Discipling Nations

Youth With A Mission is one of the most influential missions organizations in the world. It has enabled thousands of God’s people to build his kingdom. So when YWAM’s founder and chairman Loren Cunningham commissions a book to explain what YWAM is about and challenge the church to move in the same direction, one can be sure that the result will be a book that reflects the thinking of some of the best minds and hearts in evangelicaldom. To write this book Cunningham chose Darrow Miller, whom he says

is not an intellectual; he is a Christian who is busy making a difference worldwide, and committed seeing the minds of Christians renewed by God’s truth in order to more correctly and effectively reflect and initiate His truth into every realm of society, and thereby “disciple the nations” – which is the key to solving the world’s problems.

So Brother Miller is a heart, a mind, and two hands passionately engaged in furthering the kingdom of God on earth. He makes many good points in the book: ideas do have consequences, one’s view of God will indeed dictate how one treats one’s neighbor, Christ alone can save us from sin, and God has commanded us not only to call individuals to repentance but also to build godly communities. I was especially impressed by his point that when the Bible says that God is by nature love (1 John 4:8), it necessarily follows that God be both unity and diversity: three in one and one in three. But for whatever reason, when Brother Miller describes the community he thinks the church should be building, he pours gasoline on the fire he’s trying to extinguish and shuts off the water and fire retardant foam.

One justly relegated to nobodyhood like me needs to think twice before accusing a man of his stature of grievous error, but I think the job needs to be done, so here goes.

The following charts are taken with cosmetic modification from “One, Yet Many: The Nature of Community,” the chapter of Discipling Nations (Seattle: YWAM, 2001) in which Brother Miller applies the doctrine of the Trinity to human interaction at all levels. His thesis is that because God is both one God and three persons, human society must balance the individual component and the relational component. To emphasize the many to the exclusion of the one is to fall into polytheism, pantheism, and postmodernism, all of which go hand-in-hand with the idea that there is no objective truth, everyone has to come up with his own construct and supporting narrative, and the individual is swallowed up in the family, tribal, or national collective. So far, so good, methinks. He runs into trouble when he says that to emphasize the one at the expense of the many is to fall into libertarianism and anarchy.

If he had said libertinism and chaos, respectively, this post would be much shorter. But I think he has chosen his labels carefully; if so, he totally misunderstands libertarianism and anarchism, and he places entirely too much faith in 1990s-style conservatism and democracy, which had failed miserably before he first wrote the book and have failed spectacularly in the almost two decades since. These misconceptions still plague evangelicalism, so while I will leave it to others to critique his view of the dangers of viewing God and society in terms of “The Many,” I will give a shot at clearing up those under the other two headings.

Take a look at the first chart.

Community
	The Many	The One and Many	The One
	Egalitarianism	Community	Individualism
Synonyms	Communalism	Fellowship	Libertarianism
Root	Envy	Contentment	Greed
Focus	Status	Responsibility	Rights
Time Frame	Past	Future	Present
Concept of Equality	Numerical	Equitable	To the conqueror the spoils
Examples	USA welfare socialism	The Body of Christ	Western consumerism
Fruit	Enslavement to envy	Service to God and man	Enslavement to Self
Values	Equality	Justice	Privilege

To start with, I defy anyone to read the writings of respected libertarian authors – whether agnostics like Eric Peters and Butler Shaffer, or even overt atheists like Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, Walter Block, and Ayn Rand, to say nothing of Christians like Catholics Joseph Sobran, Lew Rockwell, and Thomas Woods, or Protestants Gary North, William Anderson, John Whitehead, Becky Akers, William Grigg, and Laurence Vance (yes, I realize I’m taking all the merchandise from one shelf) – and build a successful case that all or even any of them base their view of community on greed, which I define as the desire to acquire by means of violence or deceit what belongs to another.

While the libertarian focus is indeed on rights, because we view the community as having no identity apart from that of each individual who comprises that community, we conclude that the community has only those rights that inhere to the individuals that comprise it. That is, the community, the tribe, and the state per se have no rights that supersede the rights of its individual members. William Grigg and Eric Peters in particular attack the idea that agents of the community have rights and privileges the rest of us lack, reiterating that police and other government agents grievously abuse “Mundanes” solely “because they can.”

Because most individuals cannot live at a decent material level without interaction with others, and because libertarian ethics preclude violence and deceit against people and their property, the only way libertarians see anyone making a decent living is through serving their neighbors. A Christian would add that this can truly flow only from love for and service to God, but bereaved survivors of “collateral damage” inflicted by Christians in the US military and their sympathizers hier im Heimat might dispute that point.

At any rate, the libertarian ideal that people and their property (i.e., what is properly theirs, having been acquired through peaceful means) is a far cry from “to the conqueror go the spoils,” a term overtly associated with the democracy Brother Miller equates with liberty.

Liberty
The Many	The One and Many	The One
Totalitarianism	Liberty	Anarchy
Compulsion	Freedom within limits	Unrestrained freedom
No freedom	Freedom based on the rule of law	No law
Serfdom	Moral freedom	Natural freedom
Fascism (right) Marxism (left)	Democracy Free markets	Anarchism Libertarianism

The first problem with this chart is the red herring of “unrestrained freedom.” If I am free to take your property through violence or deceit, your freedom to enjoy your property is ipso facto restrained, so it is impossible for a society of totally unrestrained freedom to exist, and the claim that this is what we are after is thus false. The same is true of a society with “no law.” A person who wants unrestrained freedom for himself at the expense of others’ freedom – or who wants laws to restrain others but not him – is, as noted before, a libertine, not a libertarian.

 As for the “anarchy” and “anarchism” entries, this is simply the pro-“democracy” pot calling the kettle black. As noted earlier, the “spoils system” is an integral part of democracy: if you can get fifty percent of the vote plus one, you can make anything the law. It is democracies (Israel, the US, and Sweden, among others) that spend tax money on abortions, prohibit parents from educating their children at home (Germany and Singapore), and forbid the propagation of the gospel (Israel again). As anyone from farmers to doctors to holistic practitioners to educators to wannabe lemonade stand proprietors can tell you, the US is a democracy, but it is not a free market: further, it is precisely because it is a democracy that it is not a free market.

Libertarianism is different from democracy precisely because it defines moral freedom as freedom based on the rule of law, freedom within the limits of the non-aggression principle that forbids violation of people or their property through either violence or deceit. Is that really less biblical than the “three wolves and a deer planning lunch” principle of democracy? Given the tendency for those with the privilege of enforcing democratic law to abuse that privilege, is the idea of no one having such privileges – i.e., anarchy – really unjust?

Justice
The Many	The One and Many	The One
Injustice	Justice	Chaos
Class	Individuals in community	Individual
Economic equality (numerical)	Equality before God and the law	Maximum personal freedom
Group advancement	Responsibility	My individual rights
No personal responsibility Victimization (Class responsibility)	Personal responsibilities to myself and my community	Limited personal responsibility and NO social responsibility
“Liberal”	“Progressive”	“Conservative”
Internationalist Welfarist	Incarnationalist	Nationalist Isolationist

I’m not sure what this last chart is supposed to show. I know of no libertarian or anarchist who is a nationalist. Because we do not believe that any community of any size has any identity apart from the sum of the identities of its members, and in view of the evils done by all nations at all times, we tend to identify ourselves more with those who share our ethical system than with those who send their taxes to the same address. While most US Christians are proud to fly the flag of Barack Obama, which is to say the flag of HealthCare.gov, Planned Parenthood, the Super Bowl, General Motors, the United Nations, extrajudicial lethal drone strikes, helicopter gunship diplomacy, Big Pharma, and the War on Drugs, every libertarian anarchist I know considers it the flag of chaos, not justice. These are people who want to be responsible for their own lives and of those with whom they choose to interact; they have no desire to be a burden to the community, though they are willing to help out those less fortunate than they. Unlike “conservatives” and Progressives, they want to mind their own affairs and leave others in peace.

Not every good thing in the world originates from the church. In Genesis 4:19–24 we see that it is the sons of the wicked Lamech who become the “father of all those who play the lyre and pipe,” which God commands us to use in worship (Ps 33:2; 150:4), and “the forger of all instruments of bronze and iron,” also associated with worship (Josh 6:19). God promised to give his people “great and good cities that [they] did not build,  and houses full of all good things that [they] did not fill, and cisterns that [they] did not dig, and vineyards and olive trees that [they] did not plant” (Deut 6:10–11). I’m uneasy that the libertarian anarchist view of society comes from the writings of non- and sometimes anti-Christians. But I find the idea so compatible with the greatest commands in Scripture – to love our neighbors as ourselves, to do for others what we would have them do for us, to honor those who benefit us, to treat all people’s tangible and intangible assets as sacred – that I cannot understand why Christians react to it with such hostility, unless it be that they consider themselves privileged to dispose of their neighbors’ assets as they see fit, whether to educate their own children, lower their own transportation expenses, or keep their neighbors from defiling themselves.

Jesus does call us to disciple the nations, to bring them into conformity with the message that God entered a world in rebellion against him in the person of Jesus Christ, who paid for the sins of his people and commands those whose sins he has forgiven to repent, believe the good news, and live lives worthy of his name. Only Jesus has the words of eternal life, and no ethical system that excludes Jesus can give eternal life. While there are instances of God sending those known as notorious sinners out with the good news (Mark 5; John 4), he did so after their lives could be expected to reflect a radical change in their hearts. Our lives will affect our audience’s reaction to our message (1 Cor 14:23). If we proclaim and live out a democratic society based on power and privilege, rational observers will consider our message nonsense at best. On the other hand, if we build a community of mutual service to others and regard all others as sacred, I think the world, or at least the men of peace who will become important to our mission (Luke 10:5–9), will want to listen.