Farewell John Piper?
The disinterest in the material suffering of the world is a feature, not a bug, of evangelical theology.
It is safe to say that nobody has had half the influence on my spiritual and theological formation as John Piper. At one point in my life my bookshelf was almost entirely full of his works. One day I even took the brave step of deciding not to read any more of his work, not because I didn’t cherish every syllable, mind you, but because his words became familiar to the point that it became difficult to distinguish my inner thoughts and his formulations of the supremacy of Christ.
Recently Piper has come under great scrutiny, becoming the most recent target of the unbroken online outrage cycle. According to Daniel Kleven, an ex-employee of Piper’s Bethlehem College & Seminary, a report about racial reckoning systemically quashed, eventually costing him his job. The report called for the seminary to publicly distance themselves from noted racist and long-time Piper ally Doug Wilson.
Of course, this is not the first controversy Piper has created for himself (to be fair, after some 40 years in the public eye, particularly in this cultural moment, it would be difficult for anybody to avoid controversy but that’s a conversation for another time). In his trite 2011 dismissal of then-fellow Minnesota pastor Rob Bell’s book Love Wins, Piper simply tweeted “Farewell Rob Bell.”
In Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, Kristin Kobes Du Mez summed Piper’s perspective and impact in this way:
For leaders of the movement, patriarchal power was at the core of gospel Christianity; in the words of John Piper, God has given Christianity ‘a masculine feel’
Farewell John Piper?
For the same reason I didn’t join Piper ten years ago in marking Bell’s theological shifts with outright and somewhat gleeful dismissal my point is not to decide Piper’s status among the unwashed community of sinners. Frankly I could care less and I’m sure the sentiment is shared by all.
The common denominator of these episodes draws out a larger theme of Piper’s theology, and indeed, that of a wide range of white evangelical teachers. The goal of the evangelical project is not to change the world for the better but to make better Christians.
My main calling is not to help America be anything, but to help the church be the church. I want to help the church be the radical outpost of the kingdom of Christ, no matter what kind of America it happens to be in or any other people group or country in the world.
And, while he mentions in another part of the conversation that he is “glad glad glad that there are Christians who are more politically active than (he is),” the curious division of what it means to be a religious person in the world absent anything to say about place you occupy in the world leaves Christian life in the abstract and theoretical.
Surely a pastor who has spent much of his life pressing for international missions has thoughts on the historical implications of colonization? He clearly also has thoughts on abortion and same-sex marriage. And, as he points out, he has written a book on racism.
Yet, the questions of economics, of war, of power of empire, indeed of whether the poor have housing are simply not of particular interest to him.
Why do individual people love or not? Why are they afraid or have confidence? Why are they lazy or active? Why are they foolish? Why are they craving security or making sacrifices and taking risks? Why do they have joy? Why do some people have joy in pain and others get angry at God?
These are the kinds of questions that stir my emotional engagement way more than whether rent controls are effective or not in helping people.
The disinterest in the material suffering of the world is a feature, not a bug, of evangelical theology. Piper is certainly not alone in this, although his decades of influence speak to his approval and complicity in distancing Christians from questions that have historically been of great importance.
Nowhere does this disinterest come through more than in Piper’s commentary leading up to the 2020 election. In a post titled Policies, Persons, and Paths to Ruin, Piper denounces the moral implications of Joe Biden’s pro-choice positions and the indefensible moral character of Donald Trump. But, miraculously, nowhere in the piece does Piper name either candidate.1
Indeed, Piper’s refusal to engage critical moral issues of his day (with the exception of the issues noted above) appears to be a grand exercise in hyper-spiritualization. How else could he cherish the words of Cotton Mather, a slave holder and apologist who was also an architect of the Salem Witch Trials?
If a well-articulated dogma - and not loving your neighbor in concrete, material terms - means anything, then what can the offer to his people? If anything explains the uselessness of a morality that is simply not interested in engaging prophetically in the world wouldn’t the Apostle Paul himself call that a clanging cymbal?
How long can white evangelicalism call itself relevant when its leaders intentionally abdicate their role as witnesses and truth tellers? As long as Christian leaders insist on their role of saying nothing about the world, its systems of oppression, and what Paul might have called “principalities,” who can take them seriously?
But perhaps it is their own words that are the most damning in this conversation. Nobody needs to write a farewell letter.
Maybe we just need to find better voices.
I feel today that most of the macro and international, political, economic issues are too complicated for me to figure out. Therefore, I don’t have anything authoritative to say from the Bible about particular strategies for how to solve various political or economic issues.
In an editor’s note at the bottom of this article reads: After this article was published, John Piper tweeted, “The article we posted today explains why I won’t be voting for Biden or Trump. That choice to ‘write in’ is relatively unimportant. But the reasoning really matters.” He then linked to his 1995 article on abortion as a stake in the ground he hopes never to move.