Save us from liberty

It's interesting to consider, on a day when we celebrate American independence from England, Peter's admonition that we "honor the king" by submitting to civil authorities. While most interpret that to allow resistance when obedience would require sin, it's a bit of a stretch to claim that armed revolt is a Biblical response to irritating taxes, or even to taxation without representation. There was some talk about state funding for Anglican bishops in the colonies, and fear that this might lead to ecclesiastical courts adjudicated by quasi-papists, but the animating factors in our revolt against the king were economic (taxes) and political (rule by a remote Parliament).

This might have been expected from people sturdy enough to found the colonies and firmly Puritan in background; they had already hacked off the head of one king a century before. The British should have known better than to come marching at a bunch of skilled hunters in straight lines, and let's be honest -- anyone dressed in one of those fancy red jackets was just asking to get beat up and have his tea money taken. All in all, being a fan of modern dentistry as well as football played the way the good Lord intended, I'm grateful for that kerfuffle back in the late 18th century.

And yet I wonder about the repercussions of founding a country in rebellion. Not only was our nation established by repelling the civil authorities who originally governed it, but our churches, for the most part, were themselves founded on rejection of other church authorities. The Anglicans rejected the Catholics because Henry VIII wanted a divorce, and the Puritans rejected the Anglicans because too many of them behaved like Henry VIII. Dissent continued to be the guiding ethos in the colonies, with talented performers like George Whitefield chasing out less entertaining pastors during the Great Awakening.

In inculcating among ourselves the notion that we are reliable democratic arbiters of our own church governance, we set the stage for continual schism. Even America's leading theologian of that time, Jonathan Edwards, was eventually judged too tiresome by his own congregation. Today, if you can't find a church to suit your proclivities, you can just turn on your television and be part of a virtual church. There is a church for everyone, and with the advent of Starbucks even the atheist has a comforting spiritual experience available to him on Sunday mornings.

So we confront in our churches, and in our own spiritual lives, the blessing and danger of liberty, which is that we are entirely free to determine for ourselves how we will be preached at, and by whom, and what books we will read, and what songs we will sing, and precisely what our children will be taught about God. What a glorious freedom, should we choose wisely. But how frightening as well, when one reads in Judges: "In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes."

Now that the toothpaste is out of the tube, so to speak, there's no putting it back. With thousands of denominations, and splits within those denominations, and cliques within those splits, and notions like catechesis, covenant, and church discipline all but lost, we look to be permanently in the position of every one of us doing what is right in his own eyes.

And even if we have discernment and knowledge, we face the temptation to rebel every time the pastor says something we don't like, or the music director chooses hymns our teenagers don't relate to, or the first time we are -- heaven forbid, in this age of self-affirmation -- rebuked or admonished. Anyone on the receiving end of that endangered species -- church discipline -- has only to pick up the phone and find any number of pastors happy to listen to his half of the story and then welcome him into the fold without so much as a consultation with the pastor he is leaving behind.

So we have the fruit of rebellion: enormous liberty to choose where we will be in communion, and very little guidance about how to do so. There is the Bible, thank God, but one has to be practiced in the craft of reading the thing, after all, and in the interpretation of what one has read, which is precisely where a good Church education can do one some good, but then we have worked ourselves into a circle, where Biblical education is necessary for one to ascertain where he will receive Biblical education.

Viktor Frankl once said that America's Statue of Liberty should be balanced on the opposite coast by a Statue of Responsibility. I wonder if the same might be said for American Christians. Blessed to live in a land of liberty, the price is that we have been raised as well in a culture founded on rebellion against authority. How can we take advantage of our freedom to choose, without falling into the pit of self-satisfaction? When people who identify themselves as Christians can't answer even fundamental questions of dogma, what are we to make of the abundance of churches springing up to serve them as if they are customers in search of a good burger? A hungry person knows how to tell a good burger from a bad one, but what of the spiritually hungry, ill-educated Christian? How is he to find a competent church? How is he to find community that is more than just accidental?

A Christian might be forgiven by his peers for praying the following, not just as it pertains to church life, but to life as an American citizen, as well as citizenship in the kingdom of God: Thank you, Lord, for the blessing of liberty, and please hasten to save us from how we use it.