6. What must we be? The Call to the Church
The church is the bearer to all the nations of a gospel that announces the kingdom, the reign, and the sovereignty of God. It calls men and women to repent of their false loyalty to other powers, to become believers in the one true sovereignty, and so to become corporately a sign, instrument, and foretaste of that sovereignty of the one true and living God over all nature, all nations, and all human lives. It is not meant to call men and women out of the world into a safe religious enclave but to call them out in order to send them back as agents of God’s kingship. What does the calling imply for a church faced with the tough, powerful, and all-penetrating culture that we have been considering in these chapters?
It cannot imply a renewal of the attempt to create the kind of synthesis of church and state that shaped the life of western Europe for a thousand years. We can and must acknowledge our incalculable debt to the medieval church, which created a reasonably just and stable order out of the chaos of northern European barbarism and gave birth to the world that we have inherited—its science, its political democracy, and its traditions of ethical behavior. But there is no way in which we can, and no sense in which we should, attempt to reestablish the medieval corpus Christianum.
Nor, on the other hand, can we accept the view that the only task of the church is to provide for individuals a place in the private sector where they can enjoy an inward religious security but are not required to challenge the ideology that rules the public life of nations. The privilege of the Christian life cannot be sought apart from its responsibilities. The Christ who said, “Come unto me and I will give you rest,” also said to those same disciples, “As the Father sent me so I send you,” and showed them the scars of his battle with the rulers of the world (John 20:20–21).
But if we reject both of these proposals, there is still a wide field in which it is difficult to find our way. How is the Christian responsibility to proclaim and embody the kingship of God over the life of nations to be exercised in practice? If I am not mistaken, the predominant note in the contemporary answers to this question is the note of protest. The political order, with its entrenched interests and its use of coercion to secure them, is identified as the enemy, the primary locus of evil. The place of the church is thus not in the seats of the establishment but in the camps and marching columns of the protesters. The protest may be pacifist, claiming in the name of Christ to renounce all coercion; or it may be political and revolutionary, claiming to embody an alternative order of government. In either case, the protesters contend that as Jesus was crucified outside the wall of the city, so the place of the Christian must always be outside the citadel of the establishment and on the side of its victims. Only from this position, they claim, will things be seen as they truly are. Attempts of the kind that were often made earlier in this century—to bring together Christians in responsible positions in government, industry, and commerce to discuss the bearing of their faith on their daily practice—they dismiss as elitist and therefore incapable of generating true insights. A person who wields power cannot see truth; that is the privilege of the powerless.
It is easy to point out that the popularity of this kind of view owes something to the Marxist idea of the proletariat as the messianic people, history’s bearer of the promise of truth and life. But to acknowledge that does not silence the argument. Jesus was indeed crucified by the established powers. Does it not follow that to go with Jesus on the way of the Cross must mean to be on the side of those who suffer from the powers of the established order and not of those who wield these powers? Can one who goes the way of the Cross sit in the seat of Pilate when it falls vacant? I do not find it easy to answer this question, and yet it cannot be evaded. Certainly, a church that sees the cross of Jesus as the central event of history can never identify any political order with the reign of God. There cannot be what Islam has set out to establish: a single Sharia, which controls a single society in all its life—political and religious. It is only possible to entertain that idea if one denies the biblical account of the radical sinfulness of human nature, a sinfulness that no social order will remove. If the Cross is the place where the reality of human nature is unmasked, then the idea of a perfect earthly society is an illusion. There cannot be such. But, equally certainly, the Cross must be interpreted in its true context, in the biblical narrative taken as a whole and in the context of a fully Trinitarian doctrine of God.
We misunderstand Jesus and his death if we see him simply as the greatest of those who have died in revolt against established power. Jesus died as the beloved Son of the Father, by whom the powers that killed him are authorized. It was the almighty Father who delivered up his Son to death for our sake. During his trial, Jesus acknowledged the fact that Pilate’s authority to deliver him to death was given to him by God (John 19:11); what he condemned was the abuse of this authority. Kingship in the human sense—the authority to rule over a people—is, according to Scripture, something authorized by God and also something constantly corrupted by human sin. This is brought out with exemplary clarity in the accounts of the establishment of the kingship in 1 Samuel 8 and 9. Jesus did not set out to destroy the rule exercised by the Roman and Jewish establishment. By manifesting and exercising the true kingship of God, he exposed their corruption and thereby, as Paul says, disarmed them, robbed them of their pretensions to absolute authority. He exercised his kingship by bearing witness to the truth—to the one great reality against which all claims to reality have to be tested (John 18:37). All kingship from Calvary onward is tested and judged by the standard of the true kingship established there; judged and tested, not eliminated. The powers were disarmed, but they were not destroyed. According to the Pauline teaching, the principalities and powers, which can become the agents of evil, and which were unmasked and robbed of their pretensions to absolute authority when they put Jesus on the cross, are nevertheless created in Christ and for Christ and still continue to function after Christ’s decisive victory, yet only under his authority (Col. 2:15; 1:15–16; 1 Cor. 2:6–8).
To unpack these Pauline ideas, let us return to the gospel narrative. The first commentary on the death of Jesus was the suicide of Judas. If the cross were the last word in God’s self-revelation, then this first commentary would be the only possible one. If all humankind—even in its best representatives—is exposed here as one murderous treason against its Creator, what future is there but death? What is the point of continuing this futile saga of sin, even with all the adornments of civilization? If the cross is the end, then there is no future.
But it is not. The resurrection is the revelation to chosen witnesses of the fact that Jesus who died on the cross is indeed king—conqueror of death and sin, Lord and Savior of all. The resurrection is not the reversal of a defeat but the proclamation of a victory. The King reigns from the tree. The reign of God has indeed come upon us, and its sign is not a golden throne but a wooden cross.
But what does that mean in practice? In what sense that has any practical consequences can we say these things? Can powerlessness wield power? Must not the crucifixion of the king mean the end of every kind of kingship that collaborated in his crucifixion? Surely now all traditional embodiments of kingship, of political rule, stand exposed and condemned before the kingship that is exercised in the cross. Surely now is the moment for the kingship of God to appear, displacing all other forms of sovereignty. That is the natural and obvious inference, it would seem, that must be drawn and that the disciples do draw once they have become convinced that the death of Jesus is not the end of his claim to kingship: “Lord, will you now restore the kingdom to Israel?” (Acts 1:6). It is the obvious question. Jesus’ answer is a warning and a promise that together define the role of the church with respect to the kingdom post Christum. It is first a warning: God alone is king, and he retains in his own authority the decision on when and how to manifest his kingship. “It is not for you to know times or seasons which the Father has fixed by his own authority” (Acts 1:7). We are required to bide the Father’s time. We do not establish his kingdom; it is, quite simply, his rule.
But there is also a promise: it is the promise of the Spirit whose presence is the pledge and foretaste of the kingdom and becomes for the church a witness to that kingship vis-à-vis the continuing powers of this age (Acts 1:8). The continuing existence of these powers, sustaining an order—albeit with much distortion and corruption—in which some measure of justice and freedom are secured, is a work of God, who in his mercy gives a time and a space for men and women to recognize the true kingship, to repent, and to believe. These powers are ordained by God and are to be respected. They are appointed, as Paul says, to punish the wrongdoer and to reward those who do well. Thus the Christian is not to seek justice for himself by taking the law into his own hands, for there is one appointed by God to establish justice, a servant of God for your good, as Paul says (Rom. 12:17–13:4). Consequently, Paul himself does not hesitate to appeal to the established authorities for justice in his own case (e.g., Acts 25:10–11).
The Christian, therefore, has no right to be indifferent to the good working of those authorities which God has ordained for a good purpose but which can easily become instruments of wickedness. We know that it is God’s kingship alone that has the last word, and we are witnesses of that kingship through the presence and power of the Holy Spirit, who is God’s kingly power in liberating and sanctifying action. That kingly power is at work in the preaching, healing, and serving witness of the church to call men and women to their true allegiance. But a true allegiance can only be given in freedom, and it is the gracious will of the Father, whose patience is great beyond our reckoning, to provide a space and a time within the present order wherein that allegiance can be freely given—or withheld. We have no right to try to foreclose on God’s patience and, in the name of God’s kingship, to disown responsibility for the forms of earthly rule—sinful as they are—that God provides for the maintenance of such a measure of order and freedom as is possible for sinful human beings. When the classical world-view and the Roman imperial power, which had seemed invincible and eternal in the first century of our era, disintegrated and lost their power to rule, Christians would have been wrong to refuse responsibility for the exercise of political power. Rulers, like all human beings, can act with vigor and patience only in the power of some sustaining vision of how things really are—of the order, the dharma, the Tao that governs all things. When the classical vision faded and the pagan empire disintegrated, it was right that those who had been given a new vision of the eternal order through the Incarnation of the Son of God should accept the responsibility of seeking to shape public life in the power of that vision. The attempt to create a Christian civilization, to shape laws consonant with the biblical teaching, to place kings and emperors under the explicit obligation of Christian discipleship—none of this was wrong. On the contrary, to have declined these immense responsibilities would have been an act of apostasy. It would have been an abandonment of the faith of the gospel.
By the same token, the church today cannot without guilt absolve itself from the responsibility, where it sees the possibility, of seeking to shape the public life of nations and the global ordering of industry and commerce in the light of the Christian faith. Even where the church is a tiny minority with no political power, it has the duty to address the governing authority of the civil community with the word of God. This is what the brave churches of Taiwan and Korea, for example, are doing today; the church reminds them of the fact that—whether they know him or not—Christ is the judge before whom they must stand in the end to give account of their stewardship of the power he gave them. With that responsibility comes, necessarily, the duty of regular and public prayer for the governing authorities. Even when the church lives under a brutal tyranny, it still has the double duty and must discharge it fearlessly, as Archbishop Luwum of Uganda did when he confronted the dictator Amin with the word of God and paid for it with his life. And most certainly when the church enjoys freedom and influence, and when it includes a large part of the population in a democratically ordered society, it cannot be absolved from this responsibility. How this is to be done is the question with which we must wrestle; but that it must be done is certain. Of course, the distinction of church and state has to be maintained and would have to be maintained even if every citizen of the state were also a member of the church. Church and state have different tasks, but both receive their mandate from the God who is revealed in Christ, and both are responsible to him. This is true whether governments acknowledge it or not. The necessary distinction between them with respect to their powers and responsibilities does not negate the fact that those who exercise political authority are responsible to God—the only God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—and it is the duty of the church to remind them in season and out of season of that fact. Whatever the form of government—monarchy, oligarchy, democracy, one-party rule, or any combination of these—there are in fact men and women who exercise power over their fellow men and women. Their authority to do so rests on God’s gracious ordering of his world. They are sinful men and women who may and do misuse the power entrusted to them. But they are nonetheless responsible for both doing the right and acknowledging the truth; and the church always has the God-given responsibility, which it may not evade, of reminding them of that fact.
I am well aware that this doctrine is unacceptable in a society and at a time when the concept that the state is secular, in the sense of morally and religiously neutral, has become almost an axiom. And while I believe that the idea of the secular state needs to be examined afresh, I cannot fail to acknowledge its persuasiveness. If we cannot disown all that we have inherited from the thousand-year experience of the medieval corpus Christianum, neither can we deny our immense and enduring debt to those of the Enlightenment who challenged the medieval world-view with the slogan “dare to know.” We are witnessing in parts of the world of Islam today a powerful movement that, rejecting modernity, seeks to restore the rule of the Sharia over all of life, public and private. We cannot desire a similar movement among Christians. Nor do modern attempts to create a Christian state, as in Franco’s Spain and Salazar’s Portugal, inspire any desire to emulate. Can there be such a thing as a Christian state or a Christian society, and ought we to seek it?