Farewell, John Piper

why are evangelicals prone to eat their own?

Recently, hard-left, liberal, woke theologian and pastor, John Piper, was piled on for tweeting out this scripture, “You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.” Leviticus 19:34 together with this sentence: “Christians know the miserable bondage we were all in.” Well-known worship leader, Sean Feucht, hit reply and wrote, “Never imagined a theologian I once looked up to would became so unbelievably WOKE while weaponizing scripture to justify the illegal invasion of a sovereign nation.” Other Christian MAGA celebrities joined in with their own criticism of Piper’s choice of Bible verses for that day.

You may not have noticed that I was using the sarcasm font when I described John Piper. He’s a theologian and a pastor but left, liberal and woke are not in his bio.

But here we are.

Back in 2012, former Congressman Ron Paul, during a Republican primary debate, suggested that the “Golden Rule” (treat others as you would want to be treated) should be applied to American foreign policy. He was booed by the audience which, if statistics are accurate, was made up largely of evangelical Christians. His remark was immediately preceded by Newt Gingrich saying, “Andrew Jackson had a pretty clear-cut idea about America’s enemies: Kill them!”” The same crowd roared with approval.

May God help the person who suggests to a room full of evangelical Christians that God’s desire is for us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us.

It’s hard for me not to think that following Jesus for most of us evangelical Christians has far more to do with a political ideology than it does trust that living out the way of Jesus is our raison d’être.

Scrolling social media I came across a comment someone left on a friend’s Facebook post. My friend had shared an article titled, “The Bombing of Iran Cannot Be Justified,” published by Christian Century. Lefties. The comment that caught my eye simply said, “So you think we should have just waited until Iran had the capabilities and nuked us?” It struck me how beautifully this comment sums up where the evangelical church seems to live. It betrays a complete lack of prophetic imagination. For some, it’s just this simple, black and white, good and bad, either/or, we kill them or they’ll kill us. It’s a pre-emptive eye for an inevitable eye and we can’t imagine any other way than violence and this kind of pre-retribution.

We’ve been taught to fear and we’ve taken to it.

There’s a beautiful story about Francis, one of my favorites, it’s tucked into an article by Aaron Keebaugh for Early Music America. Here’s how he tells it for his article…

The lower level of the Basilica of Assisi houses a peculiar relic that symbolizes a miraculous meeting between leaders of opposing faiths during a time of war. An ivory horn, used to announce battles and major events in Islam, had been a gift to Francis of Assisi from Sultan Malik al-Kamil, leader of the Muslim forces defending a city at the edge of the Nile from invading crusaders.

Saint Francis had preached against the Crusades and had ventured to Egypt, barefoot and unarmed, in mid-1219 to halt the fighting. When few listened to his pleas, he crossed the Nile in September to meet the sultan at his camp in Fariskur. What transpired at their meeting has been lost to history, though several Christian sources reported vastly different outcomes. In some, Francis tried to convert al-Kamil to Christianity. In another, he tested the sultan to an ordeal of fire. But the meeting has survived as a symbol itself: Francis remained in the sultan’s presence for several days, and they parted on good terms.

You can read a mythical narrative version HERE.

But the meeting did happen and Francis did part on good terms. He had engaged the conflict with prophetic imagination and approached the conflict the way he could imagine Jesus approaching it.

If you and I had a nice, hot beverage, say a cappuccino, or black tea with milk, and maybe an apricot scone or cinnamon roll to share and some Jacob Collier music playing quietly around us, I bet, given an hour, you and I would be able to come up with at least 10 possible scenarios, alternative choices, ways we could try to write a better story than violence and murder. Let me jump ahead to this question… “Don’t you think people have tried other options?” And then to my response… “No, I really don’t. I’ve come to believe we are living in the days in which our prophetic imagination has atrophied from disuse and violence is our first choice.” I think this because it seems to me we are hot for a strong man and as long as our safety is guaranteed, we’ll turn our Christian eyes away from the violence done in our name.

Gratefully.

I think that if Francis was with us now, and he walked into Tehran while drones and fire fell from the sky, seeking a conversation with the Ayatollah, we wouldn’t call him a saint, we’d call him a woke traitor.

The Church, I believe, exists in the world to offer an alternative. Another way. A more beautiful way that loves our enemy and our friends and treats other people the way we ourselves would prefer to be treated. However, even as I type those words I am conscience of the ire they will produce for some who call themselves Christians. We’ve moved well beyond “just war” now. We’re living in the prescient times of the Minority Report in which we can justify killing people because they might one days kill us. Who, I wonder, can ever feel safe in such a world?