Should Christians Vote for the Vain and Boastful? By Ben Voth for American Thinker
Evangelical thinker, author, and Christian pastor John Piper stirred the Christian community and a larger public intrigued with how Christians may vote in the this election with his recent essay, “Policies, Persons, and Paths to Ruin: Pondering the Implications of the 2020 Election.”
Piper concludes: “I will not develop some calculus to determine which path of destruction I will support.” After rejecting the sin of boastfulness with a terminology diagnosed in the Greek with the term “eristikos,” he is willing to forswear voting on or in the Presidential election of 2020. Piper’s critique of leadership character is one of several made by other major evangelical thinkers like Max Lucado and Beth Moore. Piper’s thesis cannot be reconciled to the rhetoric and arguments of basic Biblical hermeneutics.
Piper complains early in the essay: “I find it bewildering that Christians can be so sure that greater damage will be done by bad judges, bad laws, and bad policies than is being done by the culture-infecting spread of the gangrene of sinful self-exaltation, and boasting, and strife-stirring (eristikos). How do they know this? Seriously! Where do they get the sure knowledge…” Piper is condescendingly stunned that Christians might vote in the current election given the tragic political character flaw of boasting that for him obviously precludes the task of voting for President. Piper does not provide biblical examples to support his thesis and offers only the well-worn hermeneutic that all sin is of equal offense in the eyes of God so boasting will be as “deadly” as abortion, according to Piper. In reality, the Bible is replete with human beings plagued with boasting character flaws and yet assigned to not only leadership but political sovereignty.
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Moses is an arrogant murderer who is mocked in chapter two of the book of Exodus by his fellow Israelites: “Who made you a prince or a judge over us? Are you intending to kill me as you killed the Egyptian?” The deeply flawed Moses flees to Midian. Nonetheless, while he is in hiding, God chooses Moses to be the sovereign political leader of the Israelites. Moses argued with God that he was not of sufficient character to carry out such a task and God is angered by this rebuttal. Moses’ arrogance and strife-stirring remained with him as sovereign leader of Israel to the point of being banned from the promised land of Israel by God, even after delivering the Israelites out of Egypt.
