Yup. We’re going there … The Obama-Dobson Quarrel [Updated]
I opened my browser yesterday morning and pulled up cnn.com. It’s sort of part of my morning routine. Get a cup of coffee. Open the MacBook. Scan my RSS feeds. Check the news. You get the picture.
Yesterday’s headline was the very public quarrel between conservative Christian leader James Dobson of Focus on the Family and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama.
The issue? Biblical interpretation. Specifically, Dobson took Obama to task for a 2006 speech delivered at Call to Renewal, a gathering of progressive/liberal Christians. Read the text of the speech here.
The original CNN piece is here.
I’m going to go out on a limb (not really) and say that if you’re the sort of person who’s interested in Following Christ 2008, you’re probably also interested in being a redeeming influence in culture. Right? You’re probably also someone who spends most of your life in a that highly pluralistic environment known as the university.
So the issue raised in this little (and very public) tiff is actually quite germane to your life.
I don’t want to get into the specifics of the quarrel, you can read the CNN piece for that. I do want to consider one of Obama’s assertions. It just so happens that it is one that Dobson took issue with, but never mind.
Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason. I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God’s will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.
- Barack Obama, Keynote Address, Call to Renewal.
I believe that Obama is right.
Christians have for centuries believed that there exist not only the (specific) revelation of Scripture, but general revelation in nature and reason. This general revelation could also be called Natural Law. As a result, it is possible to converse with those outside of the Christian faith on the basis of first things, moral principles that are knowable outside of Scripture. This means that we can discuss policies from a Christian perspective without using explicitly Christian language.
It doesn’t mean (and I don’t think Obama suggests) that Christians/the Church should abandon reflection on Scripture as a basis for views on all sorts of issues. After all, it is not only our “religious selves” that are Christ’s, we are Christ’s in our entirety (whole persons).
Religion seems like its going to be an issue in this election, but not as it was in 2000 and 2004. We’ve already seen a battle over the “reverends,” both with Obama (Wright and Pfleger) and McCain (Hagee and Parsley). Who knows what else we see before November.
For other interesting discussion see Erin Manning’s response to Jim Wallis’s response to Jim Dobson at Crunchy Con.
[...] Dobson and Obama Posted on June 25, 2008 by jg75 See some of my thoughts on this very public quarrel here. [...]
This is actually a really interesting point for discussion. I sort of agree with Obama and sort of don’t. I actually think we have to do both - respond by appealing to natural law as well as by appealing to Scripture and Christian worldview values. Or said another way, we should try to translate our “reasons for our faith” (”with gentleness and respect”) via general revelation AND yet also not be afraid to appeal to specific revelation.
The reason for this “both and” is that if we simply (and only) appeal to natural law then we will have a society governed by only that which we can argue from general revelation which essentially means we will have a naturalistic society which carries a worldview and values system in itself (a la Alistair MacIntyre, After Virtue) that may not (and probably is not) capable of forming the kind of society we need. Civil gay marriage can be argued against based on an argument about redefining marriage as redefining families which in turn are building pieces of society, but unless I invoke and VOTE according to the deeper revelation I believe (apart from evidence or “reason”) about gender, sex, and family, I will probably not bring that redemptive “lift” to the culture that I seek.
This is not to say that Obama (and whoever posted this post) aren’t correct to call out people who don’t seem to even BOTHER arguing their point to the broader world - poor evangelists and apologists indeed (Did Wilberforce only say, “Read your bible and you’ll see that I’m right”?). But I think we must still vote our beliefs or else we are not really participating in the culture the way we should I think.
(BTW, isn’t there a kind of Barth vs. Bultmann vs. Brunner tension going on in this whole thing? What do you think?)
[...] delved a little into politics here at Flourishing. I wrote about James Dobson’s sort of unfair words about Barack Obama and his view of the Bible. We talked a little bit about the [...]
Jon, thanks for your comment. In a pluralistic society, religious people should be free to enter the public square as religious people. That means, for Christians, taking positions on matters of morality and policy that are based upon Scripture. I didn’t mean to suggest that Christians ought not to rely upon or even reference Scripture in public discourse. However, in a largely post-Christian context such references will not, of themselves, win the day. It will be ability to use the “universal” concepts of which Obama speaks. And it is interesting that he refers to universals, no?
Unpack you parenthetical about Barth v. Bultmann v. Brunner?