5. What is to be done? The Dialogue with Politics
I am concerned in these inquiries to ask this central question: What would be involved in a genuinely missionary encounter between the gospel and our post-En-lightenment culture? In the preceding chapter I spoke about the encounter at the intellectual level with what forms the mental and spiritual heart of our culture—modern science. I was pursuing the question “What can be known, and how can it be known?” But the gospel concerns not only that question but also the question “What is to be done?” A missionary encounter impinges on not only the ideas and beliefs of a people but also on its ways of behaving. And these ways are, of course, not merely private and domestic but public and political. It is, indeed, impossible completely to separate these two, for it is the same person who is active in both. Consequently, missionaries have not hesitated, in their encounter with strange cultures, to attack forms of behavior, whether private or public, that they deemed incompatible with God’s will revealed in Christ. Thus, in the Indian society which I know, missionaries have attacked such deeply entrenched elements of public life as caste, dowry, child marriage, and the immolation of widows. In Africa they have similarly thrown their weight against polygamy and the slave trade. What would an encounter of the gospel with our post-Enlightenment culture involve for the public arena—the political, economic, and social aspects of our life?
We have to deal at the outset with the claim that the gospel has nothing directly to say on these matters. There are loud voices that insist that the church has no business meddling with matters of politics and economics; that its business is with the eternal salvation of the human soul; and that if it undertakes to give ethical advice at all, it should be confined to advice about personal conduct. The gospel, these voices tell us, is about changing people, not about changing systems and structures. Let the church keep out of public affairs and mind its own business!
Many things could be said about this opinion from the long perspective of history, but I shall confine myself to three:
1. The claim that the church should not be involved in politics is clearly in line with the post-Enlightenment division of human life into the public world of facts and the private world of values. As an optional set of values for the personal life, Christianity has freedom to compete with others and to win such place as its merits can secure for it. It cannot claim a place in the public world of politics, economics, and social administration; this must be governed by those who have the expert knowledge of the “facts.” This is, of course, a view that would have astonished Christians living in an earlier period of the church’s history. And there is no need to repeat here what I said in the preceding chapter about the mythological function the concept of “facts” performs in our contemporary culture.
2. The negative side of the claim, namely, that the church should not be involved in politics, arises from its positive claim, namely, that the proper business of the church is with the eternal salvation of the individual soul. Here we are dealing with a dichotomy that has been characteristic of a great deal of human religious thought but is notably absent from the Bible.
The idea that the real essence of what it is to be a human can be found only by stripping away the visible, external, contingent, historical elements of human life is very common in Indian religion and in the Greek thought within which much of the church’s first systematic thinking was done. In this view, a human being is essentially an eternal soul dwelling for a time within a physical body, which is part of the world of nature and through which the person is tied by the bonds of physical and biological necessity to this visible and tangible world. There is thus a dichotomy running right through a human’s whole experience between the eternal world, with which he has direct contact by way of his rational and spiritual being, and the world of the senses, with which—during the brief period of life on earth and as part of a biological and social group—he has fleeting relationships. Granted this dichotomy, the business of the church is not with the ephemeral world of outward happenings but with the eternal world of abiding spiritual realities.
3. But if one turns to the Bible from this world of thought, he finds it obvious that quite different assumptions reign about the nature of the human being. From its beginning and throughout, the Bible views the individual person realistically as someone always involved in relationships with other human beings and with the world of nature. The Bible is the story of these relationships. At the outset, it characterizes human nature created in the image of God as the mutuality of man and woman. From this beginning in the primal family, the story is about the relations within and between families, clans, nations. Of course, there is much in the Bible about what may be called the interior dimension of human existence, about that area of our experience where we are conscious of our aloneness, of our unsharable responsibilities, of the fact that, although we are part of an ongoing physical, biological, and social process, we also know that and by knowing it affirm our transcendence of it. Yet there is no attempt in the Bible to separate out this dimension of human experience and treat it as solely real. The point at which we are all tempted to do this is the point where we face the mystery of death, for death is the place at which the human subject parts company finally with the physical, biological, and social process of which he has been a part. Alone among animals, it seems, human beings are aware that death is a mystery, and therefore they make provision, often elaborate provision, for the respectful disposal of the dead body. It is remarkable that the ancient Israelites, apparently, had no belief that anything significant lay beyond death. God’s purpose as they understood it was to be worked out among the living and their descendants here on the earth, not in a world beyond the grave.
It follows from this way of understanding what it is to be human that there is no separation of the inward and spiritual from the outward, visible, and social. The Torah of Yahweh, his loving guidance and instruction for his people, concerns the whole of their life as persons, as families, and as a nation. Faith, obedience, repentance, and love are not bracketed off under the category of religion; on the contrary, they are embodied in ways of behaving that cover much of what we would describe as jurisprudence, public health, education, welfare, and economic policy. It is a simple fact, familiar to all who read the Bible, that if we want to read only the passages that are exclusively about what we call the spiritual life, we have to leave the greater part of the Old Testament unread.
What I am saying, of course, is familiar and usually leads to the assertion that we must read the Old Testament in the light of the New, and that when we do so, we shall see that the teachings of Jesus were not about these external and ephemeral things but about the eternal realities of the spirit, and that what is written in the Old Testament is to be read solely in that light. I want to say, however, that this spiritualizing of the teachings of the Old Testament does not do justice to the actual content of the New.
The message of Jesus was that the kingdom or reign of God is at hand. Behind it lay the faith of the Old Testament that while Yahweh had chosen one people to live under his Torah and so to be a witness to the nations, a day would come when all the nations would come to acknowledge him as God alone and live under his Torah. In addition, behind it lay the later molding of this faith into its apocalyptic form under the terrible pressure of successive disasters. As generations of faithful Israelites died martyrs’ deaths in the struggle against the enemies of Yahweh, the old lack of interest in what lay beyond death gave way to a belief that the victory of Yahweh would bring along with it those who had given their lives for his sake. The victory of Yahweh would be his own work, bringing the present order to an end and establishing a new order in which those who had died in faith would also share. It is against the background of this apocalyptic expectation that we have to understand Jesus’ message of the imminence of the reign of God.
As we well know, this apocalyptic expectation, without which we cannot understand the message of Jesus, was also the cause of misunderstanding. The story of the ministry as unfolded in the Synoptic Gospels shows us an initial enthusiasm gradually turning into unbelief and rejection as it became clear that the reign of God is a profoundly mysterious and paradoxical reality, which only a few chosen witnesses can understand. The victory of God is finally accomplished in the rejection and death of Jesus. The king reigns from the tree. That fact, hidden from the world, is proclaimed to those chosen as witnesses (and only to those) by the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. Those witnesses are sent forth to proclaim and to embody in their common life the victory of Jesus, the reality of the reign of God. They are to go, bearing about in their body the dying of Jesus, that the life of Jesus—the life of the victorious kingdom—may be made manifest in their bodily life (2 Cor. 4:10). They proclaim and embody the victory of God under the sign of the Cross.
Thus a new reality is brought into being, a new kind of human community in which the Torah of Yahweh is being fulfilled by people not only from the tribes of Israel but from all the nations. The promise of the prophets and the psalmists is being fulfilled. The nations are coming to the new Zion to be the people of Yahweh and to live under his rule, his Torah. They have become—from many races and nations—one family bound to one another in the brotherly relationships, the kinship bonds that were characteristic of the household of Israel in God’s intention. They are no longer strangers to each other, but brothers and sisters; they are, as Israel was, one household—but drawn from all nations.
Thus the earliest church never availed itself of the protection it could have had under Roman law as a cultus privatus dedicated to the pursuit of a purely personal and spiritual salvation for its members. Such private religion flourished as vigorously in the world of the Eastern Mediterranean as it does in North America today. It was permitted by the imperial authorities for the same reason that its counterparts are permitted today: it did not challenge the political order. Why, then, did the church refuse this protection? Why did it have to engage in a battle to the death with the imperial powers? Because, true to its roots in the Old Testament, it could not accept relegation to a private sphere of purely inward and personal religion. It knew itself to be the bearer of the promise of the reign of Yahweh over all nations. It refused the names by which the many religious societies called themselves, and which critics such as Celsus applied to the church (thiasos, hieranos); it called itself the ecclesia tou theou, the public assembly to which God is calling all men everywhere without distinction. This made a collision with the imperial power inevitable—as inevitable as the Cross.
But the church did not set out to create a new political order, or to take political action for the reformation of political institutions. It would be both anachronistic and theologically confused to infer that. The God-given—and therefore limited—authority of Caesar is acknowledged in the Bible (John 19:11). Pilate has God-given authority to pass judgment on Jesus, but Jesus is king in the absolute sense that he bears witness to the truth; the ultimate reality against which all kingship is to be measured is present in him (John 18:37). And when, as in this case, the God-given authority of a political order is placed at the service of a lie, a head-on collision is the only possible result. In the Cross the ruler of this world is unmasked and dethroned, and this decisive event is the clue to all subsequent history. The apocalyptic passages of the New Testament are the projection through history of the conflict that was fought out on the cross. In the end, the present order will pass away and Jesus will reign.
But how is the kingship of Christ exercised in the interim? While the church is a small minority living under an imperial power, the kinds of questions that arise in a modern democracy are obviously excluded. The church, in the power of the crucified and risen Jesus, bears witness to the truth and pays the price with its blood. But what was the church to do when the imperial power lost its will to continue and the emperor turned to the church to provide the spiritual cohesion for a disintegrating society? Much has been written about the harm done to the cause of the gospel when Constantine accepted baptism, and it is not difficult to expatiate on this theme. But could any other choice have been made? When the ancient classical world, which had seemed so brilliant and so all-conquering, ran out of spiritual fuel and turned to the church as the one society that could hold a disintegrating world together, should the church have refused the appeal and washed its hands of responsibility for the political order? It could not do so if it was to be faithful to its origins in Israel and in the ministry of Jesus. It is easy to see with hindsight how quickly the church fell into the temptations of worldly power. It is easy to point—as monks and hermits, prophets and reformers in all ensuing centuries have continued to point—to the glaring contradiction between the Jesus of the Gospels and his followers occupying the seats of power and wealth. And yet we have to ask, would God’s purpose as it is revealed in Scripture have been better served if the church had refused all political responsibility, if there had never been a “Christian” Europe, if all the churches for the past two thousand years had lived as tolerated or persecuted minorities like the Armenians, the Assyrians, and the Copts? I find it hard to think so.
Whatever one may think—and it is perhaps meaningless to engage in these speculations—two facts are fundamental to an understanding of our present situation. One is that we are the heirs of the Christendom experiment. We who belong to the Western world live in societies that have been shaped by more than a thousand years during which the barbarous and savage tribes of Europe were brought, slowly and with many setbacks, into a community conceived as the corpus Christianum, a single society in which the whole of public and private life was to be controlled by the Christian revelation. Much of what we take for granted about normal human behavior is the fruit of that long schooling. However much we rebel against it, we are its products.
The second fact is that the corpus Christianum is no more, and we cannot go back to it. The religious wars of the seventeenth century marked the final destruction of Christendom’s synthesis of church and society. From the eighteenth century onward, Europe turned away from the Christian vision of man and his world, accepted a radically different vision for its public life, and relegated the Christian vision to the status of a permitted option for the private sector. But for the modern church to accept this status is to do exactly what the early church refused to do and what the Bible forbids us to do. It is, in effect, to deny the kingship of Christ over all of life—public and private. It is to deny that Christ is, simply and finally, the truth by which all other claims to truth are to be tested. It is to abandon its calling.
The Enlightenment’s vision of the heavenly city has failed. We are in a new situation, and we cannot turn back the clock. It is certain that we cannot go back to the corpus Christianum. It is also certain—and this needs to be said sharply in view of the prevalence among Christians of a kind of anarchistic romanticism—that we cannot go back to a pre-Constantinian innocence. We cannot use the example of the early church to encourage us in a Manichaean attempt to treat all power as evil and to wash our hands of responsibility for the realities of political power. We cannot go back on history. But perhaps we can learn from history. Perhaps we can learn how to embody in the life of the church a witness to the kingship of Christ over all life—its politic and economic no less than its personal and domestic morals—yet without falling into the Constantinian trap. That is the new, unprecedented, and immensely challenging task given to our generation. The resolute undertaking of it is fundamental to any genuinely missionary encounter of the gospel with our culture.
In order to view this task in some historical perspective, I would like to go back to Augustine, who, in his greatest work written near the end of his life, painted a picture of the relationship between church and world that was to shape the thought and practice of Western Christendom for a thousand years. It would have been equally relevant to refer to Augustine in the discussion of the interface between theology and science; for it was Augustine, standing at the point of collapse of the classical world-view, who inaugurated a new approach to knowledge with the slogan credo ut intelligam. He provided a new basis for critical thinking in the acceptance by faith of the twin dogmas of the Trinity and the Incarnation. I believe that Augustine’s example is relevant to our situation today as we face a growing disillusionment about the modern scientific world-view. But here I am inviting attention to another facet of Augustine’s achievement. When the inward and spiritual disintegration of the classical world-view was matched in the realm of outward and visible events by Alaric’s sack of the Eternal City, and Augustine found his provincial diocese flooded with refugees—pagan and Christian—from Rome, he set himself as an old man his greatest task, the interpretation of secular history in the light of the gospel.
At Augustine’s writing, a century had passed since Christians first sat on the imperial throne. Christians and pagans were mingled at all levels of public life. The church was not being persecuted, nor had the kingdom of God arrived in its fullness. Christians were scattered throughout the world as peregrini, a word which, properly translated, means not “pilgrims” but “resident aliens.” They had citizenship in another country. Thus citizens of two commonwealths were living commingled in each place: one, the earthly commonwealth, was ruled by the love of self, the other by the love of God. The latter was identified, if not exactly with the Catholic Church, then with those among its members who were truly governed by love for God. Augustine was very realistic about the evils that tear all human communities apart—the family, the city, the nation. In The City of God he has no sentimental illusions about natural brotherhood among human beings. Yet he insists that love is the basis of society; even in their wars men are in fact speaking peace. But peace is only possible when there is order, and order depends on proper government; but government in which one is subordinated to another is only right if the one who is called to govern does so for the sake of those he governs—as their servant. The motive power of order is therefore love. Augustine’s concept of human society is not based on a conception of justice drawn from elsewhere, for example, from natural law. Love, not natural justice, is what holds even the earthly commonwealth together. Thus
God, the Instructor, teaches two main laws, love of God and love of one’s neighbour. Here man finds three beings to love, God, himself and his neighbour. He who loves God makes no mistake in loving himself. Consequently, since he is ordered to love his neighbour as himself, he advises his neighbour also to love God.… He wishes to be similarly cared for by his neighbours if need arise. So far as in him lies he will be at peace with all men in that ordered harmony which is the peace of men.
Thus love creates order first in the family and among neighbors and then, by extension, in the city and the nation. Without this, even the earthly commonwealth cannot exist. It is love that creates justice.
Where that kind of justice does not exist—the kind in which the one Almighty God rules over an obedient city by his grace, in which no one sacrifices to any but him, in which on that account for all who belong to that city and obey God the mind faithfully rules the body, and the reason the vices, in proper order, and in which the assembly and people of just men live like one just man, that is to say by faith which works by love and by which a man loves God as he should be loved, and his neighbour as himself—where there is not that kind of justice there is certainly no society of men by consent of law or community of mutual service. If that is a true definition of a people, it follows that where such justice does not exist, there is no people. Therefore there is no republic, because there can be no commonwealth where there is not a people.