Justice, Silence, and Grace.

"A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another.  By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” John 13:34-35

Racism, child abuse, slavery, the fate of the lost, abortion, poverty, war, pornography, doctrinal compromise, substance abuse, etc.

Which of these is the MOST important?

Which of these MOST deserves your "speaking out"?

If you had to rank them, which would come out on top?

Which is the one which demands the church's voice NOW more than ever?

If you are simply consulting yourself, you might be able to find a clear place for one or two, but I'm betting there'd be one or where you'd have trouble deciding which went where.

If, instead, you are consulting someone else, you might be able to agree on one or two, but I'm betting there'd be one or two where you couldn't find common ground.

If planning a course of action, you might be able to agree on THE correct policy for one or two, but I'm betting there'd be one or two where you and a friend come to diametrically opposed ways forward.

If one of you thinks that a quiet approach is better than confrontation, the other may think that a strong public statement is in order.

If you think contemporary events demands that X be emphasized, your friend may think that it is Y that needs more attention.

You may decide to dedicate your Twitter/Facebook feed to "raising awareness" about one of these real problems, but your friend may find that the "dialogue" is doing nothing to help.

You may find it incomprehensible that anyone could remain silent about one of these, while your friend finds your silence on another one just as morally baffling.

You may conclude that it is best to stand up to those who support an immoral activity, but your friend may decide that this will only feed the fire.

How many people today blame the politically active evangelical church of earlier years for driving away nonbelievers because of the church's attention to abortion?

How many people today blame the politically inactive evangelical church of earlier years for driving away nonbelievers because of the church INattention to racism?

Maybe in twenty years you'll decide that the church's focus today was too much on one issue, your friend will find that the focus was too little.

Maybe in twenty years you'll decide that it was you who had the focus too much in one place and that maybe your friend was right.

We may tell ourselves that each of these issues is valuable and that they each deserve equal attention, but we can never be as engaged with any one of them as we'd like, let alone all of them. With only twenty-four hours in the day, and the daily grind of providing for our families taking up most of those, we cannot be fully "on" for each of these all the time.

It is inevitable that members of Christ's body will disagree about what is the most pressing issue of the day. Sometimes this is a matter of disagreement, but sometimes it is a matter of discerning what was needed at that moment. James, at his time and place, found it necessary to warn the church against abandoning works in the quest faith. Paul, at his time and place, found it necessary to warn the church against abandoning faith in the quest for works.

Sometimes this is a matter of a particular sensitivity you have towards one or another problem. Perhaps the pain of that issue in your own life will lead you to focus on it. Perhaps the realization that the comfort of your life was not shared by others will lead you to focus on another. Perhaps, seemingly out of nowhere, God will have led you to care about one of these more than you do another. This is not a failing but the way God has led you to spread his kingdom in this particular way.

For you, in the place where God has called you to serve him, perhaps one of these very real problems will be the thing which dominates your thinking, either for just a season or perhaps your entire life. For your friends, in their places, perhaps it will be another one which will define their moral quest.

As we do this, as we seek to encourage Christ's kingdom in this world, let us keep a few things in mind. We must always make sure that it is Christ and his glory that we seek. Let us not be like Martha, whose tasks serving the Lord distracted her from waiting on the Lord and his leading as did her sister, Mary. We can, like the proverbial cart and horse, all too easily shift our focus from following Christ onto an path to following path whether Christ is there or not.

We must always make sure that we remember that just as we have been wrong before, as a church or as individuals, we may be wrong now. Much of the passion fueling the socio-political debates going on right now flows from the conviction that the church of the past got it wrong and we must now get it right. We look at the past and we say that they believed the wrong things or did the wrong things or didn't do the right things or didn't say the right things.

If we are able to look back fifty years, a hundred years, a thousand years, and say that they were wrong, then what are the chances that our little brothers and sisters in the Lord will not do the same? Will they not look back fifty years, a hundred years, a thousand years, into our time and say that we got it wrong, that we had the wrong emphasis, that we were silent when should have spoken or spoke when we should have been silent? We all like to think that the future will only judge others in this way. But, if others in the past, just like us, were confident that they had chosen the right path, just like us, what are the chances that those of the future, just like us, will not find some great failing in our lives as we have found fault in others?

Finally, we must be gracious with one another. Maybe your friend is wrong, but maybe it is you who is wrong. If you think that your brothers or sisters in Christ are wrong by their emphasis or inattention, by their actions or inactions, by the statements or silence, then by all means plead with them, argue with them, challenge them, try to get them to see it another way, but we must do it in a way that grants to them the grace that they might be right and the humility that we might be wrong. They might well be in the wrong. They might be failing to see how their choice is harmful, or they may even be guilty of supporting an evil in the world. This in no way releases us from the call to love one another.

Love doesn't mean coddling. There is a time for vigorous debate and a time to challenge one another. The Bible is full of prophets and apostles using strong language to condemn evil, but it also full of those same prophets and apostles speaking grace to those same sinners. Love can and, at times, demands confrontation. Love doesn't mean accommodation of evil, but love does mean love. If, in our disagreements with one another, we cannot see ourselves in the words I Corinthians 13, then what are we doing? If our passion for the work of Christ leads us to speak derisively of the Bride of Christ, then perhaps we need to reevaluate our priorities.

The Legacy of the Reformation

I was recently asked to "briefly" discuss the legacy of the Reformation, and that is just mean. Asking a historical theologian to describe the significance of the Reformation and its legacies briefly is a cruel and unusual punishment. Whether speaking of the general scope of “secular” history or specifically in reference to historical theology, the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century is one of the most significant events in all of the grand story of humanity. It was at one and the same time a great retrograde revolution which sought to turn back the clock and an integral moment in the creation of the modern world. Its legacies include both the good and the bad, the heroic and the villainous, the social, political, artistic, economic, and philosophical make-up of the Western world. Then, through the subsequent European conquest of much of the globe, it helped to shape the course of history since its time.

While there are a myriad ways to approach so overwhelming a topic, there is one moment which exemplifies so much of the era and all that flowed from it. In April 1521 Martin Luther was called before the Diet of Worms. There, he stood before the powerful man in the world and said, “No.” He had already been condemned by Pope Leo X, the spiritual head of Western Christianity. Now he told Charles V, king of Spain, Austria, the Low Countries, vast swaths of the Americas, and Holy Roman Emperor that he was wrong and Luther was right. In contrast to the inertia of human society which puts great weight in the consensus of numbers, Luther declared that he was willing to die for his beliefs unless he could be convinced by Scripture or simple reason. Echoing the words attributed to Athanasius so many centuries before, Luther stood against the world.

So very much of the Reformation and its legacies, both good and bad, are encapsulated in this moment. This is the manifestation of the previous few decades of protest against church corruption. This is the culmination of humanist tradition challenging the weight of custom by looking back before the prior few centuries. This is the declaration that the gradual accretion of church traditions could not overrule the Word of God and that there was a standard by which to judge all human institutions, whether church or state. This is the archetype of the bold individual standing for truth against all authorities, decades before Galileo was even born.

From this inspiration came the great explosion of protests against political and religious powers and a constellation of sometimes allied, sometimes warring Christian entities. Within the decade the German speaking world had Lutheran, Anabaptist, and Reformed denominations. Within three decades the French speaking world was fractured into Calvinist and Catholic factions and the British Isles were seesawing between Rome and Geneva. By the end of the century this second great schism of Christendom was recognized as permanent.

European society was shattered, and the age of religious wars that had begun in Luther’s day would not come to an end until 1648. Yet this story of division was not the only one to come out of the Diet of Worms. There was also the story of political liberty which, although it took quite some time and many wars to become realized, had its antecedent that one moment of defiance. In the following decades Puritans, Huguenots, Jansenists, and Dutch rebels would lay the intellectual foundation for liberty of conscience a century before Voltaire or Jefferson.

This focus on the Bible as the supreme authority had its great social and even effect in the breaking of the dichotomy of life into sacred and secular spheres. Suddenly butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers were possessed of as much dignity as any prince or prelate. Extra-biblical restraints on financial activities were removed and cash flowed and news means of production were implemented. The elevation of commoners in art begun with the Renaissance in Italy continued among the Dutch of the Reformation. The idea that consensus of the majority was not coextensive with the truth greased the wheels of the Scientific Revolution and set the stage for the technological advancements of the Industrial Revolution.

The power of the individual to stand against authority had its great and positive effects and also its great and negative effects. The epistemological crisis sparked in part by the Reformation and the wars which followed led to the skepticism and overconfidence of the Enlightenment. Rather than standing against the world on the basis of Scripture and simple reason, now people stood against others and the universe itself on the basis of their flawed perceptions and limited perspectives. In our day this principle had devolved into the Magisterium of the transient moment, where all values and truth-claims shift as quickly the latest clothing fad, and the Protestant doctrine of the priesthood of all believers has mutated into the demand for all individuals to create God, the universe, and their own selves in their own image of themselves.

And yet, even with such dour results as some of these, the overall legacy of the Reformation is positive, indeed. In the 1950s movie on the life of Martin Luther, there was a scene where the then-monk Luther was speaking to his fellow Augustinians about the glories of the grace of God even as he was coming to an awareness himself. After he longs that the common people of the world could see such divine grace, a superior chides Luther, asking what would happen if all ordinary believers had the Bible in their own hands to interpret for themselves. Luther then broke into a broad grin and enthusiastically replied, “Why, then we might have more Christians, Father!” Through the efforts of Luther, Calvin, and many others, the gospel of Jesus Christ was set free and salvation came to many around the world who would otherwise have remained lost.

Loving Our Sinful Neighbors

In our current day we are confused as to how to treat those caught up in a scandalous sin. By scandalous sin I mean those sins that gain notoriety, rightly or wrongly, among Christians. So, someone who yells at his kids on occasion is seen as bad but not seen as extraordinarily so. However, someone who beats his kids is scandalized for life. Someone who drank too much at a party is not ostracized in the same way as the person who is a fully fledged alcoholic. The entire nexus of homosexuality and transgenderism is a scandalous sin in that its commission causes others to treat the commissioner differently. Some say our approach in the past has been too negative, too condemning, and simply too un-Christ-like. Others say that the nature of this scandalous sin make it so that we cannot approach these sinners in a way that enables their sin anymore than we ought to love our alcoholic neighbor by buying him a drink.

The clear message of the life of Christ is that he went and dined with sinners. He went and had fellowship with them. He did not avoid them but sought them out. He did not turn them away but accepted their invitations. He did this with those like the prostitutes whose sin was also their curse. They likely had no more desire to live that life than women caught in that lifestyle do today. He did this with those like the tax collectors whose sin involved the oppression and exploitation of others. He did this with those like the Pharisees whose sin blinded them to their own need of salvation. There is not a type of sin so grievous that it extends beyond the power of the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. There is not a type of sin so scandalous that it alleviates us from our calling to follow Christ’s example in loving our neighbors and enemies. Towards those caught up in sins of sexuality our attitude must be the same as our stance towards the alcoholic or the white-liar or the anger prone. Christ died for sinners like us and calls us to love sinners like us.

My life passage for this sort of thing is in John 8. When the woman who had been caught in adultery is presented to Jesus to test him, he challenges her accusers to consider their own sin. This is a great mercy. He could have merely shamed them for their self-righteousness, but he invites them to look back on their own lives and wonder if their sins put them in a higher place than her. To a man they turned back, the older ones first. Did they turn back first because they had more to be sorry for? Or, being older, did they lack something of the innate self-righteousness of youth? Who knows? But this isn’t the end of Christ’s mercy to sinners. When the woman says that there were no accusers left, Jesus first said that he, too, would not condemn her. Stopping there it sounds like Christ did not care about her sin. Please note, there’s nothing to suggest that she was falsely accused here. Contrary to those who see sexual sins as old fashioned, it is clear that she had sinned. Christ then did two things. He forgave her for her sins and told her to go and sin no more. The contemporary-Christ would not have found her behavior a problem and so would not have had need to forgive her. Likewise, in his forgiveness he did not affirm her adulterous lifestyle but told her to change her ways.

In our current situation there are those who wish to use the practices of Jesus as proof that the Christ-like life will not speak against the newly popular homosexual or trans lifestyle. They say that love and guidance cannot go hand, but this goes against the very practice of Christ. He called sinners to himself for forgiveness and called them to leave their sinful ways in obedience to him. The women who left their prostitution to follow him did not continue to sell themselves, Matthew did not keep up his tax collection racket, and Paul did not remain in the Pharisaical path. Christ reached out to each of them and drew them to himself in forgiveness and love, a love that included drawing them into a new lifestyle, whether or not the contemporary culture affirmed that lifestyle.

Indeed, let us follow the pattern of Christ in our interaction with our neighbors and our enemies. The amazing thing about Christ’s life here among us sinners was not that he was nice to nice people. The amazing thing was that he was nice to awful people. The amazing thing about Christian grace is that it is offered to those who actively do not deserve it. When we reach out and befriend our sinful neighbor, whether their sins are scandalous or mundane, we do so with the pattern of the God who dined with the likes of us. When we reach out and befriend our sinful neighbor, whether their sins are the self-righteousness of the old school religious right or the self-righteousness of the too cool for school religious left, we do so with the pattern of the God who created the world with its glories and pleasures and called it “Good.”

Let us love the guilty around us with the love of the one who while we were still sinners, died for us. Let us convince them of his way not by shaming them for their sin nor by telling them that sin is no cause for shame. Let us invite into our homes those who have no right to claim our attention. Let us show them the love that has been shown to us and point them to the one who will lead us away from our sin and not merely accepts us as we are. Let us lead them to the one who calls us to love our neighbors and to obey his commandments. “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” Matthew 11:28-30

Why Paris Matters

Yet again the world is in mourning for the City of Lights. First, there was the assault on the Charlie Hebdo offices by radical Islamists who killed 12 in Paris this past January. Now, on Friday the thirteenth no less, over a hundred men and women were slaughtered by those claimed by ISIS, a Muslim terrorist state with dreams of global outreach. Once again social media has erupted in support, even out in the normally Franco-phobic US and UK.

Nobody says that we should not mourn this day. How could they? People attending a concert and going to the café were gunned down or blown up for the offense of being free. Image bearers of God were butchered, all in the name of serving an imaginary God.

There have been, however, those who have offered quiet criticism of the outpouring of grief for France. Not unreasonably they ask why the world is so distraught about this tragedy when the other places are filled with many other events of equal or greater horror? Every other Facebook photo is emblazoned with the Tricolor of France within hours of this Parisian massacre when few in the West made similar symbolic tokens when terrorists attacked African or Near Eastern targets. Though not always explicit, there is the tacit accusation that the West cares less about the dark-skinned victims of Islamic terror than the fair-skinned denizens of Paris. While this is in many ways an understandable reaction, there is good reason for us all to cry, “Vive la France!”

We care more about France for the same reason we are more shaken by a loved one’s death than we are by the loss of a complete stranger. Crying over a friend’s death doesn’t mean that we think the stranger’s life didn’t matter. The stranger was just as much made in God’s image as our friend. It does means that the personal connection we have with our friend leaves a gaping hole in our hearts while the stranger’s tragedy brings us only a sympathetic sigh.

Despite our familial squabbles, France stood shoulder to shoulder with the United States and Britain against German Fascists and Russian Communists throughout the 1900s. We don’t always agree with those “cheese eating surrender monkeys,” but they have been a beacon and inspiration for human dignity and liberty since the end of the 1700s. Like anyone else their witness for freedom has been flickering at times, but French writers and thinkers have been the source of many great movements around the world for the general welfare of humanity as a whole. An attack on France is symbolically an attack on the liberty, equality, and fraternity of us all.

For Americans and those in the West in general, France is no stranger. We cannot keep their pains at an arm’s length the way we do with others. We are forced to see that in them the horror which could just as easily be ours. We share a culture heritage and mythic imagination with France in a way that we do not with others around the world. When we see terrorism in Paris or London, we are forced to see the reality of this war in the same way that a death of a loved shocks us the way a stranger’s death does not.

We are personal beings who have emotional attachments to everything our lives touch. To ask people to mourn for everyone’s death the same does not increase our humanity. It demeans it. If I were to tell you that I do not care for my own children any more than I care for a complete stranger, you would hardly compliment me on my great love for all humanity. In fact, you would wonder what kind of person could say such a thing.

Should we remember that death and destruction are unwelcome and all too common visitors to those outside the Shire of the West? By all means! We should all work to make ourselves more aware of the indignities which are tragically ordinary in our supposedly progressive age. The world is still with darkness filled, and the pain of God’s image bearers does not change by its association with us. Their deaths mattered. But, please, let us have no shaming of others for their pain for this shadow of darkness in the City of Lights. We take this attack personally because the people attacked matter to us personally. Our love of loved ones is not hatred of others.

The Loyal Rebels

When faced with accusations of civil disorder and state corruption, Christians can be tempted to despair over our response. The cry for justice and the call to obey the state present a seeming contradiction for believers. Some want to revolt against the powers that be while others want to support the lawful authorities. It's a tricky thing, for sure, but we have reason to hope that the testimony of the Bible has not failed us here.

The beauty and the difficulty of the classical Christian view of the state is its complex realism. The endemic corruptness of humanity demands an agent of force to curtail the worst of our natures. Without security we cannot have even the limited human flourishing possible in a post-Fall world. However, as the state, like Soylent Green, is made of people, this same corrupted human nature adheres to those humans comprising the state.

We hear that we are not to put our trust in princes, yet we also hear that we are to pray for the peace of a Babylon, a state which was hardly the acme of enlightened rule. Paul can describe the state as the minister of God and Peter can call on Christians to submit to the government, all in the context of a Roman system that makes American cops look like a bunch of fuzzy kittens. Yet, that's kind of hard to say, isn't it? Saying, "You don't have it so bad as others," works about as well in this context as it does telling someone that their physical pain or loss of their liberty isn't as bad as so and so over there has it.

Christianity offers contingent support to the state because it recognizes what the state truly is, a stopgap measure for the post-Fall, pre-glorification world that was never intended as the final guarantor of justice. In this way Augustine of Hippo was able to offer robust support of state authority even as he railed against all governments as nothing more than bandits whose territory increased enough to be called a kingdom. Christianity offers neither an absolute support for the state nor suggests that our support for the state is conditioned on our political preferences.

Both the "Back the Badge" and the "No Justice, No Peace" crowds fail in the same way as they each assume there can be such a thing as an non-corrupt state. The first assumes that God's ordination of the state entails the inevitability of justice from such a pure source while the second believes that any sign of injustice means God has not ordained this state. Both underestimate the extensiveness of the Fall. Both absolutize the state in a way not found in the Bible.

While many think this is a problem, I don't think this is Christianity's great weak point but one of its great strengths. The Bible offers example after example of the need for a corrupted people to have a state to hem them in. Yet, it offers example after example of corrupted rulers making a mess of things. It offers, in the Fall, an explanation for the presence of injustice yet also, in the reality of a personal God who has created a good world and who is redeeming that world, it provides a hope for an expansion of justice in this world.

Despite its pretensions to the contrary, atheism offers no hope in the face of injustice and oppression. In a purely materialist universe human rights devolve into social conventions on the level saying "Excuse me," after belching, pleasantries with no enduring value. Christianity, on the other hand, offers someone to complain to. In his book, The Rebel, my favorite non-Christian writer, Albert Camus, said this, "The only thing that gives meaning to human protest is the idea of a personal god who has created, and is therefore responsible for, everything. And so we can say, without being paradoxical, that in the Western World the history of rebellion is inseparable from the history of Christianity."

Christianity provides the rationale for a state and the basis for strong opposition to that state.

An Evangelical by Any Other Name

I recently told my students that if they could manage to come up with a definition of “Evangelicalism” that everybody could agree on, they could make a lot of money. It is one of those terms that everyone uses but few have a handle on what it really means. Unlike its related but equally ephemeral cousin, “fundamentalism,” evangelicalism still retains an occasional positive connotation. Sadly, the once proud term fundamentalist has been largely reduced to a second and third person invective. “You” or “they” might be fundamentalist, but “we” or “I” hardly ever are. In much the say way, these definitions of evangelicalism say more about the speakers than they do about actual evangelicals. Pundits use it to describe Koran burners and televangelists, politicians use it to analyze a special interest group, and others ponder whether “Ee-vangelical” means something different than “Eh-vangelical.”

In the past it was fairly straightforward to the point that it was often quipped that an evangelical is simply someone who likes Billy Graham. Today it has become increasingly complex as no definition seems complete without an attendant hyphen, leaving us with “evangelical-feminist,” “the evangelical-left,” and even “evangelical-Catholic.” If Al Mohler and Jim Wallis, Joel Osteen and Tim Keller can all be evangelical despite mutually exclusive ideas, what on earth does it mean in the first place? We may soon find ourselves with a definition so diluted of content that we borrow from Francis Schaeffer’s “true truth” and say that an evangelical-evangelical is someone who actually believes in evangelicalism.

Well, desperate times call for desperate measures. We find now that we can turn to a paragon of subtly for a solution to our problem. Responding to the recent hullabaloo over religious liberty laws in Indiana, Steve “Stone Cold” Austin forwarded his two cents in a commentary heavy with the dew of profanity. Although you may enjoy a more full exposition of his thought here http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/24/steve-austin-gay-marriage_n_5205212.html his terminology is somewhat more . . . colorful . . . than would be appropriate in this venue. We can paraphrase him to say that he objects to the idea that Christians think they have spoken to God and that Christians believe that the worst of criminals can go to heaven. Whether meaning to do so or not, the erstwhile wrestles pins on Christians two complaints which go to the heart of evangelical identity: revelation and redemption.

Evangelicals hold to a radical view of revelation. This is not, as Mr. Austin characterizes it, a matter of Christians going up and speaking to God, but, rather, that he has come down and spoken to us. Were Austin’s description accurate, this would be objectionable, as it would leave us dependent on the recollections of the few who made the trip to heaven rather than on the sure report of the self-revealing God who came down to us. But this is not so. The evangelical identity is built upon the idea that we have in the Bible God’s message to humanity and not merely the theological musings of people long gone. The evangelical identity is built on the principle that, as it is his message to us, we are not in the position of deciding which parts to believe or to obey, as though theological study were a middle school Bible study where we ask, “What does this mean to you?” It is to the pattern set by him that we are to conform our preferences and not the other way around. The word of God to humanity is not subject to the whims of a postmodern literary theory any more than it was limited by the preconceptions of a Medieval Magisterium.

Evangelicals also hold to a radical view of redemption. Mr. Austin objects that a murderer and molester should not be able to go to heaven after the life he has led. Implicit in Mr. Stone Cold’s complaint is the idea that heaven should be for those who deserve it, for those who have lived a life on earth worthy of a reward in heaven. It also implies that those of us who are not murderers and rapists can have the confidence that we belong to this latter group. We can know that our own merits will pave our road into the New Jerusalem. The cross of Christ becomes only an example to follow and not a necessity of life. It is the radical claim of evangelicalism that a sinner such as Mr. Austin described can indeed be saved. This view of redemption defining evangelicalism is that the sins of the best of us are so great that it required the death of God to save us, and, yet, the work of Christ is so overwhelming that it overcomes the vilest soul imaginable. There is no saint so pure or sinner so foul that the work of Christ is not the sole and sure hope of each.

Evangelicals are those who hope in the evangel of God. The message of God has come down to humanity, and the presence of God has come down to Earth. Evangelicals are those who base their lives on the hope that God has spoken and that God has acted. This good news of God both transcends and transforms our cultural moment and personal predilections. Our old traditions and new innovations cannot stand in between the word God speaks of himself and the people he saves for himself. We are able to speak into the controversies of life, not because we have access to God but because he has accessed the world through his word. We are able to hope for a changed world where all is made new, not because we have kept off contemporary society’s naughty list but because Christ died for the ungodly.

Presumably Mr. “Cold” did not intend on getting to the crux of the issue so pointedly as he did. Nonetheless, we find in his analysis an important reminder of the reality of God’s word and the centrality of the cross. We may, and undoubtedly will, continue to quibble over just what or who constitutes an evangelical. But, if we lose either of these points, that God’s word is not subject to our transitory impressions and that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth is the solitary and unmediated path to God, we can throw around any definitions we want to. If we lose the evangel of God, our evangelicalism becomes a meaningless anyhow.

Is There Virtue in Silence?

“For if you keep silent at this time, relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another place, but you and your father’s house will perish.” Esther 4:14

“For everything there is a season and a time for every matter under heaven . . . a time to tear, and a time to sew, a time to keep silence, and a time to speak.” Ecclesiastes 3:1, 7.

In moments of crisis and stress, the call often goes out for Christians publicly to take a stand about the issue, even if that stand is as simple as a social media posting indicating support or opposition. Obviously, the greatest portion of anger is directed towards those who chose to speak out in an inappropriate way, those who, by their word choice or basic position place themselves outside what is considered moral behavior and opinon. Yet these are not alone in incurring the wrath of those of us who see this or that as the defining moment when a prophetic call is needed. There are times when we condemn the absence of a statement as complicity with the evil of the day with nearly as much passion as we do those who speak wrongly.

Are there times when silence in the presence of evil is evil itself? Certainly. There are moments when silence is acquiescence. When faced with a grave injustice it is quite possible that we choose to say or to do nothing because we approve of the sin we see. We can think of the German Christians, saying nothing as their Jewish neighbors disappeared, one by one. If we are greedy ourselves, we may refuse to condemn those who exploit others for financial gain. If we are gossips, we may turn a blind eye towards the slander done by others. If we indulge in pornography, we are unlikely to condemn it practice in others. If we carry hatred in our hearts towards another branch of Father Adam’s family tree, we may well find reasons to avoid comment when racial injustice stares us in the face.

Are there times when such a silence, though not malicious, is still the sign of a hard heart, apathetic to the plight of others? By all means. Fiddling while our own Rome burns, we can’t be bothered by the misfortune affecting other people. We in the West with our ample refrigerators and even more ample waistlines shake our heads about the starving peoples of the world, and then head back to our gluttony. We see the suffering of the persecuted church, and then think only to thank God that we’re American. We may dislike the idea of abortion, but we can’t be bothered to rock the boat by saying so publicly. We who are white see the lack of opportunities and hostility endured by ethnic minorities, stoop only offer a prayer that Jesus would come soon, but then go back to our trust funds and friendly policemen.

For many who have raised their voices in protest about a social or moral problem, this is where the story ends. We look with disdain at those who do not take the stand we do or, perhaps, who do so in a different way. When we hear their silence, we can see no alternative but that either acquiescence or apathy rules the hearts of our taciturn neighbors. Is this so? Rarely do we ask ourselves if there might be more going on in our brother’s or sister’s souls than what we will allow for them.

There is another reason for silence, although it is rather less dramatic than the other options. It is a reason which even those who speak boldly concerning situation “A” might find appealing when it comes to situation “B.” It is the silence born of prudence. It is the silence we share when we decide that, whatever the merits of the crisis at hand, speaking out at this moment would not be wise. It may be as private as dealing with an unbelieving coworker involved in some obvious sin and asking ourselves whether the more constructive approach is confronting or ignoring. It may be as public as supporting a political party for the sake of one part of their platform even though we know full well that this means implicitly supporting another part of their agenda which makes our conscience squirm.

Perhaps it is a situation which we think all Christians should avoid addressing publicly. Perhaps it is one where we think that only we ourselves should stand back. We may be glad that the discussion is going on, and that others are speaking up. Yet we still may decide, at times, that we are not pleased with the way it is progressing and that our own particular contribution will not be constructive, for one reason or another. Any of us may imagine a moment, and more likely we have experienced a moment when we, too, have decided, for whatever reasons, that godly wisdom entails silence in the face of sin.

This will be of small comfort to those who have concluded that this moment or this crisis is the time to speak. What is more, we may be right. The moment we see today or tomorrow might well be one of those times when it is irresponsible of any Christian to refuse to let their voices be heard. It might be that to stay silent now makes us culpable of accommodating sin. Yet, when we say that there is no moral option other than the one we have chosen, we must be on our guard that we have not limited wisdom to what we can imagine in our finite and fallen minds.

The combination of life’s complexity and human frailty entails that there will be disagreements in this life. We will not all agree on all issues. Even if we do agree on the goal, we will not all agree on the best course of action towards that goal. For some this will mean deeds, while, for others it will mean words. For others still it will mean silence. Before we start accusing our brothers and sisters in Christ of sins of omission, we must ask whether it is us who have left something undone which we ought to have done. Have we gone to them with a humble spirit and asked them if their silence has some purpose we have not considered? Let us make manifest grace to one another by assuming that our fellow members of the Bride of Christ are not acting according to our worst imaginings of their silence until forced to do so by their words. Let us do unto others as we would have them do unto us.