Commentary
On prayers and presidents
A Commentary by Parker T. Williamson, Editor Emeritus, The Layman, December 17, 2008
Two news stories caught my attention this week. One reported Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe’s insistence that his country is not being ravaged by cholera. Why? Because he said so.
And why did he say so? For the same reason that he dismisses other unsavory realities. A loaf of bread costs 1.6 trillion Zimbabwe dollars as the nation’s inflation rate soars beyond 11.2 million percent. Farms that Mugabe confiscated lie fallow while his people starve. Bone strewn fields signal the genocide that secured his one-party rule. And his henchmen continue to slaughter political opponents in their beds.
Mugabe chooses not to see what he has done to his people. After all, he was called to be their savior. And who bestowed such a calling upon him? His ascendancy was aided and abetted by the Presbyterian Church (USA).
During his guerilla days Mugabe’s mercenaries shot down a planeload of missionaries and slaughtered most of the survivors. It then came to light that his revolution was being fueled in part from Presbyterian offering plates. And $85,000 had been channeled to this bloodthirsty killer and his thugs via a World Council of Churches conduit.
Unable to deny their complicity, PCUSA leaders said they sent church offerings to Mugabe because he would liberate his people. Colonial powers had to be toppled, they argued, in order that indigenous Africans might be saved.
Replace one regime with another. That’s called salvation by politics
Then and now
The second news story that caught my eye this week reported Presbyterian Church (USA) Stated Clerk Gradye Parsons’ reference to President-elect Obama as the nation’s new savior. Suggesting that confession precede salvation, Parsons said, “Mr. President, before you save us, let us have a chance to profess our ills.”
Parsons’ circumstances differ vastly from those of the Mugabe debacle, but his obeisance to salvation by politics expresses an identical principle. He issued his statement in Washington, DC while discussing with other mainline denominational officials how they might help Obama save the nation.
Make no mistake about it: The Presbyterian Lay Committee is praying for our nation’s
president-elect, just as it has prayed for all previous administrations. Scripture encourages us to pray such prayers, and we do so without hesitation.
But it is one thing to pray for the president. It is quite another to pray to him.
Undoubtedly, the Rev. Parsons’ defenders will cry “foul,” insisting that the stated clerk’s gaffe was merely a slip of the tongue from one as yet unaccustomed to crafting words for public consumption.
Slips do happen. Yet, as Freud so brazenly reminds us, they often contain a grain of truth. We trust that on a better day, Parsons might have found less salvific words to lavish upon the nation’s new president.
On the other hand, Parsons has lived inside the PCUSA Vatican for almost a decade as a member of former Stated Clerk Kirkpatrick’s senior staff. In the Office of the General Assembly, Parsons was immersed in liberation theology. He saw denominational leaders fawn over Fidel Castro, mask the KGB’s infiltration of Eastern European churches, politic for the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and promote faux “churches” created by the monstrously evil Kim Il-sung. In such a context, he could not have missed the denomination’s salvation by politics dictum.
Christians are called to honor Scripture’s counsel that we be good citizens, making a godly influence on the affairs of state. But Scripture also warns that there is a limit to what we may render to Caesar. The Bible has a word for salvation by politics. It is called “idolatry.”
Having seen a host of politicians and their causes obtain money from Presbyterian Church (USA) offerings, we refuse to make politics a matter of ultimate concern. We’ll take our stand with the disciples who when confronted by secular alternatives, said to Jesus: “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.”
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