When I was preaching week by week to the same congregation, one of my fundamental convictions was that I needed to keep politics out of the pulpit. Perhaps I should express that more precisely: I needed to keep party politics out of the pulpit. I was — and still am — convinced that how an individual votes at the ballot box should be shaped and informed by their Christian character as nurtured through Word, sacrament, and worship in the community of the church. But I am also convinced that the pastor’s first task is to point people to things above; and not to anathematize anyone in his congregation because of matters of earthly politics. Of course, that is easier said than done, particularly in an era such as ours where the prepolitical has been all but abolished and everything has been turned into an acrimonious political war zone. Rejecting the transcendent and seeing nothing beyond the material, we have allowed the trivia of the present to take centre stage and become both the battlegrounds and the weapons of a total cultural war of all against all. In such a world, I suspect that any application one is likely to draw from the biblical text and any illustration one might choose to use are likely to run the risk of offending somebody somewhere. That is the nature of things in out tribalized world. Read the full article by Carl R. Trueman.
2021-08-03