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by
N.T. Wright
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April 9 - April 11, 2024
God intends his wise, creative, loving presence and power to be reflected, ‘imaged’ if you like, into his wor...
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So the objection about our trying to build God’s kingdom by our own efforts, though it seems humble and pious, can be a way of shirking our responsibility, of making nervous sideways glances when our master is looking for volunteers.
But one must be wary of indifference masquerading as humility, as if to say I am too insignificant to make a difference. As if to presume that God cannot use me, though he has used people less educated and less fortunate than me.
fill your mind with things of love, not the love of things.
Even if one starts out with the noblest of intentions, those intentions can be worn down by cynicism or ruined by greed. They can end up gaming the system rather than bettering the system.
We should not be seeking to lord it over others, but to leaven society with Christian influence.
our political systems have encouraged career politicians who have never run a farm or a shop or a school or a ship, and who lurch from utopianism, which gets most of them into politics in the first place, to pragmatic power-seeking, which is what they turn to when Utopia fails to arrive on schedule.
as long as people of faith can vote, discuss politics, run for public office and serve in government, then religion is always going to have a voice in our political theatres.
most Western nations are founded on a Christian heritage.
the whole purpose of Christian influence is not the pursuit of Christian hegemony but the giving of faithful Christian witness.
Christian hegemony strives to make Christianity the official religion of the land by playing on fears and prejudice,
Effective definition of "Christian Nationalism."
The Western world in general has bought heavily into the Enlightenment belief that ‘sacred’ and ‘secular’ are divided by an unbridgeable gulf.
But the compartmentalisation of the spiritual and secular is foreign to Scripture and to most of church history.
Secular government is still a divine servant and is therefore theological; the Church’s existence cannot be divorced from life within the public sphere and is therefore political.
the two-realms or two-kingdoms theology which purportedly divides everything between the sacred and the secular, trying (often in a clumsy fashion) to partition the ‘spiritual’ or ‘eternal’ domains from the ‘secular’ or ‘temporal’.
The point is that ‘Caesaropapism’ and ‘inseparable wall between Church and State’ have never been the only two options.
Romans 13 enunciates the minimal position: being a Christian does not mean being an anarchist.
The Creator intends his human creatures to live in social relations, which need order, stability and structure.
We cannot abandon politics to those who carry guns,
It should also be agreed that a healthy pursuit of the political implications of the gospel will not allow us to use our faith purely in the interest of depositing religious capital into the coffers of political leaders.
But making Christianity powerful is not the same thing as making the country authentically Christian.
Tertullian could argue that Christians can call Caesar ‘Lord’ in a political sense but not a religious sense. They will not pray to him but they will pray for him.
This is why the Anglican divine, Richard Hooker, in his Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, argued that the Church should be subject to the authority and laws of the State in matters that did not directly contradict the Church’s essential doctrines.
the State had the authority to regulate the external affairs of the Church, such as the building of churches and even ensuring the proper conduct of public worship.
The problem with Romans 13:1–5 is not its opacity but its clarity, its plain and unqualified call for submission to governing authorities.
The Jewish sage Ben Sirach said, ‘The government of the earth is in the hand of the Lord, and over it he will raise up the right leader for the time.’
Calvin was quite aware of this problem and had much to say about it. Calvin wrote that obedience to state officials ‘is never to lead us away from obedience to God . . . if they command anything against him, let it go unesteemed’.
Calvin was worried about a Catholic prince who might force his subjects to attend the Catholic Mass or enforce certain liturgical rites on Reformed churches.
Suffice to say, Calvin rightly grasped that obedience to the State was never total or unqualified.
As for those rulers who engage in cruelty, injustice and avarice, they cannot say that they do so with divine sponsorship by virtue of their office. Their legitimacy is forfeit, for only good government can claim the mantle of a divinely appointed authority.
Calvin maintained that ‘the correction of unbridled despotism is the Lord’s to avenge’, so that no recourse is left to God’s people ‘except to obey and suffer’.
John of Salisbury pointed out that even tyrants are ministers of God. Accordingly, when a certain bishop encountered Attila the Hun, Attila introduced himself as the ‘scourge of God’.
The way to get rid of tyrants was patience and prayer.
many later Protestants, especially the French Huguenots and English Puritans, found Calvin’s reluctance to embrace insurrection frustrating and unworkable in the end.
Thomas Aquinas had noted that authority could be illegitimate for two reasons: first, if it was attained by violent usurpation; and second, if it was exercised in violent and unlawful ways. Aquinas appealed to Cicero’s justification of Brutus for killing Julius Caesar who was a tyrant.
John Wycliffe concluded that if God appointed tyrants then that would mean that the sins of tyranny would be attributed to God, which would be a blasphemous proposition, he claimed.
John Milton wrote his Defence of the People of England (1651) to reject the notion of the divine right of kings, to distinguish between kingship and tyranny, to declare that, while laws come from a king, liberty comes from God, and to explain that Paul’s remarks about submission to rulers only applies to lawful rulers.
Even to consider the prospect of violence as permissible or divinely sanctioned enters into a morally fraught space. There is a reasonable argument for a just war against a foreign invader, but a justification for anti-government revolutionary violence against one’s own civic leaders and against one’s fellow citizens is more precarious.
One can only turn one’s own cheek, if there is hope that it will put a stop to evil, but not the cheeks of others. They must be defended.
disobedience must be scaled to the detriment that a government performs against its citizens and non-citizens.
The reading of Romans 13:1–5 used to justify the American war of independence by the colonies was also used to justify the insurrection of the confederacy against the US federal government and its emancipation of slaves.
Totalitarianism comes in many packages, whether Fascist, Communist or theocratic.
The problem is that Fascism is a specific sociopolitical phenomenon from the first half of the twentieth century that arose under special conditions created by the First World War and the Great Depression. The derogatory label ‘Fascist’ is now so over-used and over-applied as to be practically meaningless. Today, ‘Fascist’ is more or less synonymous with ‘bad people’.
Nazism was not an alien political doctrine that appeared out of nowhere. Nazism succeeded because it embodied what people either believed or wanted to believe.
Tomáš Halík opines that Communist evils tend to be glossed over due to our haunting and horrified fixation on the evils of Fascism:
The Communist leaders Stalin and Mao killed far more people than Hitler, King Leopold of Belgium in the Congo, and the military junta of Argentina put together. Yet Hitler and Fascism remain lodged in Western imagination as the definitive symbol of human evil.
The Hebrew Bible, the teaching of Jesus, the ethics of the apostles, and the social vision of the church fathers are saturated with concerns about the poor, oppression, injustice and God’s radical reordering of power in the hereafter.
Both theologians show just how much of abolitionist, socialist, liberationist and Marxist doctrines carry Christian genes. One could even argue that the need for social revolution is championed by none other than the mother of God as Mary’s Magnificat celebrates the inversion of power that God’s kingdom brings:
On the one hand, Communism is too Christian in that it constitutes an over-realised Christian eschatology, trying to bring heavenly justice to earth by violent revolution,
so that the road to paradise runs through several caverns of hell.
