The Bible and the Ballot: Using Scripture in Political Decisions

By Tremper Longman

How to read the Bible on matters of public policy

Christians affirm the Bible as our standard of faith and practice. We turn to it to hear God’s voice. But what relevance does the Bible have for the contentious public policy issues we face today? Although the Bible does not always speak explicitly to modern issues, it does give us guiding principles as we think about how we might vote or act as political figures ourselves. 

The Bible and the Ballot demonstrates the proper use of Scripture in contemporary political discussions. Christians regularly invoke the Bible to support their positions on many controversial political topics—gay marriage, poverty, war, religious liberty, immigration, the environment, taxes, etc.—and this book will help facilitate those conversations. Tremper Longman provides a hermeneutical approach to using the Bible in this manner, then proceeds topic by topic, citing important Scriptures to be taken into consideration in each case and offering an evangelical interpretation. 

Longman is careful to suggest levels of confidence in interpretation and acknowledges that often there are a range of possible applications. Each chapter includes questions to provoke further thought in individuals’ minds or for group discussion. 

The Bible and the Ballot is a ready guide to understanding the Bible on issues that American Christians face today as we live within a pluralistic society. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Jan 14, 2020
• ISBN: 9781467458580

Tremper Longman

Tremper Longman III is Robert H. Gundry Professor ofBiblical Studies and chair of the Religious StudiesDepartment at Westmont College, Santa Barbara, California.His other books include Introduction to the OldTestament, How to Read the Psalms,Reading the Bible with Heart and Mind, andLiterary Approaches to Biblical Interpretation.

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INTRODUCTION

I have given them your word and the world has hated them, for they are not of the world any more than I am of the world. My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one. They are not of the world, even as I am not of it. Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth. As you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world. For them I sanctify myself, that they too may be truly sanctified. ( John 17:14–19)

Jesus taught his disciples that they are in the world but not of the world, which raises the question: How are Christians who are not of the world to interact with the world in which they live? Jesus’s teaching and our question presuppose a difference between the world and Jesus’s followers who constitute the church. After all, Jesus had earlier taught his disciples that the prince of this world was none other than Satan (John 12:31; 14:30; 16:11). No wonder Jesus wanted to make sure his disciples knew that they were not of the world and prayed for them that the Father would protect them from the evil one, a reference to the devil.

But again, Christians live in the world, but how? In another gospel, Jesus warns his disciples that, as they live in the world, they will be like sheep among wolves. Then he goes on to tell them to be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves (Matt. 10:16).

All these passages (and many more) are important to keep in mind (and we will come back to them) as we approach the question of biblical interpretation and public policy. Christians are followers of Jesus but also citizens of a nation-state. How do Christians live shrewdly and innocently with the tension between church and culture?

The first step is to recognize that the state is not the church. The error of identifying the state with the church is particularly prevalent among American Christians, and since this book is specifically addressed to the American church, we need to recognize this significant theological error and criticize it from the start. Thus, we will anticipate a longer discussion (see chapter 4 on nationalism, patriotism, and globalization) with a few words here in the introduction.

America today is not a Christian nation either by its founding or by its present constitution. Our founders did include people of faith, but they also included many who were shaped not so much by Christian principles and convictions as by various forms of Enlightenment philosophy.¹ But even if they were all sincere Christians, that fact would not make America a Christian nation. Indeed, as D. A. Carson points out, talk of the ‘Christian West’ actually stifles the advance of the gospel in parts of the world where countervailing religions and ideology want people to believe in the stereotype of the Christian West so that Christian claims can be dismissed as merely Western. Indeed, also, Christians who wish to be faithful to the Bible will remind themselves of their heavenly citizenship.²

Only Israel was a godly nation (and only during the Old Testament period), and that role was through God’s choice of them to mediate God’s blessing to the rest of the world. As God said to Abraham:

Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you. I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all people on earth will be blessed through you. (Gen. 12:1–3)

God had chosen Israel during the Old Testament period to stay separate from the surrounding people, to obey his divinely given law (Exod. 20–24), and to attract the surrounding people to God through the blessing that would come from their obedience. This election was not for special favor, but rather for service that often would bring them suffering for the benefit of the world.³

No nation today, including America, holds the same status as ancient Israel did during the Old Testament period. Indeed, as we move from the Old Testament to the New Testament, we see that God’s people move from being a nation-state to being the church, drawn from many different nations and ethnicities. To treat America as if it has some kind of favored divine status or role is not only mistaken but potentially idolatrous. God is in relationship with and works through the church, not through nation-states.

To recognize that the church and the state are different, even identifying the state as the world, does not answer the question how the church and individual Christians are to live in the world. This question continues to be one fraught with disagreement and even controversy.

In the post–World War II era, the theologian H. Richard Niebuhr wrote Christ and Culture, where he explored five different models of the church’s reaction to the world (culture).⁴

The Church and the World

Christ against Culture

The Christ-against-culture perspective arises from a recognition that there is a fundamental difference between the world and the church. This awareness of the contrast between Christ and culture leads to a strategy of withdrawal from the culture to the fullest extent possible. Here we might think of the monastic movement, both historically and in the present. In terms of the latter, we might cite what is called the Benedict option, which calls for the church to withdraw from public life to escape from the contamination of secular life, as well as the increasing futility of Christians trying to speak in the public square due to increasing animosity toward Christian perspectives.⁵

The Christ of Culture

The Christ-of-culture viewpoint may be the opposite of the Christ-against-culture perspective in that those who adopt this approach do not see a difference between Christ and the culture they live in, although they may seek to improve it by insisting on what they see as Christian ethical values. Niebuhr himself used the social gospel as an example. Advocates of the social gospel weren’t interested in presenting the gospel to people but in getting them to act more justly toward each other. Philip Yancey cited some liberation theologians as examples, since they read their Bibles with Marxist lenses and then applied biblical principles of liberation to the oppressed, apart from a relationship with God.⁶ Perhaps another example might be those Christians who basically Christianize the culture as we have it—for instance, some mainline Christians who simply accept contemporary culture’s sexual mores, or perhaps more conservative Christians who baptize capitalism as divinely sanctioned economics.

Christ above Culture

According to Niebuhr, this church of the center perspective understands that Christ and the world cannot be simply opposed to each other. Neither can the ‘world’ as culture be simply regarded as the realm of godlessness; since it is at least founded on the ‘world’ as nature, and cannot exist save as it is upheld by the Creator and Governor of nature.⁷ In this view, culture is basically good (and the antithesis is between Christ and humanity, not Christ and the world [culture]), but it needs to be improved by Christian values. Thomas Aquinas is often taken as a lead example of this perspective.

Christ and Culture in Paradox

Niebuhr himself suggested that some strands of Lutheran theology and even some Calvinist theologians advocate a kind of two-kingdom idea. An individual is both a Christian and a citizen of the broader culture. In this model, church and society have separate but legitimate spheres. We obey Christ in the church and political leaders in our public, community life. Jesus tells his followers to render to Caesar what is Caesar’s (Matt. 22:21), and Paul urges his readers to let everyone be subject to the governing authorities (Rom. 13:1; see vv. 1–7). That said, what does a Christian do when the two kingdoms put contradictory demands on the believer? It is arguable that such a simple bifurcation can lead to a type of unholy collaboration, such as that between the church and the Nazi government of Germany in the mid-twentieth century.

Christ the Transformer of Culture

This view, like the Christ-against-culture perspective, flows out of the recognition that Christianity and the broader culture are at odds with each other. Rather than leading to withdrawal, however, advocates of this view work toward the transformation of the culture. At the time of Niebuhr, Christianity was losing its cultural grip, but its recovery seemed more possible during his lifetime than today. Secularism had not yet taken a firm hold, and there were not yet open hostilities between, on the one hand, many secular cultural elites and their institutions and, on the other, the church’s elites and their institutions, as there are today. After all, it is common today, but not at Niebuhr’s time, to speak of culture wars. Thus, for better or worse, among evangelical Christians at least, transformation often means attacking secular institutions and trying to coerce transformation in the form of legislation. We will have occasion later to question the wisdom and propriety of strong forms of this type of legislative coercion. And we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that there are still Christian, even evangelical, voices and institutions that attempt a more nuanced and softer-voiced type of transformation through persuasion.⁸

While Niebuhr’s five categories have been influential over the past fifty-plus years since Christ and Culture was first published, they have been recently criticized by Craig Carter in his book aptly titled Rethinking Christ and Culture: A Post-Christendom Perspective.⁹ Carter, writing from an Anabaptist perspective, takes issue with Niebuhr on a couple of essential points. First, he believes that Niebuhr presupposes what Carter calls a Christendom perspective—that is, the idea that the culture is essentially Christian and therefore Christians need, through the transforming approach, to call the culture back to its essential Christian nature. Carter charges that such a view involves compromises with the world. Carter believes that we are moving into a post-Christendom period (where the church is clearly a disenfranchised minority within the broader culture). He argues that Niebuhr misrepresented important aspects of the Christ-against-culture perspective, which Carter himself clearly prefers. With these questions about Niebuhr, he proposes six categories. He divides them into two groups of three, where the first three presuppose a Christendom culture, defined by the acceptance of what he calls violent coercion, and the second three presuppose a non-Christendom culture, which he defines as rejecting the use of violent coercion.

Christendom Types

Type 1: Christ Legitimizing Culture

This approach describes Christians and Christian movements and institutions that use violence to create what they consider to be a Christian culture. Here he places the medieval crusades as well as German churches that supported the Nazis during World War II and before.

Type 2: Christ Humanizing Culture

Here Christians approach the culture out of their private faith in order to move it toward Christian values. He cites the sixteenth-century reformer Martin Luther and the recently deceased evangelist Billy Graham as examples of this approach.

Type 3: Christ Transforming Culture

This approach is based on the idea that Christ is Lord of all and that force can be used to bring everything under subjection to Christ. The sixteenth-century British political leader Thomas Cromwell is a lead example.

Non-Christendom Types

Type 4: Christ Transforming Culture

Christians like William Penn, Desmond Tutu, and Martin Luther King Jr. are examples of those who also believe that Christ is the Lord of the cosmos, but they believe that nonviolent means of persuasion should be used to achieve their objective, which is to make the broader culture more Christlike.

Type 5: Christ Humanizing Culture

Like Type 2, a Christian like Mother Teresa wanted to leaven the broader culture and make it more human. But whereas someone advocating Type 2 might start a social action group and thus coerce people to behave in the proper way, a Type 5 Christian would simply go out and serve humanity with the hope of providing a model to the rest of society.

Type 6: Christ Separating from Culture

Here Carter describes Christians who withdraw from culture with no intention to directly influence culture, except to provide an attractive alternative to it. He uses the example of the Amish, who separate from society to provide a kind of countercultural alternative to the culture.

***

For my present purpose, I am not interested in defending Niebuhr over Carter or any one particular model of interaction with the broader culture.¹⁰ I present these two examples of theologians exploring different options of interaction with the culture to give us some categories with which to work.

My own view is that there is not a single strategy or formula of Christian interaction with culture, but rather Jesus’s instruction to be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves calls on Christians to utilize wisdom in reaction to specific issues that arise in our public life. In other words, there is not a single-size-fits-all approach. Sometimes we will be called to withdraw, at other times to engage and affirm, and at still others to transform or humanize. D. A. Carson seems to agree, when he says that four of the five strategies can claim some biblical warrant.¹¹ These four strategies aren’t offered as alternatives so that only one is right, but rather as different ways the Christian and the church should relate to the broader culture, depending on the circumstances.

We will see that the Bible does not give us instructions about specific policy decisions. To interact in culture, we need to know relevant biblical principles and be able to read situations and people in order to know how to apply them.

1. Think, for instance, of the influence of the political philosophy of John Locke.

2. Both quotes are from D. A. Carson, Christ and Culture Revisited (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 195.

3. For the understanding of election as service rather than special favor, see Joel Kaminsky, Yet I Loved Jacob: Reclaiming the Biblical Concept of Election (Nashville: Abingdon, 2007).

4. H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1951).

5. Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian World (New York: Sentinel, 2017).

6. Philip Yancey, A State of Ungrace, Christianity Today 41 (February 3, 1997): 31–37. See also his What’s So Amazing about Grace? (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1997).

7. Niebuhr, Christ and Culture, 117–18.

8. I think here of the work of the Center for Public Justice (cpjustice.org) and thinkers like James K. A. Smith, Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2017).

9. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2006.

10. For a helpful critique of Carter, see Carson, Christ and Culture Revisited, 218–22.

11. Carson, Christ and Culture Revisited, 206. Carson rightly argues that the Christ of culture option cannot be defended biblically.

PART 1

The Bible and Public Policy

1

Key Questions

for Reading the Bible

Why should Christians care what the Bible says about issues or principles connected to public policy? In a word, Christians recognize the Bible as canon, which means that this collection of books occupies a privileged place in the development of our thinking about God, ourselves, and our world (doctrine), and our attitudes and behavior (praxis). When the church recognizes the Bible as canon, it acknowledges its authority in our lives as the word of God.

While all Christians throughout history and across the globe acknowledge that the Bible has a special place as canon in the life of the church, some differences lie particularly in two areas: the nature of its authority and also its scope.

We begin with brief comments about its scope. All Christians affirm the Old and New Testament books that constitute the entirety of the Protestant canon. Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christians do not remove any of these books, but they do include some from the period between the Old Testament and New Testament books. These books are called the Apocrypha (Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christians disagree on the contents of the Apocrypha). For the purposes of this book, it is not necessary to adjudicate this issue since the inclusion of the Apocrypha would not affect our development of principles for public policy. That said, as a Protestant myself and writing primarily for a Protestant audience, I will appeal only to the books in the so-called narrow canon of the Protestant church.¹

Protestants particularly in the Reformed school of thought speak of sola scriptura to assert that the Bible and the Bible alone is the ultimate source of authority for the development of binding doctrine and practice. Many Christians, including Reformed, acknowledge the role of tradition, reason, and experience as well. Albert C. Outler spoke of the Wesleyan or Methodist Quadrilateral (Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience) based on the writings of John Wesley, the eighteenth-century founder of the Wesleyan movement. While today some speak as if these are equal or near equal carriers of divine revelation, that was not Wesley’s point. For him, Scripture remains the ultimate authority, with the result that true tradition, right reason, and experience rightly understood will not conflict with or contradict the clear teaching of Scripture. As Outler puts it, the Wesleyan Quadrilateral preserves the primacy of Scripture, it profits from the wisdom of tradition, it accepts the disciplines of critical reason, and its stress on the human experience of grace gives it existential force.²

The church acknowledges Scripture as canon because it recognizes it as the word of God. We hear the voice of God in its pages. Since God speaks in Scripture, it is true in all that it teaches. God does not lie or mislead. Among Protestant evangelicals, this assertion is often called the inerrancy of Scripture, though the same assertion is often made by referring to the Bible as infallible. Some believe that its utter truthfulness refers only to its theological and ethical teaching, and others would include historical assertions. While the present author’s view is that the Bible is true in all that it teaches (including historical assertions), this book will focus on the theological and ethical teachings of Scripture as they bear on issues of public policy.

However, it is one thing to say that Scripture is true and a different thing to say that our interpretations are true. This realization is important because we have no access to the meaning of Scripture other than through the process of interpretation. This point should not lead to despair or the idea that everyone can interpret the Bible in whatever way he or she desires, but it should lead to humility and also care and self-awareness when we interpret Scripture. In addition, we should be mindful of what is clear and what is unclear in Scripture (see below, pp. 20–23).

We thus must be conscious of our interpretive method, realizing that everyone depends on some method, even those who just pick up their Bible and start to read. In the first place, since the Bible is written in Hebrew and Greek, with a bit of Aramaic, most people must read it in a contemporary translation. As any translator will tell you, to translate the Bible involves innumerable interpretive decisions. Thus, those who read the Bible in English are reading an already interpreted Bible. But more interpretation is to be done after that, and we need to be aware of our interpretive method particularly as we deal with issues as important as those related to public policy.

For that reason, we begin with a short description of the method that governs the interpretation and use of biblical texts in the rest of the book. We will first identify the goal of interpretation and then discuss the strategy to achieve that goal.

The Goal of Interpretation: The Locus of Meaning

Understanding the goal of interpretation certainly begins by identifying where the meaning of the biblical text should be located. To be fair, in our present, postmodern age, our attempt to ask whether there is a determinate meaning in a text or in life has been thrown into question. While this book is not the place to engage in a full analysis of the claims of postmodern criticism of biblical interpretation, our following discussion will show that, while we don’t accept the idea that the goal of discovering the meaning of the text is ill-fated from the start, it is not as straightforward or certain as once thought.³ In other words, postmodern critique of the act of interpretation does not undermine the possibility of reaching an adequate and defensible understanding of the biblical text. The postmodern critique, however, appropriately breeds humility in interpretation, but not despair and skepticism.

With that background, we begin by simply describing the act of literary communication. An author writes a text to readers.

Author—Text—Reader

As interpreters, we are readers of the text written by an author. Thus, we begin with the statement that the goal of the interpreter is to understand the message of the author. It seems simple enough, but on closer examination, interpreting the Bible today is more complex.

Who Is the Author?

When we read a biblical text—Genesis or Hebrews, for example—who are the authors, and how do we access their meaning? These questions lead to several different observations.

First, questions of authorship are often debated among biblical scholars. Did Moses write Genesis, as traditional scholarship has asserted? If so, did he use sources concerning matters that happened in his past, and were there later additions or changes to the text after his life? Or was Genesis written long after Moses died, perhaps as late as the Babylonian exile? In the case of Hebrews, there is absolutely no consensus on who wrote that New Testament letter.

In short, many biblical books are anonymous or of debated authorship. Does that matter to our goal of biblical interpretation? Further, many biblical books, probably most, were not written by a single person at one time, but by a number of authorial hands over longer or shorter periods of time.⁴

We would argue that these questions of authorship do not matter to the question of interpretation, because we have no independent access to the authors who wrote the biblical texts, since they are all long dead.⁵ We are able to hear the author’s message only through the text that he wrote, so interpreters focus on the text itself. As we interpret, we make a hypothesis about the author’s meaning based on what he wrote.⁶

Before moving on to a consideration of the text in the act of literary communication, we must add a further complication to our understanding of the author of the biblical text. So far, we have focused on human authorship of biblical texts, and that is as far as some will go. But many believe, as stated above, that the Bible is the word of God. If that is the case, then God is the ultimate author of the biblical text.

The biblical authors themselves often reveal that they knew they were speaking and writing on behalf of God. Peter expresses this idea as a general principle for all of Scripture when he says, Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet’s own interpretation of things. For prophecy never had its origin in the human will, but prophets, though human, spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit (2 Pet. 1:20–21). Paul affirms this same understanding in his letter to Timothy: All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work (2 Tim. 3:16–17).

But then what is the relationship of the divine and human authorship of Scripture, and how does that affect our understanding that the message of the author of Scripture is the goal of our interpretation? Again, there is much debate about this question, but as we see New Testament authors interpreting the Old Testament in ways that almost certainly would have surprised the latter’s authors, we have to admit that the divine author’s intention is not completely coterminous with the human authors’ conscious intentions. That said, neither does it contradict it. Upon study, the best conclusion is that the New Testament authors’ use of the Old Testament exposes the fact that texts can have a deeper meaning (sensus plenior) than that discerned by a study of the human authors’ intentions. Still, we can discern that deeper meaning only when the inspired New Testament author brings it out. For us today, we should restrict ourselves to what we believe the human author intended and assume that that message is also the one that the divine author wants us to hear.

What Is the Text?

We have already admitted that the text itself is more complicated than we might think at first. Most biblical books have a history of composition that stretches over a period of time. One scholarly impulse is to study the text in order to reconstruct that history of composition, with an interest to recover the original core of the biblical book, sometimes with the sense that the original is the most authentic. But another impulse, which aligns with the church’s affirmation of canon, is that it is the final form of the book, no matter the history of composition, that is important. Thus, God may have used more than one contributor to produce the final form of the book, but it is the final form that is what is canonical, which is a good thing since the project to discover the original form is fraught with speculation.

As an example, we might consider the book of Job. There are many competing theories about the composition of the book of Job, which is an anonymous and undated literary text as we have it. That the story of Job is set in an early time tells us nothing about when the book was written. But there are theories about what might constitute the original text, which was later expanded by additions. One theory, for instance, is that the Elihu speech (chs. 32–37) was a later addition, since Elihu is not introduced before he makes his appearance in 32:1 and no one responds to him after he speaks. Perhaps so, but what is the object of our interpretation in the final form of the book that includes the Elihu speech? That is the form of the book of Job that the church has recognized as canonical.⁷

The goal of our interpretation is to hear the message of the divine/human author. We move toward our goal by our interaction with the text. Thus, we must learn the literary conventions employed at that time in order to read the text correctly (see chapter 2 below on key interpretive principles).

Who Is the Reader?

An author writes a text to communicate a message to readers. While we are readers of the biblical book, we first need to realize that we are not the original audience of these biblical books. Every biblical book addresses an ancient audience with their needs and questions. In other words, biblical books were not written to us, and we need to keep that in mind when we are reading them, or else we will too quickly apply the message to our situation without taking into account the possibility of discontinuity between the ancient audience and our present situation.

Take New Testament letters like Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, and so on. Paul wrote these letters to churches in the cities (Rome and Corinth) and province (Galatia) that give these books their name. They are the intended audience to whom the author is consciously writing, and he addresses concerns that they have. What is obvious in these letters is true for every book, even though we might not know the exact audience of all the books of the Bible.

The important point as we study the Bible is that we are not the first or intended readers. Such recognition is particularly important as we read the Bible in reference to twenty-first-century public policy. We are not going to find specific texts that take us to specific policies concerning immigration, gun control, or abortion. That acknowledged, we will find principles that are relevant to our development of positions on such public policies. In other words, the Bible, while not written to us, was written for us—that is, the faithful who follow the original audiences of the various biblical books.

Before