Christians in the Political Arena

Some Sociological and Theological Learnings

Melba Padilla Maggay, PhD
Institute for Studies in Asian Church and Culture

2018 Stott-Bediako Forum

Manila, Philippines
14th-15th September 2018

 

Introduction

In a time of fake news and the rise once again of the mythical strongman – whether in authoritarian states or in democratic societies experiencing populist dictatorships as in the Philippines, the churches need to discern, more than ever, where “evil comes up softly like a flower” to borrow a phrase from the French poet Charles Baudelaire.

The generation that figured in the protest movements of the ‘60s and ‘70s, like our local First Quarter Storm revolt, are now aging, and so are the paradigms that used to frame our political engagements.

We first experienced a crisis of paradigm when the socialist experiments behind the Iron Curtain collapsed. We are now seeing the same crisis about the efficacy of neoliberal economics, cloaked in our time in the language of globalization. The promise in the ‘90s that globalization will ‘lift all boats’ has not materialized. Instead, we see massive poverty and inequality, whether we are looking at the pauperization of the underclasses in the West, or at the intensifying marginalization of the poor side by side with the unconscionable affluence of elites in the Majority World.

Time and again, when political crises erupt and the churches get involved in what is seen as partisan politics, we hear cries of the “separation of the church and state” on the part of the secular world and “be subject to authority as Romans 13 teaches” on the part of conservative evangelicals. In this paper we clarify the relationship between the church and the state as institutions, and why they necessarily overlap, thus causing frequent and unavoidable church-state tensions.

Based on anthropological and theological insights, the middle part of the paper suggests a frame for inserting the missional role of the church in the realm of politics.  From this theological and social science backdrop, we hope to move towards an understanding of the unique role the church plays in effecting social change.

Historically, the church has oscillated between the twin poles of separation and solidarity. There were moments when the emphasis was on being the “church on the hill,” bearing witness before the watching world by who we are as a community. There were also times when the church stood in solidarity and took part in what it considered to be wars of liberation.

While there is strong biblical warrant for taking both courses of action, the concern for holiness sometimes tended to lapse into legalistic isolationism on the one hand, and the ways of the kingdom reduced into spiritually empty social activism on the other hand. Much of the last part of this paper sets forth some learnings on what it means to be a church in politics.

 

On church-state tensions

The British Lord Melbourne had long ago put to words a recurrent complaint that surfaces whenever people of faith insert what they believe into the way the world works in the public realm: “Things have come to a pretty pass when religion is allowed to invade public life.” He was fulminating against the campaign of William Wilberforce and his friends to abolish the slave trade, at that time considered an absolute economic necessity.

This modern aversion to religion in the political realm has been enshrined as a constitutional principle in many countries that followed the spirit of the American declaration of independence. It has for its historical backdrop the great struggle between Pope and King and the politico-religious wars in Europe, at a time when modernizing forces were cutting the silver cords of decayed monarchies and putting up institutions that pushed religion into a corner and relegated it to merely private spaces.

But should religion and politics be separate? In what sense should the state be independent of the church, and vice versa? In what sense is religion meant to ‘invade public life’?

In political theory, the idea that the church and state must be separate began with Martin Luther’s doctrine of the ‘Two Swords’, his interpretation of Jesus’ cryptic response to those who wanted to push him to a corner: “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.” (Mark 12.13-17)

Shrewdly, what Jesus left unsaid was that the coin bearing the image of Caesar quite properly belongs to Caesar, but God alone has absolute claim to kingship in all possible realms under heaven. In reality, says John Howard Yoder in The Politics of Jesus, what belongs to Caesar also belongs to God.

There is an intrinsic ambiguity in all this, as can be clearly seen in Jesus’ response to Pilate: “My kingdom is not of this world.” Yet towards the end of the conversation, he tells Pilate, “You are right in saying I am a King.” He even lays claim to the allegiance of this proud autocrat by saying, “Every one who is of the truth hears my voice.” To which Pilate derisively retorts like a modern relativist, “What is truth?” (John 18:28-40)

In the end, Jesus was hanged, not for violating Jewish legalisms and pieties, but for the political charge of being subversive of the Caesars.

Scriptural evidence suggests that the ambiguity lies in the fact that Jesus was both supportive and subversive of the state and other institutions as he found them.

He was prepared to be subject to human rites of passage, like the baptism of John as sign of national repentance and cleansing: “Let it be so now,” he tells the reluctant John, “for thus it is fitting for us to fulfil all righteousness.”    (Matthew 3.13-17)

He paid the temple tax, even if, as son of Yahweh, he need not do so, like the sons of earthly kings who are exempted from paying taxes: “…the sons are free. But so as not to give offense,” he tells Peter, “cast a hook and take the first fish that comes up, and when you open its mouth you will find a shekel; take that and give it to them for me and for yourself.” (Matthew 17.24-27, cf. Ezra 7.24)

Part of the meaning of the incarnation is this ‘revolutionary subordination,’ to borrow the language of Yoder.  Jesus identified fully with us in subjecting himself to the institutional demands and constraints of his time.

Yet Jesus, while disavowing merely political ends, was vulnerable to a political charge.  Apart from his stupendous claims that “I and the Father are one,” — which to Jewish ears sounded like blasphemy, — there were times when he behaved as someone with authority superior to that of worldly powers.

Some Pharisees warned him that he should get away from Herod’s dominions because he was out to kill him. Whether this was done because they were friends or in collusion with those who wanted to silence him is not clear. His reply was fearlessly straightforward, self-possessed and assertive of full control over his destiny and mission: “Go tell that fox, ‘I will keep on driving out demons and healing people today and tomorrow, and on the third day I will reach my goal.’”  (Luke 13.31-33)

In a similar vein, Jesus objected to unfair treatment of him by an officer who struck him for his answer to the high priest: “If I have spoken wrongly, bear witness to the wrong; but if I have spoken rightly, why do you strike me?”  (John 18.22)

It seems that where it concerns matters of public justice, we do not ‘turn the other cheek.’ There may be warrant to merely absorbing violence when we are personally wronged. But when the powers overstep their bounds, riding roughshod over matters of law and justice, we should protest.  Paul, for instance, staged a sit-in when the magistrates ordered him and Silas to be released quietly:

“They have beaten us publicly, uncondemned men who are Roman citizens, and have thrown us into prison; and do they now cast us out secretly? No! let them come themselves and take us out.”                                 

Acts 16.37

Ideally, there should be no difference between personal and social ethics. Scriptural evidence shows, however, that we should not just suffer wrong when the point at issue involves not just the trampling of our rights but also the rights of others.

The Church in politics: a socio-theological frame

We may begin defining the role of the church in politics by its very nature as prophet, priest and king, offices that in the Old Testament were always in tension and which the Lord Jesus while he was on earth held together in his person. These offices are now expressed historically through his Body, the Church, as She responds to the exigencies and challenges of the times in which She lives.

 

So first, the prophetic task, or speaking forth the Word so as to be a voice to the voiceless

The Church is called to be a prophetic voice for the voiceless: ‘Open your mouth for the dumb, for the rights of those who are destitute.’ (Prov. 31:8)

As the poet T.S. Eliot puts it in his book, The Idea of a Christian Society:  “The Church’s message to the world must be expanded to mean the Church’s business to interfere with the world.”

At this juncture, it is worth noting that the modern separation of church and state is merely institutional. The Dutch statesman Abraham Kuyper affirms that each has ‘sphere sovereignty,’ that is, they are sovereign in their own domains as institutions. The priest may not tell the king how to govern; this is clericalism. The king may not encroach nor curtail the moral and spiritual authority of the church; this is secular authoritarianism.

Further, the philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd, professor of law and jurisprudence at the Free University of Amsterdam, offered the helpful insight that the temporal church institution, or the historic church as we know it, does not exhaust the meaning of the ‘visible church’ or the ‘ekklesia visibilis.’  Like yeast, the visible church encompasses all the structures of human society.

In other words, the Word as pattern of God’s design for human life and Jesus as risen king has authority over all of society. The Word must be preached in such a way that it makes “every thought captive to obey Christ,” and brings a discerning word that speaks prophetically to the powers. Writes the French sociologist Jacques Ellul in his book, Theological Foundations of Law:

“The Church is summoned in the course of human history to speak a discerning word to each concrete situation, “These are the rights of man here and now. This is what man may demand. This is what he needs to be protected from.” This discerning word is part of the Church’s proclamation. In pronouncing it, the Church addresses itself to society and to the state. It is the mouthpiece of man’s exigencies. Normally, the Church should not leave it to revolutionary movements to assert human rights. Rather, it should claim them before man is driven to despair. In the past, the Church had the courage to do it. But it has kept silent now for three centuries.”

This was written half a century ago in the last century. In a time when technology has mesmerized us into once again believing in the myth of the strongman, in a virtual world of images created by media, we need to recapture our own ‘primal reality,’ as C.S. Lewis put it, and speak a discerning word that clears the fog.

Part of the divisiveness that now wracks the churches when it comes to politics is the lack of a clear biblical worldview on what it means for the church to speak to issues in the public square. Mostly, we only know how to use the Bible on issues like getting saved.

I was struck speechless, for instance, by the utter callousness with which a pastor, who seemed nice enough, told me that it is good that our President, Rodrigo Duterte, is now hunting and cleaning up our streets of drug addicts. They are, after all, dangerous scum and should be eliminated for the greater good of society.

This echoes Jeremy Bentham’s social theory of utilitarianism, simplified as ‘the greater good for the greater number.’ The trouble is that this does not cohere with the fact that we have a Shepherd who will leave his flock of 99 sheep to look for the one lost sheep. Those who follow Jesus cannot do social arithmetic.

Arthur Koestler, a disappointed Marxist, has critiqued the way communism tended to value an individual only as part of the collective. Cold calculations of the supposed social gains and costs made it possible for socialist experiments to sacrifice millions of people for the sake of an abstract vision of the greater good. The individual, Koestler said, is viewed and defined as an impersonal and abstract entity, “a multitude of one million divided by one million.”

Unfortunately, there is as well no philosophical basis for the inviolability of the individual in Asian religious cultures. ‘Human rights’ is a Judeo-Christian idea; we stand for the sanctity of one human life because each of us is made in the image of God. We are not dust in the wind that dissolves into nothingness, nor inexorably tied to an endless cycle of death and rebirth, but people who have value apart from our communal identity, whose actions can significantly alter the end of history.

In a time of failed ideologies, when “truth has fallen in the public square” as Jeremiah put it, the church has a peculiar opportunity to speak forth the Word in such a way that it engages the hearts and minds of those struggling for insight, seeking for clarity amidst the murky moral and political ambiguities in which we now live.

 

The priestly task, or bringing the need of the world to God, and mediating the power of God to the world

Social activists tend to neglect or underestimate the power of prayer in social transformation. Karl Barth reminds us, “To clasp the hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world.”

Our agency as instruments of God’s re-creation of the world has efficacy only in so far as it enters truly into the mind and will of God and participates in the doing of it.

Months after our ‘People Power’ revolution in 1986, activists from the churches gathered for an ecumenical reflection on what we did well and what we did wrong as people of faith by way of learning from experiences of our recent history.

Speaking from the evangelical side of the church, I said that our Maoist-inspired movements had no traction because we failed to connect with the culture of our people and the resources of our faith. We readily embraced ideologies from the outside and allowed ourselves to be framed by concepts and ideas that were alien to our culture and even hostile to our faith.

After my short remarks, an activist priest sidled up to me and ruefully admitted that he, like others of his priest colleagues who took up arms and joined the revolution, became NPA. I thought he meant he became a member of the New People’s Army, the underground communist movement that has now waged a 50-year rebellion against the government and for which he was repeatedly incarcerated. “No,” he said with a roguish glint in his eye, “we became NPA – ‘Not Praying Anymore.’”

More than three decades after, we are seeing the return of forces we thought we had defeated in that epochal event in our history. I am learning that evil has great capacity to come back and reinvent itself. We do not deal with it simply by rearranging the social furniture.

These days, there is a great sense of powerlessness before the revivified social energies that fuel the return of authoritarianism. We must not forget that in our lifetime, we have seen what seemed like monolithic powers of injustice being dethroned by a determined minority who implored the Almighty in prayer.

Part of the hidden, but nevertheless real, social forces at work in our history is this outworking of the divine hand that mysteriously waits for us to ask and move so it can work alongside us. Prayer is our privileged access to the center of power in the universe, and empowers us to enter into the experience of beholding that margin of mystery where all our calculations collapse and we come face to face with a transcendent force that is beyond imagining.

We did not imagine, for instance, that the most powerful regime we had known would be overthrown in just a few days of unarmed siege accompanied by the fervent prayers of our people. Likewise, totalitarianism in Eastern Europe and South Africa’s systemic apartheid unraveled and eventually collapsed as the churches courageously woke up and played the Pied Piper to thousands of dissenters.

“Prayer holds together the shattered fragments of the creation,” says Jacques Ellul.  “It makes history possible.” It also makes for startling reversals:

“In testimony given before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings in South Africa, one black man told of crying out to God as the white officers attached electrodes to his body after beating him with truncheons. They laughed in his face: “We are God here,” jeered one of the guards. The Commission hearings bared the delusion of that brash claim, for the guards, stripped of all power, now sat in a defendant’s box with heads bowed as their accusers paraded before them. They had been dethroned.”

Philip Yancey, Prayer

Because we run with the horses and not just with mere men, we need to keep close to our spiritual center and summon the powers to aid us. In situations of great need and the hardening of political conflict into war, we are called upon in our priestly task to directly mediate the power of God to a desperate world.

 

The kingship task, or the cultural mandate of stewarding the world under God

A book I once read on managing non-profit organizations said it is easy to be prophetic. It is easy to critique what is wrong. But the real challenge is building alternative structures and institutions.

Now that we are once again under dictatorship in the guise of populism, I am often asked by the battle-scarred soldiers of those dark days of authoritarianism:  ‘How have we come to this?’

The reasons are complex and many, but let me just point out one: we failed to institutionalize ‘people power’ as a mechanism for accountability and ensuring plurality of leadership. Because the culture is personalistic, that is, we mostly rely on charismatic leaders to straighten things out, we did not pay attention to the hard task of putting nuts and bolts in place so that the system is responsive to popular will and shut tight against merely personal political ambitions. As we are now finding out, the culture is such that it remains easy to dismantle checks and balances in the apparatus of power and make the system bend to the will of a strongman.

In our Institute’s study of the breakdown of tribal leadership among the Aetas, an indigenous community displaced by the explosion of Mount Pinatubo, it was found that the people’s idea of a leader is ‘taga-utos’ (‘one who commands’) and the follower as ‘taga-sunod’ (‘one who obeys’).

Tribal authority and cohesiveness broke down when the traditional means of choosing leadership, which was by consensus, was replaced by elections.  An election is not always democratic in its effects in societies where people are used to making decisions by consensus.

Not everyone turns out to be happy with an elected official, so the process brings an element of divisiveness: “…sa election, nahahati,” (“in elections, things get divided,”) explains the community’s pastor.  The old way of resolving contestations and disputes, which was by consensus, ensured that whatever solutions agreed upon were not forced on the losing party, as in an election. Delicate negotiations, a give-and-take behind the scenes, result in a decision considered satisfactory and acceptable to all sides.

The breakdown of social trust in the society as a whole is partly due to the loss of such traditional ways of consensus-building. ‘Majority rule’ tends to divide people between ‘losers’ and ‘winners,’ and the losers invariably feel bulldozed into acquiescence, or, worse, dominated.

This indigenous practice has been overrun by the thoughtless introduction of structures and artifacts from more modern forms of democracy. It mostly survives, in a rather obscure way, among leaders in grassroots communities, who are not necessarily those in formal positions of power. In many communities, the really effective leaders are usually those who are able to quietly work behind the scenes and build consensus through back channels. They are often not those who talk and stand out in meetings, but they carry a quiet authority that enables conflicting parties to settle differences.

This example tells us two things: a) strong democratic institutions require supportive norms, like the idea that all are equal before God; and b) social structures and systems must have congruence with what anthropologists call the ‘deep structures’ – worldviews, values, deep-seated patterns of behaving based on mental models of how the world works.

It is this task of creating a new culture, — life systems that are organic to the indigenous ways of our people and at the same time rooted in Scripture, — that the church is best suited to do. More than capturing political power, the church serves the world better by developing the necessary values that will make democratic institutions work. Social change theorists call this the ‘normative-reeducative approach.’

Much of the crisis being experienced by dying democracies today has to do with the lack of an infra-culture to support the institutions re-installed in societies that emerged out of the shackles of authoritarianism in the ‘80s and ‘90s.  It is not enough to hold free elections or pour billions of dollars into ‘institution-building’ in such fragile states as Afghanistan. We need to raise citizens who will value freedom and not just bread, especially in contexts where abject poverty renders political rights meaningless.

Democratic institutions that have worked elsewhere cannot be transplanted in societies where people still think and behave as if they are subjects to a king or a feudal lord, rather than citizens who can make their rulers accountable.   As the Guatemalan sociologist Bernardo Arevalo once remarked, “We have the hardware of democracy, but the software of authoritarianism.”

Doing politics: some historical lessons

Christianity, like Islam, has now become a political religion.  After a spell of withdrawal from affairs of society, Christians have awakened to their social responsibility. This renewed social consciousness has mostly taken the form of responding to poverty in the Majority World. In older democracies, where institutions once sourced their inspiration from the Christian faith, it has given rise to militant movements inserting themselves into political space, like the Religious Right in the US.

A number of issues have emerged out of these socio-political engagements. Let me address some of them by way of putting forward some propositions:

 

Political participation is not just putting Christians into office, but transforming the use of power according to God’s purposes

We have seen in recent years Christians capturing positions of power. Yet there is little evidence that their rise in politics has resulted in advancing God’s purposes for society.

It is either because their faith is so undeveloped or untutored such that it has little bearing on the decisions they make, or their politics are so unaware of the complexity of issues before them such that they take positions that are embarrassingly naïve or merely toe their party line.

It is important to grasp that access to power, while important, may or may not lead to making a difference in the way it is exercised. Jacques Maritain, the French Catholic philosopher who was influential in drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, clarifies the missional nature of our political engagement:

“Christian political life is not the accepted political life of the time being accomplished by Christian individuals; it is doing the will of God as revealed in Holy Scriptures in the political sphere of human society.”

—   Jacques Maritain

 

As Christians, we do politics so that there is justice for all, not just to advance our own agenda or interests as a religious sector

Often, Christians insert themselves into political space not to add a prophetic voice on issues of common concern, but to protect our cherished values as a community and defend the civilizational ramparts of a Christendom that now lies in ruins. We summon the faithful for a crusade against abortion, same sex marriage or causes like prayer in the schools, but do not raise a whimper against racism, violence in schools, poverty and unjust governance.

Months after martial law was declared in our country in 1972, a church leader mounted the pulpit and enjoined the congregation to praise God for this bold move on the part of President Marcos. The communists are now held at bay, he said, referring to the rebellion seething in the countryside and threatening to engulf the city. Our freedom to worship is now secure, he said, unlike those countries in the region that one by one fell to communism like dominoes.

As I sat there on the pew, I thought of my editor who was then languishing in jail, the first to get arrested among the journalists who were rounded up for ‘preventive detention.’ Our newspaper was the first to get shut down, and I had been spending the vacant time visiting friends from university who were tagged as subversives and clapped to jail.

I was dumbfounded and squirmed in my seat, feeling there was something very wrong in praising God for securing our freedom to worship and witness while so many were being unjustly detained, tortured or hunted down like animals as they fled to the hills. In this self-serving reflex, the church was behaving just like any other vested interest, lobbying for its own narrowly pious concerns.

We do not go into politics to gain power to advance our own agenda. We go as people of God seeking justice for all.

 

Seeking the common good requires collaboration with all people of goodwill or those who work alongside us for making visible the presence of God’s kingdom on earth

The church has no monopoly of insight nor the will to do what is good and moral. God’s kingdom is at work, not just within the four walls of a church, but in the much wider expanse of his rule on earth.  We work with all who long for a just society and such other values of the kingdom:

“There is a distinction between political activity as exercised by Christians and political activity as inspired by Christian principles. The latter does not need all Christians or only Christians, but only those Christians who have a certain philosophy of the world, of society and modern history and such non-Christians as recognize more or less completely the cogency of this philosophy.” 

Jacques Maritain

We had an experience of this human solidarity during our People Power revolution. We were tasked with organizing the religious presence in the barricades during those fateful days. We stationed ourselves at Gate 2 of Camp Aguinaldo, where the handful of military rebels were holed up like frightened rabbits at the possibility of being crushed by the Marcos forces. The Muslims took their place on our right side and spread their mats on the sidewalk, praying five times a day. The Legion of Mary on our left side took turns praying the rosary round-the-clock, and offered special novenas at six o’clock. Our band of Protestant evangelicals sang hymns every evening, which was always picked up by the lone radio station still broadcasting, the Radio Veritas. The lusty and robust call to faith of such hymns as ‘A Mighty Fortress is our God,’ and the encouragement to go forth with courageous heroism of ‘Onward Christian Soldiers,’ heartened the crowds that massed themselves at EDSA to prevent violence and bloodshed.

In the aftermath, there was a rather narrow partisan talk about whether the prayers of Muslims and the effusive rituals that suspiciously looked pagan, like parading the statue of the La Naval de Manila up and down the length of EDSA to ward off the advancing soldiers, were really heard by God. I said in response that in Scripture, the pagan nation of Nineveh, in spite of Jonah’s recalcitrance, repented and prayed for mercy and was heard by God.

This element of desperate prayer by a whole nation that is down on its knees, regardless of whatever tradition the impulse is coming from, perhaps spelled the difference in outcome between the People Power at EDSA and the massacre of students at Tienanmen Square. I do not think the hapless Chinese students were less brave nor the country as a whole less virtuous and religious, but there is something about imploring the aid of the Almighty that spells mercy before tanks, in contrast to the grim ferocity of being gunned down in cold blood by a military acting on orders of a ruthless party in power.

 

Change the social climate by engaging the ‘prince of the power of the air.’

Christian participation in politics is usually a reflex, merely a reaction to the contestations happening in the centers of power. Our calling is to be game changers, to challenge the rules of the game and confront the powers that stand behind the oppressive institutions that seem so powerful that we are rendered helpless.

Walter Wink has called our attention to the reality of spiritual powers behind the seemingly invulnerable forces that hem us in. I sometimes sense this demonic element when I walk into some government office that is particularly rife with corruption. I feel it in the air, in an atmosphere that seems water-logged by a steamy mist of vapors rising from the abyss.

We may not be aware of it, but what the Germans call ‘zeitgeist,’ or the spirit of the times, may in fact be what Paul calls ‘the prince of the power of the air,’ that amorphous spirit at work among ‘sons of disobedience,’ creating a climate of dis-ease and despair that leads us all to hell.

These days we sense its presence in media, in propaganda concocted by anonymous authorities in newsrooms and information offices and spread by an army of trolls. As Jacques Ellul has warned us, “The goal of modern propaganda is no longer to transform opinion but to arouse an active and mythical belief.” It is part of the reason why we are led to believe that a strongman makes for a strong state.

More than ever, it is important for the church to insert its voice in the public square and articulate an alternative perspective, a new vision of what society can be like.

This calls for writers and artists, those gifted with words that shape imagination and visually create for our eyes intimations of a new world. The media theorist Marshall Mcluhan said long ago that “The artist is the antennae of the race.” She is good in catching the mood of the times and sensing winds of change, and putting into words and color and shape the vaguely perceived longings of a people for a future and a hope.

Unfortunately, the artistic gifts of God’s people are mostly in the sidelines, used mostly to entertain us in worship or produce tawdry tracts that no one reads outside the community of the faith. It is time to put the artist at the center of our life and witness.

The Spirit blows where it wills, and often, change begins, not in the corridors of power nor even in the four walls of a church, but in ideas percolating in universities and a new generation raised in families intentionally creating a new culture of kingdom values.

We must create a cultural consensus that hardens the rule of law in soft states. The Word must penetrate society in such a way that it frames behavior in the public realm. As T.S. Eliot puts it:

“What the rulers believed would be less important than the beliefs to which they would be obliged to conform. And a skeptical or indifferent statesman, working with a Christian frame, might be more effective than a devout Christian statesman obliged to conform to a secular frame…

“It is not primarily the Christianity of statesmen that matters, but their being confined, by the traditions and the temper of the people which they rule, to a Christian framework within which to realize their ambitions.”

Some concluding caveats 

 

As social intermediaries, we walk on the side of those who are oppressed, for “on the side of their oppressor is power.”  (Ecclesiastes 4.1)

We do not apologize for being on the side of those squashed by asymmetrical power relations. Bishop Desmond Tutu, responding to charges of partiality, says this:

“If the elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.”

At the same time, Scripture tells us to “follow justice, and justice alone.” (Deuteronomy 16.20)

The issues we face are complex. There is not one path, one ideological approach to finding solutions. We cannot be captive to a party line, but maintain a critiquing element and an ethical center, standing up for what’s right and wrong, even as we stand in solidarity with those on the underside of liberation struggles.

For the kingdom cannot be identified fully with any social movement nor reduced into mere ideology. Cautions John Howard Yoder in The Politics of Jesus:

“The Church must not be caught up with the surface meaning of events and say, “Behold, here is the Christ!’ She must discern God at work in history, but carefully, so as not to tie up the Church to the merely expedient.”

 

Once in power, the church tends to confuse prophesying with politicking.

We are not called to be power brokers, flexing our muscle as institutions to influence voting behavior towards gaining more power for advancing our own pet causes, usually at the expense of larger issues that have bearing on the well-being of the general public.

Power is seductive. Christians in majority situations tend to behave like the church in the medieval period, seeking to recapture a lost Christendom.

There are limits to what power can do. Ultimately, nothing is changed by putting a few Christian individuals on top of a political game that God does not own.

What changes society is when the whole Body of Christ, God’s actors in the human drama that is history, performs their roles wherever they are as God designed us to be – salt and light in a dark world:

“Christians were never meant to be normal. We’ve always been holy troublemakers, we’ve always been creators of uncertainty, agents of a dimension that’s incompatible with the status quo; we do not accept the world as it is, but we insist on the world becoming the way that God wants it to be. And the Kingdom of God is different from the patterns of this world.”

— Jacques Ellul

May God give us the courage to step into the political arena and there shine as people of the kingdom who do things differently.

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Share your reflections and feedback below

Some questions for thought…

1. What are some examples of the Church building “alternative structures” in your context, historically and today?
2. How do you see the Church participating in “politics” and the “public sphere” in your community? Is the Church more invested in advancing its own agenda or in promoting values of God’s Kingdom?
3. What are some prophetic words and transformative actions that the Church must take in our day in order to defend justice and the oppressed?

 

The views and opinions expressed in these papers are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect an official position of INFEMIT. We seek to foster reflection through conversation, and ask you to be respectful and constructive in your comments.