Conflicting claims

The Prince of this World is the dominant force behind all government. And this is more distressing when governments claim to be on a Christian basis. Jesus and his Spirit cannot rule because our human schemes maintain absolute control.—Christoph Blumhardt in The Hidden Christ, page 14

<idle musing>
Ain't it the truth! As Ken Schenk put it this morning:

As for Christians, the New Testament has done away with the category of clean and unclean, at least in the public sphere. We are strangers and aliens in that land anyway. We need to stop thinking of America as sacred space we need to keep from being defiled.

To which I give a hearty Amen! And then, some advice from Thomas Kidd at the Anxious Bench:

-Stop sending the message that we are lapdogs for any political party, Republican or otherwise. Russell Moore’s recent emphases on our status as a moral minority, not beholden to any temporal political movement, strike a welcome tone on this subject.

-Adhere to the best of the historic and contemporary Christian intellectual tradition, and stop chasing after celebrities and faddish pop Christian writers. We have many able evangelical defenders of the faith, but the politicians and writers who get the most coverage on talk radio and Fox News are often not among them.

-Put our money and service where our mouth is in terms of missions and service. We cannot account for how the world construes what evangelicals do. But as much as we can, we should seek to be known by heroes such as Kent Brantly and Stephen Foster, people who give up their lives to take up their cross. In so doing they find their true life, whether or not anyone applauds them.