(From the October 2008 issue of the Lutheran Witness)
By Uwe Siemon-Netto
Next month Americans will elect a new government that could face the most dangerous period in US history, primarily because of the global oil crisis that can affect every aspect of public life for decades and centuries to come: war and peace, civil order, foreign affairs, health and medicine, the economy, agriculture, food, possibly even the unity of the nation.
Are we “waiting for the lights to go out,” as Bryan Appleyard titled a scary essay in the conservative London newspaper, The Sunday Times, four years ago? Appleyard’s point merits serious contemplation even if some pundits consider as overly alarmist the prediction of Sweden’s Uppsala University that the world will start running out of petroleum in ten years’ time. The prospects of wars over the last barrels of oil, of food riots at home, of a shortage of basic petroleum-based medicines in pharmacies and hospitals, and of surgeries being performed on patients under hypnosis because of a lack of anesthetics might not appear all that immediate but seem real enough in our lifetime.
In this situation the Church must remind Christians of the responsibility God has given them as they vote on Nov. 3. This responsibility can be summed up in four short sentences:
1. Christian voters will follow nothing less than a divine calling to be a special kind of priest.
2. As voter-priests they will not preach the Gospel.
3. Instead, as in all worldly pursuits, Christians serve God in the voting booth by serving their fellow man.
4. If they do so with love and circumspection rather than for selfish ends they rank as members of the universal priesthood of all believers.
This is in a nutshell the Lutheran contribution to the debate about faith and politics. It provides a healthy alternative to this campaign season’s jabber by “false clerics and schismatic spirits,” as Martin Luther called churchmen lecturing government on how to handle its business. Seen from the Lutheran perspective, Christians act as God’s masks when they cast their votes. Through them He bestows power on political leaders, and the voters then serve God by holding leaders’ feet to the fire. “Throwing the bums out” might well be a divine assignment.
Church-owned publications cannot endorse political candidates. Of course we have a clear position on issues of theological concern, such as the sanctity of life and of marriage as the union between one man and one woman. But the Lutheran Witness would be wrong to tell Washington how to fight wars in the Middle East, end 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 function in this world. The Church ought to tell secular rulers to use this gift wisely, but not promote specific policies.
However, the Lutheran Church has to remind Christian voters of this fact: They are the divinely appointed sovereigns of a democracy and as such compelled to exercise their office by virtue of good sense. In these dangerous times they must have the courage to ask candidates to be brutally truthful about the dire state the world is in, and how they intend to deal with this, even at the risk of proposing unpopular measures. Should voters base their decision on prejudice, ideology, conjecture, ignorance, selfishness, and a sloppy desire for an “easy way out,” rather than informed logic and neighborly love, they neglect their priestly duties.
Playing ostrich under these circumstances is not a Christian option. A Christian failing to vote resembles the useless servant who kept the pound entrusted to him laid away in a napkin (Luke 19:20). The same applies to Christians deaf to the calling to run for public office. Some sects tell their followers to shun this 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.
God’s charge to voters in a democracy has chilling implications. They can’t just 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. Biblically speaking, they had received their authority from God (Romans 13:1) but squandered it by handing power to the wrong rulers. 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, “I had no idea that the infrastructure in America was rotten.”
The voters’ priestly rank in the secular “left-hand kingdom” involves noblesse oblige; it comes with responsibility. Their first responsibility is to ask questions, to inform themselves and reflect on the most significant issues the next government will have to handle. The 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.
Thus in Lutheran eyes the view of some liberal and evangelical theologians that the Gospel transforms culture seems utopian. It has caused Christian idealists of the right and the left to see their own country or Soviet Union and Pol Pot’s Cambodia as precursors of the Kingdom of God. But 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.
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, 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. Next month, America’s sovereigns cannot afford to be act mindlessly, they cannot afford to elect leaders without good sense.
The situation is desperate 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, was saying.
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.”
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