It's glorious how God leads intellectuals to shout their blindness. Things the simplest plowboy sees clearly are obscured by the intellectual's highly nuanced mists and vapors, so the plowboy is left to his centuries-old occupation of making fun of them. He's not anti-intellectual--he's anti-intellectuals.
Plowboys aren't envious of the intellectual's degrees or salary or light teaching load or clean soft hands and time alone with books. And it's certainly not that the plowboy is careless with reason, logic, history, and right and wrong. He's as careful with his tax forms as any making-of-books man, and much more sophisticated.
No, it's not that the plowboy is stupid and thinks stupid is good. Rather, it's that he's got his feet planted squarely on the ground while the intellectual is up in the mists and vapors forgetting that he's made of dust and to dust he will return. The intellectual speaks from on high while the plowboy speaks from soil and manure. The Christian sizing both up may be able to grasp that the plowboy's perspective makes all the difference for his grasp of truth and his growth in righteousness.
Applications of these fundamental truths are everywhere.
R2K intellectuals are a special interest group hounding the nation's citizenry about their pet policy issue. They're a PAC whose primary work is not on K Street and in the halls of congress, but out across the land. They publish and yell and chivy and curdle and yap at and hector and dog their fellow citizens with their political dogma, and they do it in the Name of God citing His Word and Church as their authorities...
They are fixated on silencing the voice of their fellow citizens who are religious, particularly those citizens who profess faith in Jesus Christ. Their endless political message is that no man may speak for God outside the privacy of his own home and church-house; and that if he does choose to speak as a citizen of these United States, he must be ever so careful to make it clear he's not speaking for God or His Church. Our form of government requires him to parse his words and mince his sentences and nuance his tone so that no civil magistrate or fellow citizen will feel threatened by Christians-as-Christians, let alone Church-members-as-Church-members or Church-officers-as-Church-officers. This is the nature of our civil compact, and if religious people speak for God and His Church and people, they are violating that civil compact.
The R2K-novelty man is one with the ACLU in gagging God, His Church, and His officers. And we've seen before how fundamentalist Christians allying themselves with Eastern Seaboard intellectuals on an issue carries the field. United, the church and liberals are a powerful force. Think of Left-Behind Dallas and Cru dispensationalists agreeing and making common cause with the Jewish press in assuring our nation's fundamental commitment to Israel.
The ironic thing is that R2K intellectuals would oppose Jerry Falwell and Bill Bright and Jim Dobson and Francis Schaeffer and Joel Belz and Marvin Olasky out in public, holding their precious separation of church and state in hand while being completely blind to the precious inconsistency of their actions. Their great learning has driven them mad.
Separation of church and state promoted by conservative Reformed men on the internet and on seminary campuses and in bookstores and on the Kindle and on the airwaves and through lectures and at colleges and universities across this land, all done in the Name of the Church, is the Church engaging in political action as the Church. R2K-novelty men are political activisits every bit as active in pushing Christians, their pastors, and churches to be silent as Pat Robertson and Marvin Olasky are pushing Christians, their pastors, and their churches to speak. They're identical to their fundamentalist Baptist parents, but travelling in the opposite direction.
Both claim Scripture and Church history as their authority for their political action, and both equally claim to speak for the Bride of Christ in their exhortations. The only difference is the thrust of their political advocacy--the thrust of their sectarianism. One group promotes clothing the public square with the Word of God and the call to the Cross of Jesus Christ; the other promotes keeping the public square naked and the Word of God and the call to the Cross of Jesus Christ hidden and private and (of course) inoffensive.
Two political action committees. Two competing voices. Two visions of the proper political engagement of Christians. Two understandings of our unique Americanism called by one "separation of church and state" and the other "gagging of God, His Church, and His officers."
What the plowboy sees is that he can't speak his conscience to his township councilman or senator without having his local R2K intellectual look over his words and arguments, showing him how he got it all wrong and that, really, he might do better not to write at all.
Our beloved plowboy, though, knows this is cowardice. He's watched chickens signal dominance and submission, and so with his mud room smelling of pig stuff and supper finished, he gets out his laptop and writes his congressman telling him that sodomy is an abomination before God and God will hold him accountable for how he votes on the bill requiring his state's public school teachers to promote sodomy to the children under their watch-care; and that his pastor and fellow church members feel the same.
When the R2K intellectual sees his e-mail and tells this plowboy he shouldn't quote Scripture to his congressman or warn his congressman of the opposition of his fellow church members or threaten the congressman with the coming judgment of the Only True God because our form of government is based on separation of Church and state and it's the job of Christians and the Church and her officers to preach the simple and unadulaterated Gospel, the plowboy will go cross-eyed, scratch his chigger bites, snort, and hit "Send."
(TB)
