(Sunday School) PFT: Week 5

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Alright. Good to see you all here today. Thanks for being here at my class. Today's class is on hope and cynicism. This is week five. If you've missed some weeks, all the papers are up here on the table, the handouts, and you can grab those. They're all recorded online on our sermons part of our website under resources.

So today, I'm gonna open with this quote from Oscar Wilde. I think this is really great for our class:

I'm not at all cynical. I'm only experienced. Pretty much the same thing.

So if you would find this paper at the end of your table and a pen, and it's a quiz, and it's not really a right or wrong quiz. It's more of an assessment of how you feel about politics. And there's no right answers. I'll just tell you—I'm not trying to lead you towards something. This is just a spectrum: you're on the hopeful spectrum or the cynical spectrum?

Alright. So I know you can tell these are too simplistic, but if you sort of tend toward the first category in each section, that's the more cynical side. If you tend toward the other ones, the last ones, you tend to be the more hopeful, idealistic side about politics. That's really my point for this morning. We're gonna talk about hope and cynicism when it comes to politics. And we're gonna do scripture study. We're gonna look at 1 Peter.

Scripture Reading and Study

So if you wanna pull up the next one, 1 Peter 1 and 2 is much of a passage about the posture of believers as we live in this present age. So I'm gonna ask if somebody would read real loud and clear for us from the first paragraph, which is 1 Peter 1:3-5 and then verse 13 and 17, and then somebody else read from chapter 2 verses 9-17.

Gabe, which one do you want? The first one? Okay. Somebody read the second one for me?

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. In his great mercy, he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead and into an inheritance that can never perish, oil, or fade. This inheritance is kept in heaven for you. Through faith, you're shielded by God's power until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time. Therefore, with minds that are alert and fully sober, set your hope on the grace that can be brought to you when Jesus Christ is revealed in his coming. Since you call on the father who judges each person's work impartially, live out your time as foreigners here in reverence. But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's special possession that you might declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God. Once you did not receive mercy, but now you have received mercy. Dear friends, I urge you as foreigners and exiles to abstain from simple desires which wage war against your soul. Live such good lives among the pagans that when they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us. Submit yourselves for the Lord's sake to every human authority, whether to the emperor as the supreme authority or to governors who are sent by him to punish those who do wrong and to commend those who do right. For it is God's will that by doing good, you should silence the anger or talk of foolish people. Live as free people, but do not use your freedom as a cover up for evil. Live as God's slaves. Show proper respect to everyone. Love the family of believers. Fear God. Honor the emperor. — 1 Peter 1:3-5, 1:13, 1:17, 2:9-17

Great. Thank you. So we're gonna do a little small group study of this, and I've got you four questions:

1. According to Peter, is God's kingdom more present or more future?
2. According to Peter, what is our true citizenship?
3. How does spiritual citizenship shape our this-worldly citizenship?
4. Do you think, based on his words here in the second part, that Peter is more hopeful or cynical about this-worldly governments?

So if you need to move around, you can. If you wanna take a moment and discuss these as a group, then we'll come back together and share our answers. Take a couple minutes to do that.

Okay. Let's go through these questions on 1 Peter 1 and 2.

According to Peter, is God's kingdom more future or more present? So let's break this down real quick. What parts of this passage point to it being future? Can you give me a couple verses? Read them out loud, really loud if you got one.

This inheritance is kept in heaven for you. — 1 Peter 1:4

Right.

So it's kept in heaven for you. What else?

Until the coming of the salvation. — 1 Peter 1:5

Right. Okay. Good. Anything else?

Dear friends, I urge you as foreigners and exiles... — 1 Peter 2:11

Good. Yep. What would point to you that God's kingdom has come in the present? Are there things about what he's pointing to that have already been established? What's been established?

Now you are the people of God. — 1 Peter 2:10

Good. Okay. What else?

He has given you burdens. — 1 Peter 2:9

Good. He has done this in the past. Right?

Live as free people — 1 Peter 2:16

Yeah. It's just kind of a very present sense for you. Right. Good.

You are a chosen people — 1 Peter 2:9

instead of only being. Good. So if you were to answer, let's go back and ask question one. According to Peter, is God's kingdom more present or future? What would you say?

Both.

Right? Yeah. There's a sense in which it's both. According to Peter, number two, what is our true citizenship?

Heavenly.

Heavenly. Right? We are citizens of an earthly kingdom. Citizenship is heavenly. What about this? Number three, how does our spiritual citizenship shape our worldly citizenship? This is a hard question. I'm just gonna go ahead.

I feel like it's connected to the freedom part. I don't know. This is just me puzzling it out, but it feels like this freedom that we have allows us to be in this world and enact kindness or grace or mercy even if it's not realized.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That's good. I think that's right. He tells us how to live. Right?

To live good lives among the pagans. — 1 Peter 2:12

Right? We're set apart to do good works. Right. Brett, you gotta say something.

I feel like it's holding our heavenly citizenship tightly, but our worldly citizenship loosely.

Good. Good. Yeah. Josh?

I think it gives us a real rationale to not only be exuberantly hopeful in a particular party or candidate, but also not be dismayed if something I fundamentally disagree with comes into power. Our hopes are ultimately in heaven.

No fair stealing my notes. Yeah. That's kind of where we're going. Jeff?

Perhaps our heavenly citizenship and the laws that apply there cause us to be different than this world. There are so many things that are legal under the law that for us are forbidden under gospel. And that will sometimes put us at odds with society.

That's a good point. And I would turn that and say that our heavenly citizenship doesn't just tell us what we don't do, but it tells us things that we do do in terms of how we live as respectful aliens.

Yes. Like, we're aliens and we're respectful.

Good. Last question. More hopeful or more cynical about this worldly government based on these words?

Putting it up as like, this is just here. You gotta deal with it. Here's where your home should be. Here's how to operate in this broken world.

So I think cynical, meaning it won't deliver us.

Yes. Peter's very cynical in that sense. But I think he's hopeful in the ability for us to live in that society as he goes.

Great. Yeah. Shouldn't skeptical be up here?

Could be. Yeah. Because skeptical is not necessarily you assume it's bad. You just don't know it's good.

Yeah. It's true.

Yeah. Y'all are all dancing around my main point here, which—and we're gonna unpack the why behind this in a second—but my thesis for this morning is this: there's a type of cynicism and a wrong type of cynicism, a right type of hope and a wrong type of hope. And this is why I can tell y'all are like, "I don't know if those words fit. I don't know if these categories fit." And I'm really encouraged to hear you say that because there's a sense in which neither of those are right and both of those are right.

Eschatology

So let's jump into that, and I'll tell you where we're going. If you wanna flip your page over, we're gonna talk about eschatology. Ruth Askew mentioned this a couple weeks ago, and I told her we'd be coming back to eschatology. Eschatology comes from the Greek word eschaton, which means culmination, final event, fulfillment. And eschatology is the study of all things related to the end times.

So many of you are familiar. Some of you come from churches that really emphasized eschatology, some from churches that didn't. But eschatology really, really matters. And a lot of times we don't think about this, but your view of what is to come shapes how you live in the present.

And of course, the Bible tells us that there'll be a day that Jesus comes back. He wipes away every tear. He establishes the new heavens and the new earth. But how we think about our eschatology determines a lot of how we relate to this world.

Now there are two pictures that I wanna hold up in Jesus' teaching. Actually, one is from 2 Peter here. I think it's really the next book over. 2 Peter describes this as dawn.

If you think about dawn, dawn is the time when it's not dark and it's not light. They're both together and describes Jesus himself as being like the morning star. It's like the precursor for what's to come, the signifier, the fruition of what is to come, and yet both exist in the same place.

Or Jesus' parable in Matthew 13 of the wheat and the weeds. He says there will be the wheat and the tares or the weeds all mixed together, and there'll come a time when those are harvested and they're separated. But right now, they are together. Good and evil are both present. God is fully committed to eradicating evil, but it's not done now. And so the two kingdoms are kind of together at the same time.

Over-Realized vs. Under-Realized Eschatology

I want to think about two types of ways that we approach eschatology. The first one is in the passage that you see right here in your notes: over-realized. I'm using the word realized like established. So overly established eschatology, under-realized eschatology. These roughly fit into two millennial positions, but they also can color an amillennial position.

Overly realized eschatology means we act like the kingdom of God has already all come. It's here in its fullness. People expect that the hope of what's happened in Christ has come here and now. They might say, well, if Jesus has come and the kingdom has come, then there should no longer be evil in this world. Everyone should be healed of sickness. There should be no poverty or suffering. Everything should be the way that God designed it to be now. And if you believe enough, if we work hard enough, we can make it be now.

That really ties into an older millennial position called post-millennialism. Post-millennialism believes that the church age is just gonna usher in almost seamlessly. Things are gonna get better and better and better and suddenly the kingdom of God. What's interesting about that is that the high time of post-mill theology was the nineteen twenties in this country. It was a time of a real sense that we're gonna be better and better. Industrialization, everything's getting better. We're out of World War one. We're past the big epidemic. We're moving forward to this glorious age. Post-mill has actually made a revival in the last couple of years, actually, too.

But it leads to three different ways this has worked out in churches, and they feel all very different, but they came from the same root.

The first is prosperity gospel churches. Prosperity gospel churches have this over-realized eschatology that we expect all the benefits of the kingdom should be ours now. And if you're not believing enough, then you're not experiencing all the wealth that God has to give you today. You see the connection there? God's kingdom benefits should be yours sprinkled in your life, and you just gotta believe it. Name it and claim it. It fails to take into account the nature of sin, living in a fallen world. This God's kingdom hasn't come in its fullness.

The second kind is a type of churches that believe we should set up God's law as the law of our country in various forms. Theonomy is wanting to take Mosaic Law and enact that in The United States today. There's Christian nationalism in various strands, and it's overly idealized. Like, we can make God's kingdom on earth. No. It's failing to take into account our place in history, how much of the kingdom is yet to come.

The third group—this is, surprisingly, liberal churches in a lot of cases have this. They're not looking forward to Jesus coming back. It's all about alleviation of poverty and doing all these things in the now, and like we can make the new society Jesus promised in the now. Does that make sense where all these connect? Over-realized eschatology—and it's too hopeful, too idealistic and hopeful.

On the other end of the spectrum is under-realized eschatology. Realized being established. We act like God's kingdom is all future. It doesn't recognize that with the coming, the first coming of Jesus in the world, he came proclaiming the kingdom of God. It's at hand. It's here. Even if it hasn't come in its fullness. It's expecting too little from our Lord in the present.

It can look like in some churches, just preach the gospel. Like, all we care about is saving souls. Nothing else matters. We can't expect any society-wide change or reform in this life. We don't work for those things. We're not hopeful.

We are to win souls from hell, but that's all we can do in this life. No hope for good to prevail. Now this traditionally has come out of a premillennial orientation. Premillennialism says there's gonna be this age of the church, then there's gonna be a rapture. Things are gonna get worse and worse. God pulls his people out, then the tribulation period, and then he's gonna bring in his kingdom. It's a view that things are gonna get worse and worse and worse. That's the decline. No hope for good to prevail.

Paige Benton Brown, the writer and speaker I really appreciate, puts this in terms of Narnia. Many of you read the Narnia books. She writes this: when Aslan is on the move, when it's always been winter and never Christmas, he doesn't just come back and snatch a beaver or a centaur and take them back to live with him. When he comes, when he's on the move, the sun comes out. The snow begins to melt. Flowers start to bloom.

With an under-realized eschatology, it's too cynical. And it can tend to have a tendency to overrate the power of rulers and authorities that dominate this world. Sometimes we underestimate how deeply corrupt we are, and we think all the bad people are out there, out to get us. The church's fortress mentality: gotta protect the kids from the world.

The other thing about an under-realized eschatology is it can put too much power on spiritual forces. There can be this overemphasis on spiritual warfare that forgets that, as Martin Luther said, the devil's God's devil. He's on a chain. He can only do what God allows him to do. But there can be this in an under-realized eschatology, like everybody's out to get us, and we can't do anything.

A Redemptive Approach: Already Not Yet

In the middle of those is what I wanna call a redemptive approach. We talk about this in our church, but we need to spell it out. Already not yet. We live in the tension. There's a place to be rightly hopeful and wrongly hopeful. Rightly cynical and wrongly cynical.

A redemptive approach says: already not yet. David Jones of Covenant Seminary puts it this way:

We must not lag behind the king in some kind of unwarranted pessimism as though his first coming and present reign do not make a difference. We must not also run ahead of the king in some kind of unwarranted triumphalism as though we're going to make utopia here before he comes back. We keep in step with our king.

Keep in step with our king.

Paige Benton Brown said it this way: if you have an over-realized eschatology, kingdom's all now, and you look at poor people in a third world country, you say, "Who cares if they know Jesus if they don't have enough to eat? We're gonna solve all the poverty issues." If you have an under-realized eschatology, the kingdom is all future. You see poor people in a third world country and you're like, "Who cares if someone has something to eat if they don't know Jesus?" But a redemptive approach says we need to feed them and tell them about Jesus. We're both hopeful in some ways and cynical in some ways. We're both looking to what we can do in the now, but also knowing it's not gonna be complete. So hope and cynicism—I wanna hold these two together.

Wrong Kind vs. Right Kind

Wrong kind of cynicism: look at 1 Peter 1:13.

Preparing your minds for action, being sober-minded, setting your hope fully on the grace that we brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ.

Sober-mindedness is very important for the Christian, and yet there's a way that sober-mindedness can look like cynicism. Cynicism often masquerades at this. The cynic diagnoses what's going on around them, the folly of sin. That's not a bad thing—recognize the depth of human depravity. But the cynic doesn't stop with that. He often spirals into a godless view of the world. A godless view of the world isn't the real world. We don't live in a godless world. That's the drunkenness of cynicism, and that's really prevalent in the church today. There's a lot of despair, and there's this idea that we're at the worst moment in human history. We tried in the first couple of classes to counteract that. This is not a darker time than the first century, than many points throughout history for the church. We just need to be careful. We don't have a resurrectionless Jesus, a spiritless church, and a godless world. That's the wrong kind of cynicism.

The right kind of cynicism: what should we be rightly cynical about? Any politician, to say you. Yeah. Any disworldly system that promises a kingdom.

Any political system that's like, "we're gonna bring all..." That's why sometimes all kinds of politicians love the word hope, and I'm like, what are you talking about? That's my job. Right? Because our hope—we're gonna get to this in a second—but it's okay to be like, that's not the kingdom. That's a kingdom. That's not Jesus' kingdom.

The other thing to be cynical about is the person in the mirror. "I have the full view on everything. I got all the facts. I know what's going on. Everybody else is a bunch of sheep, bunch of lemmings. They're all gonna fall off the cliff because they're all dumb, but I know." Have you felt this before? Yeah. Right? I mean, it's easy to feel that.

Right and Wrong Kinds of Hope

The wrong kind of hope—I hinted at this just a second ago—is that anybody is going to bring a kingdom that Jesus has promised. Right? We can't expect to have the new heavens and new earth now. We want King Jesus on the throne. We want his rule as the rule of the land. We wanna see redemption in every circumstance. We look around and it's wearying to be a foreigner and a stranger, as Peter says, isn't it? Are you tired? Wouldn't you like a little vacation from that? Like, I'd like to go home for a little while. And holding out—there's a home. That's the right kind of hope. The king is coming back.

So in your groups, really briefly, we're gonna close with this. Where do you find yourself on that right kind of cynicism, wrong kind of cynicism? Right kind of hope, wrong kind of hope. What do you tend toward, and in what way?

---

I'm on the faith. Christian. Even on the Christian faith. Those things can go down the list. I'm a progressive, down the list. I'm a conservative, down the list. But Christ, Christian, in Christ, is gotta be number one and unmodified.

Now I know you know what you mean by when you say that, but when you label that, you are doing something that's actually kind of dangerous because it can cause other people to really miss who Jesus is. So keeping that foremost is extremely important to being curious. Again, like, he's what matters. I have the mind of Christ. I'm in him. I'm holy and blameless in his sight. Keeping that locked in as central. And everything else has gotta fall below that.

You know that. I'm not telling you anything you don't know. I'm just reminding you of something that you already do know, which is: we don't narrow Jesus. And once we do, we start getting into danger.

A Thicker Political Theology

Finally, this is where I wanna end up for today. I wanna encourage you to think therefore about what it means to have a thicker political theology. Now I'm gonna define the difference between a thin political theology and a thick one, and this is hard. This is requiring a lot more of Christians than it has done in generations past. We're in a time where we're having to think harder about how we express ourselves and what we say, how we ask questions, how we represent ourselves.

A thin political theology can go down to kinda both-sidesism. You know what both-sidesism is? It means, like, both sides are equally bad. Both sides are equally corrupt. I can support neither. I don't ever say what I really think because I don't wanna offend anybody. I don't wanna talk about these things and engage somebody.

A thin political theology votes on one issue. Takes one issue and says, that's my issue. That's how I decide what it is to be a Christian who votes. Without understanding that a lot of what we're seeing in our country is super interconnected. It's super historic. It's got a lot of roots that go a lot of different places. We are where we are not because of one thing or one person.

A thin political theology also contends usually that there is one and only one Christian candidate, one and only one Christian party, one and only one Christian way to vote. Like, this is it. It's very thin because I've already made up my mind. It's really simple. It simplifies, oversimplifies things that are very complex. Just like you're a very complex person.

A thick political theology exists within tensions. Knowing that there's a lot of pull right now. Issues aren't black and white in most cases. A thick political theology refrains from apathy—we'll talk about more about that next week—and takes decisive action for democracy. This is what I think is right. I am going to actually make a decision.

A thick political theology doesn't address just the symptoms of a problem, but tries to understand the source of the problem. A thick political theology doesn't just rely on fear and intimidation, but tries to paint a vision for a better future. What is gonna lead us toward the best that we can have within this context?

A thick political theology doesn't simply mean to deconstruct things, but trying to reconstruct things. A thick political theology recognizes we're not seeking to create a theocracy, but a democracy. A thick political theology can accept that as much as we want our Christian convictions played out in the public sphere, we always live in a pluralistic society that must make room for people who are different from us and that need to be able to thrive here and must have a hearing in a true democracy.

So a thick political theology means we gotta do more homework. We gotta be really thoughtful. When we talk about policies, policies are not either or. In many cases, looking at what are the implications for this down the line for all these people—things are not as clear as we'd like them to be. Everybody wants shortcuts. We all wanna create formulas where we don't have to think about things.

Being a Christian right now who is engaging your whole self means you gotta really be thoughtful, and that's really hard. And it's why we also need to be on a team—not a political team, but in a church that has people who are different from us, where we practice some of these things, where we know how to disagree with one another. It's so important to be in a church where we lovingly disagree.

I hope that you lovingly disagree with me on some of the things I say on Sunday mornings. It shows you're reading your Bibles and you're engaging your brain and your heart. I hope that's a regular thing in our conversations. We don't settle into community groups or parts of the church where we're just with people like me. It is so important that we are in a church that promotes discussion, even disagreement, and deep love.

Right now, in our political moment, people cannot discern the difference between supporting something and affirming. The word affirm means you gotta agree with everything I say. You've gotta affirm not just what I believe about me, but my position in every way possible and embrace everything about me. Adults can disagree and still love one another. To be able to divide affirmation and disagreement and hold those tensions together—that's really important for us as a church.

I know I'm going over time. I wanna make sure you make it to worship. Thank you for being here this morning. Let me close this in prayer.

Father, thank you for the fact that we are in you, that we are no longer alienated, that you consider us holy and blameless, that we in Christ have the mind of Christ. We pray, Father, we'd be people who engage others around us with real curiosity. Lord, we pray that we would define ourselves by Christ alone as the central fact of who we are. We pray we would live in a place not as James and John who are seeking to call down fire because people disagree with us. But Lord, we pray that we would understand and use our brains and engage one another. We pray this in Christ's name. Amen.

Thanks, everybody. Thank you for listening to our CTK Raleigh sermons podcast. CTK is a community rooted in the depth of the gospel, refined by hard conversations, fueled by meaningful relationships, and committed to redemptive work in Raleigh. If you have questions about our sermon content or about our church in general, please visit our website at ctkraleigh.org.