I try to make this a
blog not just about politics. The name of this blog is Intersections, and its raison
d'être is to work out where politics, pop culture and the Bible meet. In other
words, I’m trying to approach my political views, pop culture intake, and
cultural trends from a biblical perspective. Am I reading stuff into Scripture
that isn’t there? That’s for you to decide. I can honestly say that I’m making
the effort, though.
So does the Bible have
anything to say about what we’ve been discussing, this fork in the road between
conservatives (“cons”) and liberals ("libs")? Is the Bible more pro-distinctions or against them? For the next few paragraphs I need to credit Dennis
Prager, a Jewish talk-show who spent 18 years going through the Torah
verse-by-verse in a weekly Bible study. He knows the original Hebrew backwards
and forwards, and he’s the one who pointed these things out to me on the radio.
The first couple of
chapters of Genesis are all about separations and distinctions. God starts out
by creating the heavens and the earth. The picture Moses presents, however, in
vs. 2 is that of chaos, and the Lord quickly begins to sort things out, and
that requires separating things one from another. Think of an orderly house and
its likely slogan: “A place for everything and everything in its place,” and
you get the idea. He separates light from dark, the sky from the waters, the
land from water, day from night (by means of the sun and the moon), etc. But a
couple of points to consider on this line:
·
The first separation is something you might have
missed, a very important starting point to understand our Creator in the very
first verse: God and his creation are separate. God and nature are not to be
confused with each other. Yes, the Lord inhabits and fills the universe, being omnipresent.
But he’s not contained inside nature, and
nature is not to be worshipped, nor anything within nature. This was a huge
distinction between the Israelites and every other people in history. Everyone
else worshipped something in nature: Sky gods, thunder and lightning gods, fertility
gods, mountain gods, animal gods, etc. The Bible is utterly unique in that it
presents a Creator who is A) alone to be worshiped, and B) moral and just, and
who thus expects us to be moral and just in imitation of himself. Nature is not moral or just. Nature abides by one law: The law
of the jungle, where the strong prey upon the weak, and it’s eat or be eaten. There’s
no concept of grace or mercy or compassion or justice in nature. We have to get
those things from the God who’s described to us in his word. For more on this,
see here.
· We need to focus on another major separation that really deserves its own essay:
God creates humanity in
his own image/likeness, and as such mankind is unique in all creation. I
love my dogs dearly. My wife loves our dogs and cats (I tolerate the cats). But
in no way are they created in God’s image, and as such every human being is of infinitely more value than my dog. But
the further left you go, the more blurry this distinction gets. You don’t have
to go very far into the environmental movement’s fringe before this vital
distinction is erased. One of the main godfathers of the modern environmental
movement, Peter Singer,
famously put it thus: “A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.” For more on the Imago
Dei, see here.
Cons, for the most part, understand this distinction, even if they can’t
articulate exactly why from a biblical perspective.
·
And of course in chapter two we see more
attention put on the creation of man and woman, and the Lord definitely creates
them as distinct from each other. Men and women are to be mutually
complementary, and any attempt to blur this distinctive doesn’t come from the
Lord’s way of thinking. The cultural normalization of homosexuality, the notion
that any perceived differences between male and female are enculturated instead
of biological, and pretty much every effort to deny intrinsic differences
between the sexes certainly don’t come from an understanding of God’s word.
·
A pattern we see in the rest of the Old
Testament Law is that of separation: It regularly separated one thing or time
or person from another. There were holy vs. common days, seasons, places, food,
and people. Of course everyone is created in God’s image, but that doesn’t mean
that the Law didn’t make a distinction between (ritually) clean and unclean
people. Most everyone would be (at least
temporarily) unclean at some part of his/her life. Women were ritually unclean for
a few days of every month. If you were diagnosed with leprosy, you were unclean
and quarantined from the rest of the population. If you touched a dead body,
you were unclean for a time. Naturally we as modern-day believers understand
these regulations to be time-bound and symbolic of spiritual realities (e.g.,
leprosy represents the spiritual disease of sin). But that doesn’t erase the
underlying principle: Spiritual understanding begins with making
proper distinctions.
·
And even the above principle falls into this paradigm of making distinctions. We need
to be careful to make proper distinctions. Seeing the
difference between obedience and sin? Good
distinction. Seeing some difference in value between one skin pigmentation and
another, or some intrinsic difference assigned to someone because of their
national origin? Illegitimate
distinction, to say the least. We’re supposed to even make distinctions between
good ones and bad ones.
Well, this is all well and good, Keith, but we’re not under the Old
Covenant any more. That’s absolutely correct, but since I’m running long I’ll
save that for the next posting.
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