Hello out there to all my friends in sanctification land.  Hope all is well with you.

Today’s dispatch from the road is all about authority.

When you read that, did you cringe just a little bit?  If you’re an American, and you’re under the age of 60, the chances are excellent that you did.  The mythology (true or not) surrounding the United States is that we are a nation of rugged individualists who fought a war of independence to achieve our own manifest destiny.  Americans self-identify as people who question authority, and tend towards self-determination.  My history textbooks throughout my secular educational life made heroes of those who refused to stand up and openly questioned and fought authority.  People who followed orders were given nearly no space at all, unless the orders they followed came from someone who WAS identified as a rebel against authority of some kind, in which case they too were heroes for acknowledging someone else’s visionary sense.  This ideology is not only prevalent in our political or military history, but also our social history.  The units in my American history classes about the 20th century did not focus on popular culture and it’s heroes–it focused on famous non-conformists, and glorified protest culture.  (More Thoreau, anyone?)

The message was clear: question everything, and more importantly, everyone.  If someone wants to be a leader, their motivations should be immediately questioned.  If they are capable and want to lead, they are not trustworthy, because they will use their gifts to take your rights from you.  If anyone says something which is personally problematic for you, don’t think, don’t blink, don’t question for a minute–just rebel, and in so doing, you will be a leader.  In other words, the lesson was: qualified leaders are those who rebel. You will know them by the fact that they don’t follow anyone else.  The credo is assumed by millions of people, spouted as self-evident.  You may even have caught yourself doing it a time or ten.

There are two problems with this model of understanding leadership for you and me as Christians.  The first problem is a logical one.  If a leader denies authority in favor of rebellion and encourages others to do the same, they provide no legitimate means people to trust their own leadership.  Their style of leadership would be, in effect, to cause those following them to refuse to do so.  This is clearly absurd.  The second problem is both logical and theological:  how do you follow Jesus yourself and simultaneously ask others to follow him while at the same time undermining his ability to make any demands on individuals because he demands to be Lord or nothing?

Ironically, the place I hear compliments and exhortations to this type of leadership is some of my fellow seminarians.  Whether it was the “emergent” movement in my early years at Denver Seminary, which habitually pilloried the status quo and leaders who were part of the “old institution,” or the generalized movement seemingly everywhere to abandon denominations in favor of independent local congregations, or those in my current circles who refuse to embrace orthodoxy because it’s 2000 years old, clinging to tradition and orthodoxy is clearly not “cool.”  There are days where it feels to me like some of my classmates are desperate to find any way to escape tradition so that they aren’t accused of being part of the “institution.” It’s like they can’t stomach representing “the man.”  The problem is especially ironic in those contexts.  How on earth can you simultaneously erode confidence in authority while you are studying to one day become an authority (or, more appropriately, a representative of the highest authority) yourself?  Is it possible to work to erode trust in all earthly authority without also eroding trust in your own words? If it is, how could you say something substantive about anything else?

What I am not trying to say is that we all ought to unquestioningly and uncritically follow anyone who stands up to lead us.  What I am saying is that we have a responsibility to respect legitimate, godly authority around us as we would Christ himself.

Much has been made about Jesus’ calling of his first disciples with the simple request that they follow him.  (Mt. 4:19, Mt. 10:38, Mk. 2:14, Lk. 9:23, Jn. 10:27, Jn. 12:26…) But with the anti-authority bend so many of us unthinkingly adopt, how can we truly follow anyone, including our Lord?  I submit as proof of our difficulty in this realm the prevalence of the distinction often mentioned in American Christianity between Jesus as savior and Jesus as Lord.  Such a distinction would be totally foreign to the readers of the New Testament, and furthermore, foreign to anyone who was not privy to the particular cultural ideals which I have described above.  How can you trust someone as savior who you do not acknowledge as Lord?  Would a “savior” who didn’t deserve to be followed be capable of affecting salvation for anyone?  Would a god who wasn’t the Lord of life be able to save through death on a cross?  The fact that such a distinction is viewed as helpful only demonstrates how far from the path we have strayed in this respect.  Our insistence that Christ must be both savior and Lord proves that a significant number of us do not understand the matter to begin with.

Another hint is wrapped up in our desperate desire to make Jesus a rebel-figure.  He is sexier and more attractive to us and to those we tell about him when he is a rebel.  Certainly, there are aspects of Jesus ministry which could be interpreted as rebellious if you were inclined to do so.  (A sampling: turning over tables in the temple, calling the religious leaders “whitewashed tombs,” eating with sinners, and on the list goes.)  The only problem with this interpretation is that it ignores the most important thing about Jesus: his authority.  At the beginning of his ministry, his authority is highlighted in all the Gospels.  Matthew, in particular, takes great pains to show Jesus’s authority over and against the teachers of the law, over diseases and unclean spirits, and over nature itself.  In other words, there is nothing rebellious about Jesus.  To see Jesus as a rebel is to miss the first and most obvious thing about him: he is God.  He did not come to earth to lead a rebellion—he came to earth to end one.  The significance of the death of Jesus Christ on the cross by the political authorities is not that it is an act of rebellion, but one of willful submission.  The blunt fact is that Jesus, at any point during his crucifixion, could have chosen to end the entire charade–the miracle is that he did not!  The entire Bible screams from its pages that Jesus is God.  For God to be a rebel is a logical impossibility.  Who would he be rebelling against?  I hope you see that while well-meaning, attempts to make Jesus a rebel again miss the point in a most devastating and total way.

My hope for this entry tonight, having explained the situation and the difficulty, is two-fold.

First, it is my hope to incite you to do one of the last truly rebellious things for a person in our times to do: totally, completely, and unquestioningly give your loyalty to Jesus Christ.  In one important sense, such an action is no rebellion at all–it is the ending of one.  But to live as a sold-out believer in our culture and in these times will require rebellion against an entire system of thinking and being, a system in which individuals have not only the right but the responsibility to question everything.  You will be rebelling against the virtue of rebellion.

Second, it is my hope that if there are any leaders in my limited audience, you will be challenged to call people to radical submission without undermining Jesus Christ’s ultimate leadership (or your subordinate leadership).  If you are a leader and you are encouraging rebellion from those who trust and follow you as you follow Christ, you are walking on dangerous ground, even if your goal is to teach people to rebel against culture.  Teaching rebellion as a virtue will not, by itself, foster devotion to Christ, but may make an idol of the act of rebellion and ultimately make people powerless to follow him.  Instead, teach radical devotion, and your followers will come to their individual acts of subterfuge against the world quite naturally and organically as they search the Scriptures and are led by the Holy Spirit.   When any person submits to Christ and gives their wholehearted devotion to him, they will be equipped by God himself indwelling them to stand against ungodly patterns above and beyond any feeble rebel ethic you could teach.  Leave the convicting on rebellion to God and teach devotion, loyalty and sacrifice instead–first through your own example as a leader.  No leader worth following is unfamiliar with being a follower themselves, and this is doubly true in the Christian faith–there is only one leader, and anyone serving him is at best only a messenger for the real leader.  Leadership in the Christian community is tied up entirely with the way in which the nominal leader is themselves following after the Master.  It is for this reason that Paul exhorts believers to “follow him as he follows Christ:” any leading which didn’t ultimately trace back to Christ himself would be no leading at all.

From the standpoint of applications, there are a couple of important takeaways here, beyond these two larger goals.

First, it is not virtuous in and of itself to rebel.  If you are the kind of person who rebels against everything, slow your roll down.  It’s not a virtue, and there are probably people God has placed in your life to lead you and to teach you how to follow him who you are ignoring.  Stop it.  (And if that command rankled you, I’m talking to you!)

Second, it is not virtuous to question everyone’s motives all the time, especially if you don’t want it to be done to you.  While it’s true that some people have bad motives, the process of selecting leaders should have enough discerning as part of it that by the time they’re asking you to follow, they’ve earned the benefit of the doubt.  Choose to trust leaders are doing the best they can, even when they make mistakes, unless you have specific evidence to the contrary.  If you’re in the Word the way you should be, if they get out of line, it will be obvious in a hurry.  Trust me. (See what I did there?)

Third, pay careful attention to your life when you start to assert  your own rights or the supremacy of your own ideas, especially as it relates to your theology.  You’re on thin ice.  We have names in the religious world for people who won’t listen to anyone else and are constantly inventing their own beliefs and then justifying them in ridiculous ways.  We call them heretics.  Not good times, bad times.

Finally, and most importantly, hand the keys to Jesus daily, and let him do the driving.  I know that’s cliche and terrible, but the reason that everyone says that is because it’s true.  If you are the kind of person who can’t trust God to direct you, then you may not know God as well as you think you do.  It’s time to build your faith.  Buckle up and get ready for a fun trip.

In case of life, follow the leader, and do it without undermining his authority or your own walk.  It is the only way to be sure that the one you’re following is really him.