Marginal Christianity

By PETER WEHNER SEPT. 24, 2016    Credit John Chillingworth/Picture Post/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images WHEN I was on Christmas break from college in 1980, I wrote a letter to the editor of my hometown newspaper, The Tri-City Herald. It was published soon after I began to embrace Christianity, a gradual rather than a dramatic process that didn’t come all that easily. The letter was a response to a man who had written that Christians were obligated to support a long list of conservative policies. (This was in the immediate aftermath of Ronald Reagan’s election and the rise of the religious right.) “Mr. Mays appears to believe that Christianity and his personal views are synonymous,” I wrote. “Conceivably, they are not. Christianity does not identify with a political ideology or party.” I was politically conservative at the time, and believed that my religious faith, carefully understood, should inform my politics. Yet I...

December 30, 2015 by Preston Sprinkle 1 Comment   It’s fascinating (one might say disturbing) to see how each person’s political context shapes his or her understanding of Romans 13. Christians living in North Korea or Burma tend to read Romans 13 differently than Americans do. Adolf Hitler, Idi Amin, and other “Christian” dictators have celebrated the passage as their divine ticket to execute justice on whomever they deemed enemies of the state. Not more than a generation ago, Romans 13 was hailed as the charter for apartheid in South Africa. American Christian leaders did the same during the years of slavery and segregation. If the state mandates that blacks can’t drink from the same water fountain as whites, it very well has the divine right to do so, according to certain interpretations Romans 13. Most people today would see such a view of Romans 13 as going a bit too far. But only a bit. Theologian and scholar Wayne Grudem, for instance, says that the “sword in t...