Continuing my series on biblical images of God as a worker at TGR, I consider the image of God as a warrior-king:

Today, a fresh vision of “the kingdom of God” is turning our theology upside down. How would that revolution itself be revolutionized if we considered God’s kingdom as his work?

I think it would, at minimum, put spiritual formation back at the center of this concept in a way that I don’t think has been adequately mantained. Dallas Willard, one of the original champions of a new emphasis on kingdom theology, put spiritual formation – the work of God inside us as our king – at the foundation of the kingdom. That’s where it belongs.

Heading toward a big finish with a surprise image in the final installment next time!

Skip this one if you’re paleolithic. But if you’re neolithic, or just plain lithic, enough to access Mobile Ed from Faithlife, the creators of Logos Bible software, check out my full-dress digital course on A Christian Perspective on Work and the Economy. At the link you’ll find a sample of me in all my glory in the Mobile Ed digital studio, talking about stewardship, along with a 21-unit course outline. You get a lot with these mobile courses! I had a blast recording this course for a full week out in Bellingham and am grateful to Faithlife for the opportunity.

I’m shamefully behind posting here on HT as my series on biblical images of God as a worker has continued at The Green Room.

God as a farmer:

God, like most farmers, is a no-nonsense kind of person. With the image of God as shepherd I emphasized that God has all practical knowledge; he knows how to change a tire as well as he knows the Pythagorean Theorem. God as farmer makes me think of God as “practical” in another sense; he’s task-oriented and he doesn’t put up with frivolous or irresponsible distractions.

To the unjust, God as farmer is downright terrifying. His winnowing fork is in his hands, and he will burn the chaff with unquenchable fire. The wicked tenants are massacred. I find that even the Parable of the Sower, which I cover in week 1 of my introductory small group class on Making Sense of the Bible, consistently makes people nervous.

Even on a lesser scale than that, though, God is very no-nonsense. In the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard, the workers who complain to the boss that others were paid the same as them for less work are presumably God’s people. They’re workers in God’s field, and they’re not cast out in the end. But neither does God deal very gently with them. He addresses one of them as “friend” but then says: “Take what belongs to you and go. I choose to give to this last worker as I give to you. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me?”

God as a potter:

No doubt there is an “art” to farming and shepherding and even to medicine. But that is something different from what we normally mean by “artistry.” The “art” of caring for living creatures is to cultivate and protect their organic life and nature, which grows of its own. To transform them into something other than what they are in themselves would be an offence against the life and nature within them.

There are exceptions on the margins. We groom and decorate our bodies, and within limits, that’s fine. With animals there is more room for such artistry on the margin – check out a dog show. With plants there is even more, as a garden will show.

But the “artistry” of work with inanimate nature is not on the margins of an otherwise fixed nature. Inanimate nature is completely open to reshaping by our work because it has no life of its own. And we are made to be artists in our work with inanimate nature.

God is an artist in this sense even with us, with our human nature and in our historical development, because God is God and he can shape or reshape our nature without offending against the intrinsic goodness of that nature (since he made it and is its only ultimate ground). We are not artists with humans and animals to this extent. But we do have such a great degree of dominion over inanimate nature (see point 1) that we can exercise artistry with it, and are called to be.

Such artistry is not just for “artists,” of course. Or, put another way, we’re all “artists” in this sense.

God as a counselor:

We are not related to God the way we are related to human counselors. God is the counselor who – to put it bluntly – owns us, and we can never really hear counsel from our cosmic owner the same way we would hear counsel from any human, however wise or influential.

At the same time, the Bible is clear that God really is a counselor – that God’s sovereignty does not simply swallow up all aspects of our relationship with him such that the only thing he ever does is command and the only thing we ever do is obey. God does want us to make our own choices and, by doing so, learn to be wise. And it is the nature of the mind and soul that it is essentially free and must make its own choices, in one sense (but only in one sense) unconstrained by compulsion.

We are living in a generation when it is especially hard to keep this semi-paradoxical quest for wisdom in submission to but not compelled by God at the center of the Christian life. That is where it belongs, as is clear from such passages as the Parable of the Sower or the first psalm.

But among Protestants, the mainline/evangelical split leaves us either overemphasizing the freedom of the quest for wisdom (reducing God to a mere advisor) or overemphasizing submission to God (reducing God to a mere dictator and removing the quest for wisdom entirely). Meanwhile, Roman Catholicism experiences a parallel split in which differing visions of the role of the church as mediator of God’s wisdom drive a parallel cycle of conflict.

Here we see how important God’s role as counselor is. Kings are not counselors, kings have counselors. Yet the coming of the divine savior-king is marked by the reign of a king who is himself a counselor. And his kingdom is built by the pouring of his Spirit, as counselor, into the hearts of his people.

And God, as our counselor, is a worker. God is at work building up our wisdom. I think that changes our whole mental image of sanctification if we take it seriously. And it may shed new light on the problem of how to seek wisdom freely, yet in submission to God.

I have never liked John McCain, and I can recall being angry and frustrated on a number of occasions when his status as a war hero was used to make people like me feel like we weren’t morally allowed to disagree with him on contested political issues. His presidential campaign slogan “Country First” helped pave the way for the disastrous return of “America First” to national prominence, and that was a symptom of a more general problem with McCain.

But there has never been much doubt that McCain was a man of honor, and that was proven again this week. The shadiness of the GOP strategy – corral legislators to pass a shell bill, and then write the real bill in conference committee – is breathtaking. Once you start doing that, where do you stop?

I can recall how angry we on the Right were when Obamacare was rammed through using procedural shenanigans. Did we object because making law by shenanigans is bad, or because it was the other side doing it?

The descent of the American constitutional order into chaos requires that at some point one side refuse to use the other side’s tactics. The GOP in general gets no points for this, because the GOP in general has proven itself willing to stoop as low as any Democrat. The GOP and Trump have earned each other.

McCain, however, gets to retire with honor. Well done.

Things are so going so disastrously wrong, and so much damage is being done to our civic and social institutions, that as I sit down to compose my annual Independence Day reflections on hopeful realism, I feel like I should be having another “down year” like I did in 2014 (“a more realistic July 4”). But I’m not, and the man who is helping me most in that department is a chronic depressive who was convinced western civilization was doomed.

I think I would need to write ten thousand words at least to convey the effect upon me of reading Whittaker Chambers’ Witness for the first time (in 43 years I had never read it, shame on me!) earlier this year. I’ll try to keep it shorter here; I feel no doubt that I will produce the ten thousand word version in the coming year or not much longer.

Chambers is of course a very great man and I’m teaching my daughter to be like him, but that’s not what I want to talk about here.

Reading Witness has revealed to me new insight into how the moral narratives of conservatism were formed out of the mid-century anti-statist experience. This has showed me greater depths in both what was right with conservatism and why it went wrong and failed the way it ultimately did. Chambers himself was only a reluctant participant in the formation of those narratives, and never called himself “conservative.” He felt conservatism was too ideological and didn’t offer enough to the common man whose traditional ways of life were being destroyed by the technological developments of modernity. But he taught us that the key political quesiton is “God or Man?”; that all forms of statism are ultimately forms of the answer “Man,” differing only in the degree to which they have the courage of that conviction; and that our society was sliding toward statism because its leaders had decisively committed themselves to the answer “Man,” implying that a radical change of spiritual direction was what was really needed. The fight for God and against statism were the same fight.

This was not false then and is not false now. Where we went wrong was in conflating all objections to libertarian free markets with statism, adopting too political and too pugilistic a strategy for what was essentially a spiritual fight (Chambers famously had no hope for the west; less famous is his statement that this was because he could see no political solution to the problem – and he was right about that part, at least) and neglecting to take seriously, as Chambers always did, two historical realities that complicate the fight for God and freedom against statism: the congenital political schizophrenia of the American constitutional order due to racism and slavery, and the dependence of moral norms on social institutions that are destabilized in advanced modernity.

One of my themes in the past year has been “death of conservatism watch,” not in the sense that there will not be a Right, but in the sense that the complex and somewhat contradictory combination of ideas that we call “conservatism” is dying and something else will replace it. For those of us who were deeply attached to what we thought and hoped conservatism was and could be, the question now is 1) how to preserve what is worth preserving and 2) to what extent doing that has anything to do with the political Right now.

Interestingly, I think Chambers is a figure my friends on the Left would admire, if they knew his story. And I think the heat of the Cold War may now finally be far enough away for us to introduce him to them.

It could be part of the forging of a new trans-partisan moral consensus, in which responsible people on the Left come to terms with their failure to see statism for what it is – and their persecution of conservatives for the crime of seeing it for what it is – and responsible people on the Right come to terms with the schizophenia of the constitutional order caused by racism, i.e. our failure to relate ethnic identity to natural rights in a satisfactory way, given the interdependence in the human mind of reason (a universal human power by which we know about universal natural rights) and cosmic narrative (which are not universal but particular to ethnic and religious identities).

Part of that process should be some kind of Eulogy for Conservatism. It is dying now, dying of its own self-inflicted wounds. But it did great things for this country, saving this country from disaster and catastrophe again and again, and this country did nothing but spit on it. Before conservatism passes into history, the greatness of what it did for its country, in spite of all its country did to try to destroy it, should be entered into the record.

When Chambers died, a friend remarked: “The witness is gone, the testimony will stand.” I feel the same about what was good in conservatism.

And a eulogy for what is gone is followed by a return to the forces of life.

Need a sign of hope? The New Disney Animation continued to kill it this year.

We set a course to find a brand new island everywhere we roam; and when it’s time to find home, we know the way.