Before you run off and report me, let me explain.  Franz Pieper was a Lutheran theologian who lived in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.  In Confessional Lutheran circles he is known for his contribution to systematic theology - Christian Dogmatics .  Seminary consisted in part of multiple semesters of systematic theology, helping us learn to think systematically about the faith and what Scripture teacher.  Dogmatics essentially codifies and organizes the things that the Bible teaches us on a myriad of topics.  Creation, salvation, Christian living, the Church, relations between the Church and State - if there's an aspect of life that the Bible speaks in some way to, a dogmatics text attempts to organize it so that it can be referenced quickly and easily.

I enjoyed systematics - as a fairly logical person it appealed to me on a basic level.  But I'm also a practical person, and I was hesitant to get too excited by dogmatics because it seems so removed from the average Christian's experience.  It's something that Christian leaders may know about (but many don't), but something that - probably outside Lutheranism or perhaps Catholicism - isn't much talked about.  And even in our own circles, it generally forms a baseline of extrapolating what we believe, and we spend more time in application of the principles that derive from dogmatics than examining dogmatics itself.  

Today is a good time for Christians to remember that we are not necessarily recreating the wheel as we think through issues of Church and State, or how to work with and deal with people that believe and act in ways directly contrary to what we believe.  There is a lot of hot air in the public arena, but very little attempt to speak beyond the emotional, gut-level.  I know how I feel, but as a Christian, I need to determine if my emotions are in sync with God's Word, or if they're being manipulated by either myself or others in ways that are not Scriptural.   The heart is passionate, but the heart is not a law unto itself.

That's key for Christians to return to as we mark the anniversary of 9/11.  For many it is the first experience of feeling under attack by another person or ideology.  For many it is a terrifying glimpse into the fact that if and when America loses it's superiority economically, politically, and militarily, there are quite a few people who are going to have an ax to grind with us - and the ax may be a lot more literal than we're prone to imagine.  For many American Christians, 9/11 was the first tangible feeling of persecution as a real, violent and deadly force, rather than the inexorable crush of public opinion and media war.  

We are called to suffer, as Christians.  We are told to expect it.  (Matthew 10, Luke 21, John 17, etc.)  Not that we desire it, just that it's going to be a fact of our existence as the people of God.  Any religious Jew will be able to empathize, I should imagine - they've been suffering for that status for thousands of years.  Biblical Christians are learning, what we see clearly as a theological and ideological struggle and persecution looks a lot more like legalism or Constitutionalism or fair play or tolerance or democracy or any number of other terms to those on the outside, and to many on the inside.  What we know as truth and see as the ramifications of a metaphysical struggle is written off as bigotry or whatever other effective term can marginalize and rationalize away our point of view.  Most American Christians have been blessed thus far not to have had to deal with this extensively in our own lives.  That does not mean that such a blessing always lasts.

America is not the Church, and the Church is not America.  As American Christians, we have the relatively rare opportunity to exercise our faith freely, and even to have enjoyed a rather privileged status in our society due to the Christian underpinnings and make-up of our culture.  But those times are changing.  What once was common knowledge is up for debate or lobbying.  We don't like it - we aren't necessarily supposed to.  But we need to think clearly about what the appropriate response is.  

Towards that end, it's useful to return to a systematic way of thinking about our role as Christians and citizens of America (or any other culture).  While recognizing that dogmatics texts will be couched in assumptions of their time and culture, they are helpful in providing a way for us to sort through the emotions and reactions that are sought after by various people and sources for a variety of reasons.  They help us to make sense of turning the other cheek, or giving our cloak and tunic, or walking a mile in another's shoes.  They provide a vantage point from which to view our own predicament, and remember that if reality is a struggle between the flailing death throes of an evil kingdom and an advancing and inbreaking kingdom of God, we ought to expect injury and damage as citizens of that kingdom, understanding that the damage is never collateral.  

People and nations live and die every day.  This is the result of a sinful broken world full of sinful, broken people.  There is only one solution for this and it is the perfect brokenness of a man who was also God, who was alive and dead and then alive again, who is here but will be returning bodily at some point, who has won the war but allows the final skirmishes of the battlefield to be played out.  There is no other solution.  No law, no government, no political party, no theory of government or system of economics.  Life and death is being played out all around us, and we are called to the difficult task as Christians of trying to come to grips with what our faith calls us to do and be, and what we can do and be as citizens.  How do we give to God the things of God, and to Caesar the things of Caesar - that is the question.  Confusing the two leads only to confusion.  Clarifying the two leads only to confusion.  But we are called to struggle and deal with the confusion as best we can - not in historical or theological isolation, but as the living members of the Church universal, as those called to play out the life of faith in this time and place and in these circumstances, remembering that we are not the first and probably not the last to do so, and that war does not need to be won any longer, but it needs faithful people who will live out the victory in the very real context of personal trial and loss.  

Where else can we go but to the Word and prayer and Christian community?  Not as separate and optional entities from which we might pick and choose, but rather as necessary pieces of a whole.  Only in humble acknowledgment that faithfulness does not equate necessarily with victory in the world's terms.  In fact, as per our Savior's own teachings, it's likely to result in very real and unpleasant suffering, but that regardless of our own personal suffering, the Church will in the end be triumphant.  May we be faithful witnesses of that certain future.