Perry When Politics Becomes Heresy

The Idol of Power and the Gospel of Christ
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-68359-843-5
Verlag: Lexham Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 200 Seiten

Evangelicals are choosing heresy Evangelicals fight for a place at the table, but we are in danger of losing our house. The church has become consumed by politics-political priorities and allegiances. Christian brothers and sisters have become opponents. We are no longer united by shared faith, but divided by shared heresy. When Politics Becomes Heresy is Tim Perry's loving rebuke and call to repentance. Evangelicals are embracing the logic of ancient heresies. We are using the gospel for power (Simony), integrating our faith with worldliness (Gnosticism), exchanging our heavenly Savior for a human helper (Arianism), transforming our mission into social action (Pelagianism), and demonizing other believers (Donatism). The solution is not to switch sides or carve out a third way. Rather, the proper response to unbelief is repentance. We must stop, turn around, and return to God's gracious throne. As for the idols of the nations, they are but silver and gold, the work of human hands.  Those who make them are like them, and so are all who put their trust in them.

Tim Perry  is lead pastor at St. Paul's Lutheran Church in Steinbach, Manitoba, Canada.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Perry, Tim

Leseproben

Chapter 2

SIMONY

Holy Spirit; Worldly Purpose

Rapacious ones, who take the things of God, that ought to be the brides of Righteousness, and make them fornicate for gold and silver! The time has come to let the trumpet sound for you!

Dante, Inferno

In the previous chapter, I laid out the presuppositions on which this book is based. (1) Large swaths of North American evangelicals have lost the ability to speak and think in their internal language, either through disuse or deliberate neglect. (2) To compensate for that loss, they have imported the language (and deep convictions) of the world. Whatever internal elements remain, they increasingly borrow rhetorical flourishes that both ornament and obscure deeper linguistic and philosophical commitments. (3) The most pressing of these deep convictions is that politics ought to replace religion as the language of the transcendent.

In the remaining chapters, I want to try a thought experiment in reverse. What might happen if we turned these presuppositions on their heads and simply described what we saw? If Harold John Ockenga or Carl F. H. Henry were aroused from their eternal rest to survey the current evangelical landscape, what would they see? How would they describe it? And what would they do to correct it? The rest of this book unfolds answers to these questions: (1) They would see that large parts of their movement had become worldly. (2) They would use the internal language of heresy to describe that worldliness. (3) They would treat the problem of the loss of transcendence and the substitution of politics as a grave spiritual malady that requires spiritual medicine—namely, repentance—to cure it.

Where to begin? It is perhaps an obscure place: gnosticism, Arianism, Pelagianism, and Donatism all speak more loudly in our history than Simony. Nevertheless, it is Simony that accurately names the spirit that has possessed so much of our movement.

Over two decades ago, I wrote an article entitled “What is Simony?” for “Ask A Theologian,” a column that once graced the pages of Faith Today Magazine.1 The then-editor of the magazine asked me what possible relevance an ecclesiastical crime peculiar to the Middle Ages would have for contemporary evangelicals in Canada. I had to justify the column or it would be spiked. I honestly can’t remember how I answered my colleague, but the column did get printed, so I suppose I was convincing. And yet here I am writing not just a column, but a chapter, indeed the lead chapter for a whole book on just the same subject. How well will I acquit myself this time around? Ultimately, that’s up to you to decide.

I’m convinced that Simony is no mere ecclesiastical crime peculiar to the Middle Ages. Simony names a disposition or pattern of false thought and practice that has been obstinately embraced at the expense of the truth of the gospel. It is a heresy all too common in many churches that have drunk too deeply from the wells of Western culture.

Simony underlies all kinds of conversations in far too many contemporary churches, ecclesial communities, and parachurch organizations. As I explain in the following chapters, it is the pattern that unfolds itself into the other heresies that are named in this book as hallmarks of thinking and behaving in much of late modern North American evangelicalism across the various political and theological spectra. Unless we can name it clearly for the sake of repentance before God (as opposed to standing in judgment over others or receiving the world’s acceptance), much of our witness will continue to suffer.

That’s a tall claim, I know. I am nevertheless persuaded of its truth, and I hope that by the end of this chapter you’ll be sufficiently persuaded too. Substantiating it requires that we find our starting point much earlier than the various corruptions that in part led to and in some places followed the Reformation. Simony does not have its beginnings with the buying and selling of church offices in the high Middle Ages. Its foundations are much earlier.

Simon Magus

A Hollywood screenwriter could make much out of the legends that have come to be associated with Simon Magus, or Simon the Sorcerer. He’s fascinating—someone straightforwardly at home in Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian pulp novels. In apocryphal tradition and the early Fathers,2 Simon is the chief opponent of that other Simon, the apostle Peter. With his confidante and paramour, Helen, Simon dogs Peter’s itinerant ministry all the way to Rome, preaching another gospel. Not only does he identify himself with the persons of the Trinity, his doctrines eventually coalesce into the primordial New Testament heresy: gnosticism, which we’ll take up in the next chapter. Of course, with an ego large enough to claim both divine identity and knowledge of the secret truth that had not been revealed to Peter the hapless fisherman, Simon had to come up with quite a bag of tricks. Even as the apostles worked miracles (like those described in the book of Acts), Simon Magus substantiated his preaching with false signs and wonders, up to and including soaring around on a flying carpet, to the amazement of all who saw him.3

Flashy as they are, the miracle legends are not what interest us. Simony has a much more straightforward (and plausible) origin than the legends suggest. Simon’s real story opens as the nascent church moves beyond the confines of Jerusalem to surrounding environs. “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8). The risen Lord’s prediction—which also abbreviates and outlines the entire book of Acts—is coming true. The Spirit has come (Acts 2); Jerusalem has been evangelized (Acts 2–6); and Saul has begun his evangelistic work, however unwittingly. By condoning the mob murder of Stephen (Acts 7) and persecuting the first believers, Saul drives them from the city and out into the Judean and Samaritan countryside, taking the good news of Jesus with them (Acts 8:1–3). One of these Jerusalem refugees is a man named Philip (Acts 6:5). Pressed to flee his home by Stephen’s stoning, Philip finds himself in Samaria (Acts 8:4), where he announces the apostolic kerygma: that Jesus, whom the Jewish leaders had condemned and the Romans crucified, had in fact risen bodily from the dead and been exalted by God as Lord and Christ. Mighty exorcisms and other healings then confirmed this simple truth: Jesus reigns, and it’s time to bow the knee to him. And it worked. The Samaritans were converted.

Enter Simon. Where his practice of magic once “amazed” the people (Acts 8:9), he is now in the position of eagerly listening to and watching the new teachers who were both like and unlike him. The comparison is apt. Here’s why: shock and awe attract crowds, and when one attraction meets competition, the crowds will go to whoever has the better show. Philip, it seems, had poached Simon’s audience by performing better miracles and preaching a better message. Presumably, Simon wanted to find out where his followers (and income) had gone, so he searched Philip out. And what did he find? Where Simon had previously compelled people to attend to his words because of his mighty magic (Acts 8:11), the Samaritans saw Philip’s mighty acts, believed Philip’s message, and were baptized. Simon’s stage show could no longer draw. With neither audience nor income, what was the erstwhile magician to do? The text summarizes his actions plainly: Simon believed, was baptized, and remained with Philip (Acts 9:13). The magician who had “amazed” others was now himself “amazed” at Philip’s miraculous ministry and became a part of the new movement. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

It’s an auspicious beginning! At this stage of Simon’s story, Acts offers no indication of anything gone or about to go awry. Simon’s conversion was by all accounts genuine. Its pattern was that of every other new believer’s turn to Christ: Simon heard the word of Jesus’s resurrection and ascension and believed. He was baptized. He thereby publicly submitted to the lordship of the true King by identifying himself as one of his followers. And he didn’t shrink into obscurity or idiosyncrasy thereafter. The text says explicitly that Simon remained with Philip. He continued in the community of disciples, identifying with them even as they took him in. By any conceivable metric, Simon had forsaken his magic for the Master. He was a disciple of Jesus and a member of his community. His was a “rock star” conversion.

But eventually, everything unraveled.

When the apostles heard that the Samaritans had accepted the word of God (Acts 8:14), they dispatched Peter and John to assess the situation. It seems that Philip’s evangelistic work, while good, was in some way incomplete. For while the Samaritans had indeed been baptized, they had not yet received the Holy Spirit, so Peter and John laid their hands on the new believers to impart this gift. Just what the Samaritan reception of the Spirit looked like is not narrated, but it was obvious to all present that the Spirit in fact fell on them. I think readers are right to suppose that the Spirit’s Samaritan arrival resembled the events of Acts 2: winds, miraculous languages, and tongues of fire.

Whatever manifestations accompanied the Spirit’s outpouring, they certainly were public, and Simon himself saw the reception and was impressed. And just here is where the...