Speculation and Morality

Immediately following the assassination attempt in Pennsylvania, the religious chatter about Trump got waaaaay more intense.

His supporters felt that this near miss marked him as protected by God, that it was a sign that he was a necessary part of God's plan for America.  Like King David, like Cyrus of Persia, Trump is the anointed one, the vessel of the Divine intent.  Trumpist theology has always had a divine-right ring about it, which...given that his supporters are essentially monarchists...shouldn't be much of a surprise.

Others had very different ideas, ones that seem a little closer to the reality of who Trump is.  Among some fringe communities of evangelicals who haven't missed that Trump is the exact opposite of Jesus in every way, the failed assassination attempt and the wound to Trump's ear fulfilled the terms of Revelation 13:3.  "There it is," they said.  "There's the head wound, and the wondering world!"  Trump is, they suggest, the Little Horn, the adversary of Christ, whose amorality, worldliness, and pathological falsehood marks him as the Antichrist.  The end times are at hand!

Both are...off.

Trump's "faithful" supporters are off, because, c'mon.   Christ's purposes are never served by lies and bullying.  Christ's purposes are never served by showing cruelty to the stranger, or by refusing shelter to a fellow Christian.  Ever.  Not ever.  Period.  The Gospel must be expressed in our every action, and the dark logics of your theological consequentialism can be used to excuse any evil.  Sure, he's done what he promised.  But just because the devil fulfills his end of the bargain doesn't mean you haven't sold your soul.

As the author of the definitive book on Trump's Antichrist nature, I might seem closer to the latter camp.  At least the folks who are freaked out about him have the advantage of not being bamboozled by Trump's transactional schtick.  And I will admit, the whole head wound thing is a little creepy, as is the depth to which the American faithful now stand in Trump's thrall.

The challenge, though, is that none of that matters.  The question, for Christians, is never about the details of the end times, or about the mechanics of messianic fulfillment.  Jesus was really, really specific about that.  Don't speculate about those things, he said.  Don't trust anyone who speculates about it.

Our task, as Christians, is not to worry about when it all comes down.  Because if you're a Christian, if you've committed yourself to being a disciple of Jesus of Nazareth, again: none of that matters.  None of it.  If you're claimed Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, the end times have already arrived for you.

The Christian has already stepped over to a different way of life, one that manifests itself in the values and ethos that Jesus lived and taught.  It doesn't matter where we are in the scheme of things.  We must live, right now, as if that time were fulfilled.  My moral commitments are the same, no matter where we are in the arc of history.  Faced with an cruel emperor, a totalitarian state, a flagrant charlatan, or a decadent mammonist culture, none of that changes.

Love neighbor.  Love enemy.  Feed the hungry.  Clothe the naked.  Show hospitality to the stranger.  Speak the truth, and show grace.  Refuse the sword, and turn your back on the sweet poison of wealth.  This is the basic value-set of discipleship, no matter when, no matter what.

When we get lost in wild end-times speculation, we too easily lose sight of that discipled moral agency.  We start living in a world of abstractions and phantasms, rather than in the reality of our day-to-day choices.  We forget both our Christian freedom and our Christian duty.

 

Haiti and Human Suffering

On the day after Christmas five years and a few weeks ago, Indonesia was struck by a massive tsunami. Hundreds of thousands of human beings lost their lives, killed by the onslaught of an unstoppable tidal surge. It was a time of immense tragedy and human suffering. In coming to terms with this event, many folks of a religious persuasion offered up reasons that God might inflict such suffering on humankind. Among some sections of Christianity, stories were told of churches remaining unharmed. That the vast majority of those who lost their lives were Muslim...so...well...perhaps God was annoyed at their lack of Christian faith. In the conservative Islamic world, the spin was both different and exactly the same. Indonesia was being punished for being insufficiently Muslim, allowing the infidels to drink and wear bikinis and spend lots of money in beachside resorts to sustain the local economy.

Today, the news comes from Haiti that a sizable earthquake has devastated that poverty-stricken nation. Back when I was a kid, the little evangelical free church my family attended in London used to regularly provide supplies to Haitian communities. We wrote letters to Haitian kids. Things were hard there thirty years ago, and they haven't improved. It is the Bangladesh of the Northern Hemisphere. The reports coming in this morning are spotty, but the likelihood is that there are many, many thousands dead. Slipshod construction and the crowding that comes from endemic poverty makes a temblor unusually devastating. Wretchedly undeveloped infrastructure and incompetent, corrupt government make it even worse. It is going to be bad.

Over the next week or so, the eyes of our nation will be turned to that broken state. Until some juicy celebrity scandal reclaims our undivided attention, that is. During this week, I do not doubt that somewhere, someone who claims to be a follower of Jesus of Nazareth will decide that God is somehow responsible for this event. Perhaps Haitians were not praying hard enough. Or they weren't the "right sort of Christian." Or they were immoral. Maybe someone will decide that the practice of vodun is to blame. There has to be a reason!

We can't help ourselves. We want to believe that faith somehow gets us excused from suffering, even though our faith teaches no such thing. We want to believe that just praying hard enough will protect us from disaster and keep us fat and happy and rolling in material blessings, even though our faith shows us nothing of the sort. Our desire to come up with a theological reason for the bad things that happen has nothing to do with our Maker, and everything to do with our own egocentrism.

But the reality of existence is that we are small and easily broken, and that death comes eventually to us all. Faith does not change that reality. What it does, though, is help us respond to that reality. What a faithful response needs to be has nothing to do with explanations or justifications. That sort of speculation is actively counterproductive.

Instead, Christians need to respond with caring. We need to be providing evidence of the love that lies at the heart of our faith. That will come in the form of material aid, in doctors and medicine and food and blankets and rebuilding supplies. It will come through the presence of aid workers who give comfort.

It is that caring that matters, that work that matters, that effort to bring about good in the face of the reality of our smallness and mortality that matters.