The Gospel & Religious Liberty

Russell D. Moore, Andrew T. Walker

• Publisher: B&H Books
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781433690471
• eBook ISBN: 9781433692208
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

One nation, under God. Religious liberty isn't a principle for Americans alone, though it certainly has played an important role in the history of the United States. Religious liberty is a matter of authority and allegiance for people of every land. To whom one owes ultimate allegiance is a matter of the conscience, and one that should be protected in every nation. But what if religious liberty gives way, and church's are faced with the difficult decision between allegiance to their country and allegiance to their conscience? Editors Russell Moore and Andrew T. Walker of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) assemble leading voices to frame the issues with a gospel-centered perspective. The Gospel for Life series gives every believer a biblically-saturated understanding of the most urgent issues facing our culture today, because the gospel is for all of life.

Chapter

What Are We For?

Andrew T. Walker

NOWHERE IN THE BIBLE DOES IT SAY THAT 2 + 2 = 4.

But if you’re like me, you’ve been taught that the Bible is the highest authority that informs our understanding of the Christian faith and shapes how we see the world. So, if there isn’t a verse that says 2 + 2 = 4, does that mean it’s still true?

The answer is a simple “yes,” because God created all minds to understand logical truths. It isn’t just Christians that understand that 2 + 2 = 4; it’s a simple fact of our existence. If you’re sitting and reading this chapter, it means that God put your mind together with the capacity to read and make sense of letters and words. In a way, Psalm 24:1 speaks to these truths: “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein.”

Everything—whether knowledge, mathematics, or the enjoyment of a hot fudge sundae—exists because it exists in God’s world and God holds the world together (Gen. 1; Col. 1).

Why does this matter in talking about what the Bible says about religious liberty?

From this little thought exercise, we learn an important truth that will help guide our discussion about religious liberty; namely, that there are explicit truths of Scripture and implicit truths of Scripture. Some things are very clearly declared in Scripture; for example, Jesus is God’s Son. But nowhere does the Bible talk about humans breathing oxygen or that 2 + 2 = 4, yet we’d all affirm that the importance of breathing oxygen is implied in how God chose to create humanity and that the truths of mathematics makes sense because God is the author of logic.

We, therefore, understand religious liberty as an implied truth of Scripture, one we see throughout, though not explicitly stated.

There isn’t a verse in the Bible that says, “Thou shalt have religious liberty.” Jesus didn’t commission His disciples to announce, “Repent, for the dawning of religious liberty has come.” Yet, many themes that we draw from the Bible imply that religious liberty is a bedrock value that is central to so much of the Bible’s narrative about God, salvation, mission, and even government. And when you look at the narrative of Scripture and what realities the Scriptures are pointing us to, religious liberty and the commitment to free expression are central to God’s story.

In this chapter, we’re going to look at a few biblical truths and explain why religious liberty is a common thread that helps make sense of so many biblical themes, and why valuing religious liberty is an expression of loving one’s neighbor and a main ingredient for a free society. Many of the themes below overlap with one another, which helps us to see how central religious liberty is to the Bible overall.

God and Religious Liberty

In the Ten Commandments, God commands the Israelites in Exodus 20:3 saying, “You shall have no other gods before me.”

Why does this matter to religious liberty? Because God is teaching that nothing should set itself up as a god that isn’t YHWH the God of Israel. Because God is ultimate, it is wrong when things set themselves up as gods that aren’t God. When Genesis 1:1 says that God created, it implies that only God is sovereign. It didn’t say, for example, that the United States created. Religious liberty begins with God as the primary Creator and Author of Life.

Whenever a movement, a figure, or a government attempts to play the part of God, it acts grievously wrong. Creations cannot and should not play the role of a Creator. Nothing should set itself up as ultimate that isn’t ultimate.

It especially means that institutions, movements, persons, or governments shouldn’t act to determine truths in areas that don’t belong to them. For example, it wouldn’t be right for my daughter’s teacher to tell my daughter to disobey what my wife and I have instructed her. A teacher doesn’t have ultimate authority over my daughter in the ways that my wife and I do. In the same way, a government shouldn’t tell a citizen who God is or how God wants to be worshipped. It is therefore right and good for persons, governments, or institutions to restrict themselves to the area that they’re designed to have authority over. A government is designed to see that laws are followed and that citizens are protected. The government isn’t designed to tell you or me what the meaning of baptism is.

Now, this is kind of complex, but this understanding of religious liberty played a very important part in how the United States understood religious liberty at its founding.

James Madison, one of the architects of our Constitution said it this way:

It is the duty of every man to render to the Creator such homage and such only as he believes to be acceptable to him. This duty is precedent, both in order of time and in degree of obligation, to the claims of Civil Society. Before any man can be considered as a member of Civil Society, he must be considered as a subject of the Governour of the Universe: And if a member of Civil Society, who enters into any subordinate Association, must always do it with a reservation of his duty to the General Authority; much more must every man who becomes a member of any particular Civil Society, do it with a saving of his allegiance to the Universal Sovereign.1

What Madison argues is what the Bible is implicitly shouting from its very first verse. Madison argues that a person’s relationship to God is prior to any other relationship that a person has. How a person understands what is true, good, and beautiful are such transcendent truths that the government has no rightful authority to dictate its citizens’ opinions on such matters. Religious liberty is not an absolute right; nor are society or government just blank slates. Religious liberty doesn’t lead to relativism. Religious liberty entails the careful balancing of a state’s right to uphold public order and the rights of citizens to freely exercise their religion in peaceful ways.

What does this mean practically? It means that the state should not set itself up as lord or god over the conscience—that government employees shouldn’t be intercessors and that judges shouldn’t be the priests. When the state honors the First Amendment; that is, when it provides for the free exercise of religion, it is less likely to betray or violate the First Commandment—which demands that we have no other gods other than God the Father of Jesus Christ.

The issue before us—the biblical issue—is one of authority and allegiances. To whom does our conscience belong? To God or the state? If the state can tell you what is or isn’t acceptable belief about matters relating to God and ultimate morality, what can’t it do?

In Acts, we read about the early church and their insistence that another King—King Jesus—reigns more supreme than Caesar.

According to Acts 17:6–7,

And when they could not find them, they dragged Jason and some of the brothers before the city authorities, shouting, “These men who have turned the world upside down have come here also, and Jason has received them, and they are all acting against the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another king, Jesus.”

When the church announces that Jesus is Lord, a claim is being made that trumps all other claims that any king, Caesar, or president may make. The announcement that Jesus is Lord subjects other authorities to the highest authority.

Religious Liberty and Human Dignity

In Genesis 1:26–27, God announces something unique about His creation of humanity—that only humans would resemble or image God. Something is precious and unique to humanity that is unlike other parts of creation. Being created in the image of God means that every human being—born and unborn—is created with dignity and worth. Every human, on the basis of being alive, is deserving of certain rights and respect.

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

This matters to religious liberty because every person, whether Christian or not, cannot be coerced into the kingdom of God. While we may disagree with who a person understands God to be, every person has the right to seek God for himself or herself. The rights of individuals to seek and understand who God is—even when they perceive wrongly—is something that can only be determined between a person and who they perceive God as. Each person, as an image bearer, is created with a conscience; and Christians should respect the consciences of those who come to a different opinion about who God is.

This is not to say that all quests to find God are equal. Unless someone professes Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, Christians must insist that all quests are in vain and lead to separation from the one true God (Acts 4:12).

But neither you nor I can understand who God is for someone else. We can converse, contend, plead, and work to persuade every living person that the only God is the triune God, but because every person is made in the image of God, they should have the right to discern who God is without other persons or government infringing on that quest.

To allow a person to live out what he or she considers to be ultimate truth is to allow a person to live with integrity. John Henry Newman famously wrote,...

Table of contents

• Series Preface
• Chapter 1: What Are We For?
• Chapter 2: What Does the Gospel Say?
• Chapter 3: How Should the Christian Live?
• Chapter 4: How Should the Church Engage?
• Chapter 5: What Does the Culture Say?
• Additional Reading