive their authority from God, if I may adapt Romans 13 to our political system. This places a frightening responsibility on the shoulders of voters. And we in the Church must tell them that.
. Going to the polls is therefore a vocation. It is a divine assignment, just as being a parent, a spouse, a plumber, student, a congressman or the President of the United States are divine assignments. Lutheran theology teaches that in our various vocations we are called to serve our neighbors out of love. And let me remind you that the term, neighbor, includes all the generations that will follow us. This is the most powerful argument against those who say we needn’t worry because there was enough oil around for the next 60 years.
. In fulfilling this divine assignment faithfully, we render the highest possible service to God. This makes us members of the universal priesthood of all believers. Thus the altruistic Christian voter is a real priest – but a priest officiating not at the altar or in the pulpit but in managing our decaying world.
This in a nutshell should be the Lutheran contribution to the debate about faith and politics. It provides a healthy alternative to this campaign season’s endless jabber by “false clerics and schismatic spirits” as Luther called churchmen lecturing government on how to handle their business.
Seen from the Lutheran perspective, Christians act as God’s mask when they cast their votes – masks behind which God plays a curious kind of mummery, as Luther called it. Acting through these masks, He bestows power on political leaders. And as God’s masks the electorate serves Him by holding the politicians feet to the fire.
Yes, my friends, “throwing the bums out” is also a divine assignment.
The Church has no right to opine on political topics, unless they coincide with of theological concerns. We must stand up for the sanctity of life and make clear that as an order of creation marriage can never been anything other as the union between one man and one woman.
I applaud those 55 Roman Catholic bishops who this year de facto excommunicated political candidates running on an abortion rights platform. I am proud of the Missouri-Lutheran Church of the Holy Cross in Wichita, Kansas, for excommunicating Dr. George Tiller, who has performed 60,000 late-term abortions and is killing 100 unborn babies week after week. And I find it shameful that a neighboring ELCA congregation accepted this unrepentent mass murderer as a communicant member forgetting Luther's warning that it was dangerous for unrepentant sinners to receive the Lord’s true body and blood.
Excommunication of pro-choice leaders is a theological necessity and not meant to be a political move. But if it results in political fallout, so be it. This is not something the Church should do undercover. The Christian congregation is no secret society.
Beyond this the Church must not “interfere with the rulers’ craft,” as Luther said. As Church we cannot tell Washington how to fight or end wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, or how to solve the immigration quagmire or salvage social security.
Such problems cannot be resolved by faith but only by reason, a gift from God to help us manage this dying world. Luther called reason the empress of all things in the left-hand kingdom. The Church has the right to admonish secular rulers to use this gift wisely. But it must stop there. It does not have the right to promote specific policies.
The Church must also advise the voters to exercise their office by virtue of good sense.
Especially in Times as dangerous as these the nation’s sovereigns – the voters -- must ask candidates to be brutally truthful about the dire state the world is in, and how these candidates intend to deal with this, even at the risk of proposing unpopular measures.
Voters would fail in their priestly duties if they based their decision on superficiality, prejudice, ideology, conjecture, ignorance, selfishness, and a sloppy desire for an “easy way out.”
Their vocation is to exercise their priesthood in the world based on informed logic and neighborly love. This is no time to be fluffy. Pastors would do well to tell their congregants that.
There is a tendency among some Christian groups to play ostrich, sticking their heads in the sand. I have even noticed this among some confessional Lutherans who sometimes act like Amishmen without horses.
Playing ostrich is not a Christian option. A Christian failing to vote acts like the useless servant who kept the pound entrusted to him hidden away in a napkin (Luke 19:20).
The same is true for Christians deaf to God’s calling to run for public office. Unlike some sects that make their followers shun our fallen world the Lutheran Church teaches the opposite: Christians must engage the world. Never mind that as fallible human beings they are bound to make mistakes; God will ultimately correct those, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in the dark days of Nazi rule.
No doubt, God’s charge to the electorate in a democracy has chilling implications. In a democracy, voters do not have the excuse to say, “It wasn’t me,” when things go wrong as a result of their choice. Germans who elected Hitler in 1933 didn’t get away with this excuse either.
Biblically speaking, these German voters had received their authority from God (Romans 13:1) but squandered it by handing power to the wrong rulers who had never made any bones about their evil intentions.
In today’s terms, the divine assignment to the voters precludes copouts such as, “I didn’t realize that the world is running out of oil, and that antihistamines, antiseptics, artificial limbs, aspirin, cortisone and heart valves are all made from oil.”
Or: “Nobody has ever told me that the president of oil-rich Venezuela is currently scheming militarily with the Russians against our country, which is buying his oil.”
Or: “How was I to know that most of the world’s oil supplies are in the hands of quite unfriendly people pursuing political ends that are starkly different from ours?”
The voters’ priestly rank in the secular “left-hand kingdom” involves noblesse oblige; this rank comes with responsibility. Their first responsibility is to ask questions, to inform themselves about the most significant issues the next government will have to handle.
This information is all around – in national and international publications, radio and television programs, and the Internet. It follows that Christians in the media also have a calling to work altruistically and serve their customers as neighbors.
No other church body is theologically better equipped than the Lutheran to keep hammering in this verity: Priestly service in a democracy consists of an interlocking chain of divine assignments of love. And one important link in this chain has to be the work of journalists.
This should be evident to everyone, which makes you wonder why most of the ten universities owned by the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod are not making the training of journalists their top priority – journalists endowed with a priestly understanding of their vocation, priestly in the sense that I described before.
And it is incomprehensible to me why the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod is not using one of its most valuable assets, KFUO, the world’s oldest radio station, as an instrument of this priestly service to the world.
The Church is not only the property of Christ’s right-hand realm. It is also anchored in the left-hand kingdom as a corporate citizen.
Like all citizens, corporate citizens have divine assignments in the world. It would be the logical and gratifying vocation of the corporate citizen LCMS to turn KFUO into a priestly gift of love to the world – not as a pulpit, but by transforming it into an unbiased news medium covering regional, national and world events fairly – without any spin, not even a Lutheran spin.
At this point allow me to explain where I am coming from. I am extremely passionate about my vocation as an international journalist who has covered major world events for the last 52 years – the construction of the Berlin Wall, the Cuban missile crisis, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the wars in Vietnam and the Middle East, and I have tried to be as non-ideological as humanly possible.
Today I am horrified by the decline of my beloved craft with many of whose contemporary practitioners I have little in common. Rare are secular truth-seekers of the type we used to be in my days on the beat.
If we had more time I would describe to you from my own experiences how exactly forty years ago media mischief transformed the American victory in the Communist Tet Offensive in Vietnam into a military defeat. I was there when it happened, spending weeks in heavy combat and standing by mass graves filled with the bodies of South Vietnamese civilians murdered by the communists.
Later I worked as chaplain intern with Vietnam veterans who have never recovered from the rejection by their fellow citizens, including pastors who had expelled from their churches during services. Let me leave it at that except to say that these has been haunting me ever since.
So now you know why I an emphasizing the need for a Lutheran, priestly approach to journalism so strongly. In journalism as in politics the sense of vocation often conflicts with the desire for self-gratification.
Moreover, the realism inherent in Lutheran doctrine provides an answer to one of the worst fallacies in post-Reformation church history -- the fallacy of liberal and evangelical theologians that the Gospel transforms culture.
Such beliefs are schwaermerisch – they are utopian. They have caused Christian idealists of the right and the left to glorify their own country or even the Soviet Union and Pol Pot’s Cambodia as precursors of the Kingdom of God.
Utopian error caused those foolish American clergymen I mentioned a minute ago to follow political ends in the Vietnam era and disown their own parishioners when they returned from the war wounded in body and soul.
The Lutheran position, by contrast, is clear and biblical: Christ did not die to make society nicer or fairer; He suffered to redeem the believer from sin, thus giving him eternal life.
If Christian voters are priests in the left-hand kingdom, so are Christians as rulers. All secular authorities are ministers of God, according to Romans 13:6. Paul used the Greek term, “leitourgoi,” which is the root of the English word, liturgists.
This suggests that secular rulers and the celebrants in church have parallel assignment in their respective realms. One of their many assignments is to proclaim truth – the eternal truth, which is Christ, in the case of pastors, and the truth about the state of the world in the case of politicians.
Earlier I spoke of the interlocking chain of divine assignments of love. Here again you have this chain. The priestly task to seek and proclaim the truth about the state of the world links voters, journalists and political officials if they are Christians – and of course many others.
This is particularly important to remember in a situation as explosive as the present one with a nuclear war between Iran and Israel looking more and more plausible, with genocidal wars being fought for decades in Africa and new armed conflicts shaking the former Soviet Union, with radical Islamists bent on defeating the West in Afghanistan, and gaining power in other parts of the Muslim world, notably Pakistan, with booming India and China competing with the United States and Europe over the world’s depleting oil supplies.
Which brings us back to oil. In the mid-nineteen seventies, when this writer was managing editor of a Hamburg newspaper, the world received its first warning that this fabulous gift to humanity was nearing its depletion. There were long lines at the gas stations. Politicians, corporations, shipping magnates, scientists, inventors and private citizens were busy finding alternatives.
New locomotives fueled with pellets from woodchips and coal dusts were designed on drawing bards, as were freighters with massive, fuel-saving sails and Zeppelin-like airships carrying passengers and freight cheaply, albeit slowly, from continent to continent. Back then, one man in upstate New York even collected waste grease from fast food restaurants and converted it to fuel for the diesel engine of his Volkswagen Rabbit, an innovation of that period.
But then came another oil glut, and for three decades all these necessary ideas – necessary because petroleum was still running out – were discarded. America allowed its railroads and public transport systems to degenerate to Third-World levels.
Passenger vessels stopped taking people from point A to point B but served instead as floating malls, called cruise ships. While the rest of the world developed fuel-efficient cars, Detroit built the Hummer. All this has occurred in bipartisan harmony under the less than watchful eyes of legislators more interested in pork than the wellbeing of future Americans. And the voters, the nation’s sovereigns, allowed this to happen.
Erich Kaestner (1899-1974), a brilliant German author with a fiendish sense of irony, coined the aphorism, “Whom God assigns power he first deprives of his mind.” Kaestner did not mean this blasphemously; he just wanted wake people up.
On November 3, America’s sovereigns cannot afford to be act senselessly. They cannot afford to elect leaders without good sense.
The situation is dire and requires outspoken and daring statesmen willing to acknowledge this and join forces with responsible people from all walks of life – especially industry, finance and science – in order to end the demented oil addiction that has brought the world to the brink.
“The best solution is to pray,” Bryan Appleyard quoted energy financier Matthew Simmons, ad advisory to President George W. Bush.
If he were Lutheran he might have added, “And let’s pray that American voters do see themselves as priests in the world and elect leaders who know themselves as ministers of God.”
Yes, their counsel will be naught at life’s last portal. But until then they must be made to understand that they have the priestly mission to manage this dying world out of love for their neighbors – neighbors alive today and neighbors following us decades and centuries from now.
Uwe - your talk here was certainly intersting. Do you know of any particularly outstanding books that deal with this issue of oil supply and energy?
"Moreover, the realism inherent in Lutheran doctrine provides an answer to one of the worst fallacies in post-Reformation church history -- the fallacy of liberal and evangelical theologians that the Gospel transforms culture.
Such beliefs are schwaermerisch – they are utopian. They have caused Christian idealists of the right and the left to glorify their own country...
The Lutheran position, by contrast, is clear and biblical: Christ did not die to make society nicer or fairer; He suffered to redeem the believer from sin, thus giving him eternal life.
...All secular authorities are ministers of God, according to Romans 13:6. Paul used the Greek term, “leitourgoi,” which is the root of the English word, liturgists."
Uwe, would your denial of the Gospel's transforming power over the world also preclude its ability to influence persons and cultures (I think of Alvin Schmidt's book, "How Chritianity Changed the World", previously titled "Under the Influence")? I certainly don't think this should be our *focus*, but I have a hard time not seeing it as a by-product...
Do you think that the idea of the dignity and worth of each individual person, something which is present really only in Christianity (among world religions), has not really transformed the world, as persons have either explictly or implicitly been influenced by this belief?
Posted by: Nathan | October 07, 2008 at 09:34 AM