Charlie Kirk: Martyr and Prophet?

 Historically speaking, martyrdom is sometimes the express lane to canonization. And yes, Charlie Kirk is a martyr. The word in Greek means "witness." He was murdered, it is true, and more specifically, assassinated. These facts do not preclude martyrdom. If we think of Martin Luther King, Jr. as a martyr, or Janani Luwum (the Archbishop of Uganda who was murdered for opposing Idi Amin's dictatorship in Uganda), or Thomas a Becket (who was murdered at the Altar in Canterbury Cathedral when four Anglo-Norman knights took Henry II's outburst about "this meddlesome priest" rather too literally), then Charlie Kirk is a martyr as well. His public witness to his understanding of the Christian faith, including social doctrine, cost him his life. 

There are some Christians, particularly mainline Protestants, who will find his conservative, Evangelical expression of the Christian message unrecognizable. It's important to note such an assessment cuts both ways. As an Evangelical traditionalist in the Protestant mainline, I find our preoccupation with trendy, secular forms of social analysis baffling at best and intensely frustrating at worst. Our biblical teaching can be rather shallow when it's not badly politicized. We have an unfortunate tendency to approach the Scripture with critical skepticism and modern socio-political theories with credulous optimism. This is backward, almost exactly.

One of the issues on the table is Mr. Kirk's stance on LGBTQ+ issues, and whether they are consistent with the teaching and ministry of Christ. On this point of Christian social doctrine, it's very important to remember Kirk's views are on the whole in the mainstream of Christian thought, down the ages and around the world, to this very day. Mainline and exvangelical Protestants who dissent from the view that homosexual conduct is inherently sinful, or marriage can only entail a man and a woman, or hold to the kind of "gender binary" implied by Genesis, Ephesians, and Jesus' own words on the subject of marriage and divorce, are breaking from centuries of Christian social teaching. Liberals see these shifts in social teaching as progress, and perhaps even reformation. Traditionalists see them has infidelity to the moral teachings of the church, and perhaps even heresy and apostasy. If we assume the Church as a whole down the years and around the world has been more faithful than not to Christ's vision of the Kingdom, then it is we in the mainline who must explain ourselves to the Charlie Kirks of the world, not the other way around. 

You have made a good point about Jesus' ministry of inclusion. He did indeed include everyone. He was scandalously hospitable. He also included everyone in the call to repentance. According to Mark's Gospel, the heart of Jesus' message when He began preaching was "Repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand" (Mark 1:15). We must read His teaching in Nazareth in Luke 4 in this context if we are to read it correctly at all. He proclaimed "liberty to the captive and recovery of sight to the blind" which means much more than physical healing and freedom for the wrongly accused. This is personal, spiritual healing and conversion as much as it is physical liberation. 

We can see Jesus' focus on personal conversion and repentance in the way He talks to sinners and about them. He said to Nicodemus, "You must be born again." He told the woman caught in adultery, "Go, and sin no more," after sidestepping the trap about how to punish adulterers. When the Pharisees asked why He ate with sinners, He said, "It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick." He told them the parables about the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost son to invite them to reflect on God's joy at the repentance of sinners. He called a Tax Collector and a Zealot to follow Him as Apostles. The Tax Collector would "spend and be spent" (2 Cor 12:5) for the sake of the Gospel. The Zealot would become a peacemaker and a minister of reconciliation. When Zacchaeus the Chief Tax Collector promised to make fourfold restitution and give half his property to the poor, Jesus validated his act of repentance. "Today, salvation has come to this house, for he too is a son of Abraham," Jesus said. He spoke plainly with the Samaritan woman at the well about the brokenness in her home life. He called the Pharisees and Scribes to repent as well. He could be rather harsh about it, to be sure, but down under His anger and frustration with their hypocrisy and legalism was infinite love and the desire to see them right with God. Some like Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea became His followers, too. It is very true Jesus welcomed people where He found them, as He found them. Then, He restored them, or called them to repent, and sometimes to follow. 

If all the mainline churches preach is love and tolerance without any call to repentance, we practice what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called "cheap grace." If all our calls to repentance entail structural change without personal conversion, we have lost the heart of the Gospel. If we preach an incomplete Gospel of cheap grace, our gospel is in fact no Gospel at all. The same, incidentally, is true of superficial "conversions" in Evangelical circles which begin and end with the "sinner's prayer." If we confess Jesus as Savior but never kneel to Him as Lord, or confess our sins expecting to be forgiven but never really repent, we practice cheap grace.

Jesus' Good News was deeply rooted in the Old Testament, as is the rest of the Apostolic witness. Jesus said, "I have not come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it." When He gave the greatest commandment and the second like it, He never said these were now the only commandments. He said, "On these two hang all the Law and the Prophets." He quoted Leviticus 19:18 and Deuteronomy 6:5. If He had meant to say these two are now the whole of the Law, why did He bother to cite the Law in the process of abrogating it? In short, He didn't. We can also see His intention to upload the moral core of the Law in the way He cited multiple commandments in the Sermon in the Mount. He approach was never to abrogate them and always to dig deeper into the moral basis for those commandments. When He did confront things like the teaching on divorce and the extra-biblical saying, "You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy," He kept His eye on the character of God and the ethical core of Torah. He quotes Genesis directly on the subject of divorce and the purpose of marriage. He presupposed the prayer, fasting, and almsgiving which were a basic part of Jewish piety in the Second Temple period. In summary, we have no option to dismiss the Old Testament as irrelevant and out of date because Jesus Himself models the opposite approach.

What we are called instead to do, rather than discard the Old Testament Law as somehow inconsistent with God's character (which is a heretical view called Marcionism), is discern how we as Gentiles ought to relate to the Law. The rest of the Apostolic Witness gives us invaluable direction here. When Paul summarized the faith for the Corinthians in 1 Cor 15, he twice indicated the Gospel of Jesus' death, burial, and resurrection is "in accordance with the Scriptures" - "kata ho graphe." Our understanding of the Gospel is as rooted in the Old Testament as Jesus' teaching ministry. Paul, writing in the early 60s to Timothy, indicates, "All scripture is given by inspiration of God and is useful..." In the Greek, "pasa graphe". All the writings. We have to wrestle with that all. Even the parts we'd rather not deal with and the things which aren't directly binding on Gentiles today (shellfish, and mixed fabrics, and tattoos, and the whole system of Temple and Tabernacle worship) still require our full and faithful consideration. (Frankly, on this point, the Catholics and Orthodox have a point about the Apocrypha. When Paul wrote those words, the translation of the Hebrew Scriptures most accessible to Gentile Christians was the Septaugint, which includes fun things like the Books of the Maccabees, Tobit, Judith, the rest of Esther, the rest of Daniel, and so on. We ought to be studying it, too.) The Council of Jerusalem (Acts 15) sets an important example. The Council discerned most of the Mosaic covenant law does not apply to us. As Paul would write later, "We are not under law, but under grace." This is not a pretext for antinomianism, however. Far from it! John Wesley didn't ever use the term "cheap grace," but he still came down on lawless, libertine Christianity and cheap grace like a ton of bricks. The key thing is to remember "Most" is not "all." The moral core of the Law still holds because the moral core of the Law is rooted in God's character, which never changes. The Council upheld the moral core of the law when they enjoined Gentile Christians to abstain from blood, for the worship of idols, and from sexual immorality. Leviticus 18 has a lot to say about sexual immorality. A lot of it concerns various kinds of sexual contact which constitute incest, in fact, which I suppose might have been a complicated question in a polygamous society with very different ideas about when people became adults and were old enough to marry. We have very strong social taboos against incest and against marriage during the early teen years, so it might not seem directly relevant. This does not give us leave to disregard it. On the contrary, we should wrestle and reflect. Some of those forms of incest occur in situations which would now probably involve infidelity or sexual abuse. I'm not sure what was going on in Egyptian society or the various Canaanite nations, but it seems pretty awful. God wanted the Israelites not to be like other people. The prohibitions against child sacrifice, homosexual activity, and bestiality follow the long block of prohibitions on incest. 

Coming back to the question of Charlie Kirk, what Jesus did or didn't have to say about homosexuality, and whether these stances are compatible, it is true Jesus didn't say anything about LGBTQ+ issues. It is also true Jesus didn't say anything about abortion. He didn't abrogate the commandment against murder, either. Rather, He said, "I have not come to abolish the Law, but to fulfill it." The sin lists in the New Testament give us no reason to believe murder, theft, fraud, or heterosexual misbehavior were suddenly permissible just because "we are not under law, but under grace." The Old Testament witnesses to the goodness of fertility, the dignity of children, and God's activity in the shaping of the unborn. The prophets witnessed against idolatry and child sacrifice. (Part of our trouble as Christians with Genesis 22 is how inconsistent with God's character it seems.) On this point, it is not the mainstream of the Church which must answer to the Protestant mainline for pro-life social teaching and activism, but the Protestant mainline which must answer to the holy catholic Church for having at best turned a blind eye to the murder of the unborn and at worst collaborated with our American Holocaust. 

Part of the reason I'm still a United Methodist in spite of my discomfort and misgivings is that I'm considering the possibility the Church has historically gotten LGBTQ+ issues more wrong than not. I'm well aware, however, the consensus of the Church is very much against novel, affirming interpretations of the clobber passages. I am far too traditional to blithely conclude we're right and they're wrong just because the mainline bandwagon is festooned with rainbow bunting. The key issue is the moral core of those seemingly clear prohibitions against homosexual behavior. I hold the validity and normative authority of Scripture as a central and necessary component of the Christian witness. The question on the table is therefore not "Is this still valid?" but "What is the truth at the core of these commandments and prohibitions?" For Charlie Kirk and for most Evangelicals, the truth at the core is right on the surface, particularly where a prohibition in the Old Testament has a counterpart in the New Testament. For much of the rest of the Church, the same is true, with other layers of meaning added as well. Any new and valid answer to these questions must come from Scripture, interpreted through Scripture, and consistent with the whole of the Christian witness (or Tradition).

By all appearances, Charlie Kirk is dead because he told a culture dedicated to personal autonomy uber alles what it doesn't want to hear. He is dead because he had the courage to try to change minds through open debate and seemingly more love for young liberals than those of us who gave up on dialog a long time ago. While it's too early to canonize him, if it turns out he's exactly what he appears to be, he is in fact both a martyr and a prophet. That's very good cause for canonization.