“It is not a small thing to treat lightly a pattern of public behaviors [sic] that lead to death.”
John Piper weighed in this week with an article about the US presidential election; the quotation above comes from that article.
‘So what?’ you say. American pastors are not shy about sharing their political allegiances; we have watched many big-name US Christian leaders be publicly unequivocal about their support for Trump. Piper is not usually given to political comment as far as I can see, but as election day approaches he has added his voice to the mix, and it’s worth listening to.
I read recently that in the field of ethics, the notion of virtue (first made famous in philosophy by Aristotle), ‘went out of favour’ for years. In the academy it seems virtue ethics are back in vogue. What about in the church?
Tom Wright’s 2010 book Virtue Reborn sketches a beautiful vision for the church to be a community of virtue, bringing forward the holiness and hope of the new creation into the here and now. This vision of righteousness means we should be people who inhabit the virtues, as our character is transformed by God; it means being people who first ask not ‘what should we do?’ but rather ‘who should we be?’.
In his critique of Trump, and of those Christians who excuse Trump’s behaviour because they support his policies, John Piper’s article makes this point: “Christians communicate a falsehood to unbelievers (who are also baffled!) when we act as if policies and laws that protect life and freedom are more precious than being a certain kind of person.”
Christian, as well as asking ‘how should we then live?’, shouldn’t we first ask ‘who should we then be?’. The church is more than a people who act differently to those around them (although it is not less that that). Christopher Wright in the denouement of his Old Testament Ethics for the People of God says it like this: “This is the God we worship; this is the story we are part of; this is the Word we have heard; and this is the people we belong to.”
Who we are matters.