Boundaries in our Christian Walk

There are a lot of boundaries in the Bible. There’s a bunch of rules in the Old Testament, and the New Testament is riddled with things to do. If you randomly open the NT and drop your finger on the page, there are decent odds that you are pointing at something that all Christians are called to do. Below is a chart that lists some of the principles that we are supposed to act on that we derived from Colossians 3. However, it also has a list of actions. Principles themselves have to be made concrete in a situation as an action. Sometimes the action for a principle is so obvious its hard to separate the two—sometimes a principle is so far from action it’s hard to put it into place. We’ll see how this works as we go.

So the Biblical command, “Don’t lie” is straightforwardly an action. However, others are not as obvious. How do we do “Set your mind on things above”? One idea was to consciously take time throughout the day to remember God and think about Him and what He wants for the world. A tricky one is “Be compassionate.” How are we to do compassion? If your mom says ‘go run’ or ‘start drawing’ we know exactly what to do. But if mom says ‘be compassionate to Bob now!’ we’d stare at her blankly. That’s because be compassionate is not itself a concrete action—we’d have to figure out what sort of action expresses compassion. One way to express compassion, to do compassion, is to “Say kind things to people who are struggling.” Is this all compassion is? Is this the only way to express compassion? Nope. There are often multiple different ways to express, i.e. to do, a principle.

One interesting thing about the list is that people almost universally agreed with the actions; they thought they correctly expressed the principles. Maybe we wanted to add other things as well, but we don’t disagree that, for instance, ‘Be gentle’, should be realized as not punching other people. So these principles form boundaries in our personal life, boundaries that have concrete ‘do this’ and ‘don’t do that’ actions that we pretty much agree on.

Boundaries in politics

So what happens when we try to do this with politics? What are the principles, the boundaries that we expect to see from the government and in political action? Here’s the chart:

Now the first thing you might notice is that the principles at the bottom of the list don’t have actions. Is that ‘cause we don’t like them? They have no actions? Aliens?

Nope—we were so busy discussing and disagreeing about the political actions we didn’t get around to discussing the last few. We all agreed on the principles. And we all agreed on some of the corresponding actions—most notably those for Don’t lie and Don’t be corrupt. But everything else got a bit hairy.

Now you might think, what’s wrong with the actions for Promote well being, Establish justice, Be fair? They seem pretty obvious, don’t they? The problem is they aren’t actually concrete actions—even though they are in that column. For instance, Make restrictions for pandemics-but not bad ones isn’t specific enough to tell us what the actual restriction will be, what the concrete action is. So the actual action would be to make a rule like: Don’t stand within 6 feet other people in a building, or you must wear masks indoors, or you cannot go into public places if you are contagious.

As you might imagine, these were not all agreed upon. What we found is this— (1) we could all basically agree on the political principles, but (2) we could not all agree on the realization of those principles, we couldn’t agree on the concrete actions that should be taken. The exception to this were the more straightforward moral principles like, tell the truth, don’t lie, or don’t be corrupt. We can agree they are bad, and on what concrete action should be taken. To not be corrupt, we all agreed this entails do not take money offered to you to personally to rule in that person’s / group’s favor.

In sum, we found principles that we agreed should guide our politics. But we found precious few concrete actions that we all agreed were outside the boundaries of good political action.

Boundaries in voting

So what happens when we try and apply this to the everyman, to people like us? Most of us will never be in political office! However, since we are Americans, we will be able to vote for politicians and occasionally, for certain laws. S, are there boundaries to voting? Remember the parallel to Christian living. There are certain actions that are outside the pale, outside the bounds, for Christians. But, within those bounds there can be a lot of options. Here we’re trying to do the same thing for voting. Are there certain things, issues, etc. that make it so that we can’t vote a certain way? On the flip side, are there things that require us to vote a certain way? Here, again, is our chart, but this time we already have the concrete action in place. In this case it is voting Yes for a particular candidate.

Well, we again basically agreed on the principles—but we had a lot of disagreement about whether they were sufficient to get us to Vote Yes. Is being empathic sufficient for a Yes vote? Well, someone could be empathetic but still incompetent so that would be a bit weird. Sooo, maybe if we have both empathy and competency that would be sufficient? Well, someone could be personally empathic, politically competent (successfully achieves goals) but is trying to become a tyrant, i.e., is anti-democratic. So no, those two aren’t sufficient, and even if we add in democratic on top, there could still be policies we don’t agree with.

Keep in mind that our main goal here was to find boundaries, those things that mark what is allowable from what isn’t. And what we found is there was no agreement about what things make it impossible or needed to vote for a certain person. This is the exact opposite of what we found in Christian living! There were lots of things we could identify that were either impossible or necessary for a Christian to do! There were some pretty clear, well agreed on bounds to the Christian walk. So what gives?

Conclusion

Well, the straightforward takeaway was this, the Christian life and a political vote are not the same. They operate differently. The question for next week is this—what makes them different? And what are the implications of this difference? To do that we’ll have to ask some pretty philosophical questions like what does it mean to vote for someone, what does it signify?