War and Apppeasemnt
We are in a world at war, but as Christians we must not wage war as the world does. Our war is spiritual, and our foes are not our fellow man. But, in a society that is ruled by a secular and increasingly post- and anti-Christian elite, Christians face an inescapable choice: go against the flow and be relegated to the eddies and backwaters of the culture, or go along and be tolerated in the mainstream. Faced with this dilemma, and averse to conflict, the choice that many evangelical leaders and laymen have made is to lay down their arms and seek peace through appeasement. Silent, if not swayed, in the face of anti-Christian policies and principles, they spend their powder trying to get their brothers and sisters in Christ to fall in line. Exasperated at the acquiescence and capitulation of their Christian leaders, others on the religious right have become all too willing to wage war as the world does, to seize the sword of the state and to use it to enforce not merely public order but an officially Christian state. In this spiritual and cultural war, Christians must not surrender to the world, hiding its light, and we must not fight the war as the world does, abdicating our witness.
It is undeniably true that the relationship of the Christian and of the Church to the kingdoms of this world is inherently complicated. Followers of Christ are first and foremost citizens of the Kingdom of God, and also citizens and subjects of many kinds of government systems around the world that each pose their own unique challenges. Ever since Jesus gathered his first followers, Christians have struggled with what is owed to Caesar, and with what is entailed by being in the world, but not of it.
The Apostle Paul addressed matters of civil authority in numerous contexts. Augustine of Hippo famously wrote about the City of God and the City of Man. Pope Gelasius I wrote about the “two swords” — spiritual authority (the church) and temporal authority (the state). In the Reformed tradition, Luther, Calvin, Bavinck, and Kuyper each spoke to this tension in their time. More recently, Reinhold Neibuhr, Richard John Neuhaus, and Chuck Colson . This is all to say that much grace ought to be extended to fellow Christians as they weigh the many prudential considerations involved in living under two authorities at once. Nevertheless, working directly from the biblical texts, I want to confront two errors: the weary eagerness for peace and the willingness to fight, no holds barred.
Peace Through Appeasement
Because it challenges one of the primary planks of our secular mythology, submission to the thesis that we are the product of undirected evolutionary processes is one of the primary terms of surrender. Creationists and Intelligent Design theorists, who have not waved the white flag, have been mocked, fired, and deplatformed at universities and barred from news aggregators like Apple News. For example, Joshua Swamidass’ online magazine and forum Peaceful Science self-consciously seeks a truce and to be tolerated by acceding to the current orthodoxy of evolutionary science. Similarly, Francis Collins’ Biologos displays a white dove of peace in their logo, bending over backwards to ensure that Evangelicals don’t get sideways of establishment scientists.
Darrel R. Falk, former president of Biologos, wrote a book Coming to Peace with Science, the foreword from Francis Collins. They share anecdotes of believers who have peace with science by accepting the standard view of human and animal origins. Addressing the open hostility from the “New Atheist” movement, Sheril Kirshenbaum and Chris Mooney write at the Biologos blog
The common ground, instead, must be science in its broadest sense — a shared body of facts we can all agree about, however we may differ about the spiritual. Yet this common ground itself is at risk if we let science and faith be in conflict. … the vast majority of Americas want nothing to do with this conflict. They want compromise, and compatibility.
The Case for (Spiritual) War
It is to be expected that the spirit of the times will be at odds with the Spirit of God. The calling for the Christian is spiritual war. Culture war is just a euphemism for spiritual war.
Ours is not unlike the situation faced by Frenchmen after the Battle of France. Whether under the military’s complete control in the north and west of France, or with nominal independence under the Vichy government in the south, the price of peace was submission.
Total War