Reclaiming the rainbow

The phenomenon of Pride Month, first designated for June by President Bill Clinton in 2000, presents numerous challenges for faithful Christians. We struggle to respond well to an increasingly ubiquitous celebration of what Scripture teaches to be sinful. And believers face no shortage of cultural, economic, and political powers promoting and celebrating various displays of human rebellion.

Princeton professor Robert George has led a praiseworthy effort to celebrate faithfulness to God and to one another by proclaiming June to be Fidelity Month. Humility is another needed virtue, and Christians should adopt a posture of humility, partly in response to LGBT Pride, since the Bible teaches that “when pride comes, then comes disgrace, but with humility comes wisdom” (Proverbs 11:2). But even with the necessary humility and gentleness of spirit that ought to season all of our interactions, Christians have a calling to defend the truth and honor the Creator in everything we do.

In the face of a rising tide of outright hostility toward traditional Christian teaching, Christians are newly called to be courageous. Christian courage now takes the form of countercultural living, witnessing with our words as well as our actions that God has redeemed us, and that we are “created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do” (Ephesians 2:10).

One thing that Christians must do in response to pervasive cultural decay and decadence is to remember and reclaim the symbols of our faith. Certainly the cross of Christ stands at the center of the Christian imagination, and the sacraments of baptism and communion define the rhythms of corporate worship. But the rainbow, another foundationally important Biblical sign, has been subverted into the visible image of human beings in rebellion against God and his will. 

While it may be tempting to either dismiss the Pride flag as unimportant or the rainbow as irredeemable, the importance of the rainbow as a sign of God’s preserving grace should not be underestimated. As the Dutch Reformed theologian Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920) taught, God’s covenant with all of creation is communicated in the rainbow, a reality that undergirds all of existence and the possibility of salvation itself.

“Every Christian shortchanges the honor of God when, as the rainbow appears in the clouds, he does not remember the faithfulness of his God, and does not recognize in that rainbow the sign of the covenant,” writes Kuyper. “He is acting like the pagans and unbelievers who observe nothing but a necessary phenomenon of nature, and a beautiful spectacle. Our God has emphatically testified that, as often as he displays the rainbow in the clouds, he is our God, and that he would ‘see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth’ [Genesis 9:16]. This now lays upon us, the children of men, the duty to do in such moments what God is doing, and from our side to view the rainbow in a way that remembers the faithfulness of his covenant.”

Our task as faithful Christians is to remember the rainbow, to reclaim it as a symbol of cultural power and theological significance, above all as a reminder of God’s faithfulness to his covenant promise: “Never again will all life be destroyed by the waters of a flood; never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth” (Genesis 9:11). God had sent those destructive waters on a world mired in sin, corrupted beyond all imagining. The situation before the flood was so dire that Kuyper describes it as “a hell on earth, one big insane asylum, a general dulling and brutalization, one great physical and spiritual degeneration into the most hideous diseases and inhuman cruelties, one great universal, mutual self-destruction of humanity.”

If the flood was God’s judgment on human sin, then the rainbow was God’s grace in the face of a fallen and destructive humanity. Despite the rebelliousness of our sinful natures, God promises to preserve his creation and manifest his love towards us. Even as Pride Month arrogantly takes on the Biblical symbol of the rainbow and corrupts it for the purposes of celebrating sin, Christians must recall the grace that God extends in the image of the rainbow, not only to Christians, or even simply to human beings whether fallen or redeemed, but to all of creation.

The rainbow is a particular aspect of the created order corrupted by human sinfulness. But in that sense it is no different than everything else that fallen humanity has ruined. The significance of the rainbow, however, is worth reclaiming as part of Christian cultural expression to help us remember God’s covenant faithfulness. Certainly this must be done in a way that is honest and without subterfuge. We cannot use symbols that would communicate complicity with or approval of sin. But the rainbow was claimed by God before it was corrupted by human pride, and in that way Christians can rightly be understood as having the responsibility to reclaim the rainbow and along with it all of God’s gracious promises.