Is Caesar Our Savior?

Eric Laverentz

Description

Can the Church delegate the Gospel to the government?Can the Church depend upon coercive powers to be the guarantor of Biblical values of charity, love of neighbor, fairness, generosity, shelter and nurture? Can anything but the Holy Spirit make us free?Caesar, Christian, Church, Government, Welfare, Freedom, Gospel, Laverentz, Finance, Religion

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie

Informations

• Publié par: First Edition Design Publishing
• Date de parution: 09 mai 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781622870011
• Langue: English

Extrait

IS CAESAR
OUR SAVIOR?

Why Only the Church
Can Keep Any Nation Free

ERIC LAVERENTZ
Copyright 2012 by Eric Laverentz

ISBN 978-1-622870-01-1

Published by
First Edition Design Publishing, Inc.
May 2012


www.firsteditiondesignpublishing.com


PRINT
Publisher – Fathers Press
ISBN – 978-1937520-50-2
(Second Printing)
LCCN: 2012931730

Published in the United States of America
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
All rights reserved. No part of this book publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means ─ electronic, mechanical, photo-copy, recording, or any other ─ except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without prior written permission of the author.

Published in Lee’s Summit, MO, by Father’s Press, LLC. (PRINT)
Cover by Father’s Press.
www.fatherspress.com, January 2012

Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version, copyright © 2000, 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers.

ISBN: 978-0-9833739-0-2 (First Printing)

Communicate with the author at: [e-mail] or find us on Facebook

Father’s Press, L.L.C.
Lee’s Summit, MO
[phone]
www.fatherspress.com
Dedicated to my parents, Larry and Melody Laverentz, lifelong Civil Servants who brought the heart of Christ into their work daily.
Foreword
Introduction

PART ONE
Victim or Victor?
Chapter One Government Is Not Gospel
Chapter Two The Battle Song of Triumph
Chapter Three The Land
Chapter Four Our Job

PART TWO
Waning Gospel, Waxing Government
Chapter Five The Perils of Holding It in Our Palm
Chapter Six The Bondage of Utopian Dreams
Chapter Seven The Oppression of Other Gods

PART THREE
Freed to Set Free
Chapter Eight A Well-Formed Heart
Chapter Nine Tithes, Taxes, and Treasure
Chapter Ten The Necessity of Hope
Foreword
In God’s economy nothing is wasted. Jesus is making all things new.
I write this foreword as a guest at an abbey about an hour and a half from the small town in which I grew up. Life has taken me to New Jersey, Tennessee, Ohio, and now back to the Kansas City area. Conception Abbey was a place I knew nothing about until a friend of mine recommended it for a retreat site. Here, riding atop the rolling hills of Western Missouri sits a 130 year-old outpost for Jesus Christ, an instrument for renewal, and a testimony to His imminent return. As the monks keep His worship daily, eternity seems to invade time and wash it in the light of God’s power.

Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as
it was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever. Amen.

Much of the theology of this book I had given up on. The Civil Rights movement, social change, theology aimed at setting the captives free and worked out in real time was the subject of my study in seminary and graduate school. However, I found that my increasingly orthodox, traditional, and Reformed theology set me at odds with those dedicated to the former.
As my understanding of the Holy Spirit has grown, I find myself returning to the stories of the March on Selma, Albany, St. Augustine, Chicago, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, “Letter from Birmingham City Jail,” and the like, and seeing something new and timeless that I had missed before. More precisely, I should say that I see Someone. Through imperfect and shoddy instruments, this Someone is bringing freedom. If we are losing that freedom in our nation it is not because we have elected the wrong leaders, failed to abide by the Constitution, or paid too much in taxes. It is because we have chosen to rely on an external government to make this world right rather than an internal Governor. Many thanks are in order for Is Caesar Our Savior? First, I want to thank my wife, Jen. She is God’s tangible grace in my life. She has gotten up earlier, stayed up later, prepared more meals, played more Thomas the Tank Engine, and changed more diapers as I have worked on this book. I see her live out the truth of this work every day. She has provided wise counsel and been a rock, unyielding and unbowed, as we pushed ahead with writing and seeking a publisher.
In addition to my team of editors, I would also like to thank Bo Burgener, our Associate Pastor of Mission and Evangelism at The Presbyterian Church of Stanley, who was a constant encouragement and a great help as I prayed and thought through the ideas presented here, as well as the Tuesday morning men’s Bible study group who read an unfinished draft of this work and helped me clarify some of the ideas contained herein. I also want to thank my good friends Bart Nill, with whom some of these ideas were formed, and Howard Dayton, who provided some early encouragement and support.
Some of my mentors and professors will see shades of their ideas presented here, although I am sure they will not entirely agree with how they have been used and appropriated! Dr. Peter Paris and Dr. Andrew Purves immediately spring to mind. When I was a seminary student, Dr. Jim Loder, who has gone on to the church triumphant, provided me with great encouragement for the diagram in Chapter Eight.
I finally want to thank Mike Smitley of Father’s Press, who has placed his faith in an unknown and unpublished author.

Eric Laverentz
January 5, 2011
Conception, Missouri
Introduction
“You remind me of someone... a man I met in a half-remembered dream. He was possessed of some radical notions.”
— Saito, Inception

You could fill the Capitol Rotunda and the National Cathedral with all the books written on religion and politics in the last thirty years. They generally fall into two types.
The first variety is long treatises of proclamations stating how Jesus would vote if He were registered to do so in the 21 st century United States. These books tend to resemble a politicized search for the so-called historical Jesus. Albert Schweitzer critiqued this movement saying that the ones engaged in the search were like someone looking down a deep well, and seeing their own reflection, believed that they had seen the face of Jesus. I fear that too many of these authors, although well intentioned, have simply seen a reflection of their own ballot floating atop deep and murky waters.
The second type is an eleventh-hour jeremiad delivered precisely at the axis of history. We have heard it many times; if we do not act immediately, decisively, and as one, we face disaster of unprecedented proportion. I realize a book needs urgency to sell. I do not believe what this book contains is any less urgent. But the axis of history has already occurred. It occurred at Golgotha when God’s only Son died for my sins, your sins, and the sins of the whole world. Some might even say the axis rests in the character of God who predetermined to love the world in spite of ourselves.
My hope is that Is Caesar Our Savior? is different. Despite the title, this book is not about religion and politics. It is about the church’s work in the world and the consequences of us failing in our call. Although I have my beliefs and leanings, I do not presume to tell anyone how to vote. Like many, I am alternately less and more excited about the world around me, however, I believe there is “nothing new under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 1:9), and I do not waiver in my belief that Jesus is making all things new.
I am simply saying that Caesar is no savior. But neither is he Satan. He is a servant of God—whether he realizes it or not. More importantly, so are we. We are the Holy Spirit’s instrument of freedom.
Is Caesar Our Savior? explores the pattern of government dependency, and ultimately, oppression in the biblical witness highlighted by Israel’s desire for a King and God’s warning that the King would oppress them and take the very best of their work and property. This same pattern is shown in recent history where oppressive governments have often followed a weak and ineffective church. As the church in America has accepted a cameo role in keeping the land, we struggle with an ever-expanding government that increasingly seeks to form hearts and minds according to its own conception of fairness and justice.
I have attempted to frame this argument through what I believe are three underappreciated and unyielding truths that exist at the intersection of government and gospel.
A weak church is not the victim of an evil society. An evil society is the victim of a weak church.
Oppressive powers are aided and abetted as the church refuses her call to live out the gospel.
A Spirit-filled church is the best hope for a free society.

These three points are argued across ten chapters.

-Chapter One: Government Is Not Gospel
Too often we mistake government with gospel. However, the two do not easily co-exist. Societies tend to be defined either by the permissive powers of the gospel or the coercive powers of government. Limited government is not enough for freedom. That freedom must be seasoned with gospel, for without morality and love of neighbor, society quickly devolves into tyranny. Although, in recent history the church has accepted a sideline role in the redemption of the land, Scripture teaches that God’s people are critical, as vessels of the Holy Spirit, to bless the land with righteousness and liberty.

-Chapter Two: The Battle Song of Triumph
Movements of freedom rarely originate in government. They usually happen among the people and often among the people of God. The church is called to go out into world, filled with and following the Holy Spirit. As the church takes her lead from the Spirit, the land is reformed and changed, transforming even the nature of our politics and government and ultimately setting the people free. This phenomenon is also seen historically in the early part of the Civil Rights movement, the American Revolution, America’s revitalization in the early 1980s, as well as in the fall of Communism in E