Hell Shall Not Prevail: Essays on Ecclesiocentric Postliberalism (Civitas Books)

by James Rogers

Seen as a development within Western Christian political thought, liberalism is, at its core, a heretical modification of biblical and orthodox ecclesiology—a modification whose chief effect is to domesticate the church.

From the first, the church posed a political challenge because she preached an inherently political message. The apostolic gospel was the good news of the risen Christ Jesus, the anointed Son of David, exalted by His Father to a heavenly throne as King of kings and Lord of lords (Ps 2; Eph 1:21–23; Phil 2:1–11). The gospel made totalizing claims, summoning all rulers and all peoples to acknowledge the church’s Lord as Lord of all, and to submit all they are and have to His reign.

Euangelion ("good news"), like ekklesia ("church"), koinonia ("fellowship"), kyrios ("Lord"), etc., was an inherently political word and would have been heard as such in the first century. It was a word that often denoted political tidings. Whenever Ceasar conquered a new territory he would send the "good news" of his victory via heralds (euangelistes) to all the empire, including the newly conquered territory. "Good news! You are now under Roman occupation and control! Be good citizens or be further punished!" Jesus's victory on the cross and from the grave over sin, death, Satan, and his "seed" (the ungodly) is our euangel. "Good news! Jesus has conquered! He is Lord! Accept His gracious invitation to mercy and fellowship or be crushed!"

Thus, though the church was a nation unto herself, she modeled true familial affection, true nationhood, and true civic order to the cities and peoples of the Roman world. She existed to “disciple all the nations” (matheteusate panta ta ethne; Matt 28:19), giving the nations a new identity and vocation through baptism, transforming the customs and values of all ethnicities by teaching them the commandments of Jesus. She existed to bring about the “obedience of faith among all the Gentiles” (Rom 1:5).

"Matheteusate" is a greek verb. It means "disciple," an intensive form of "train" or "instruct,' as in "Our pastor disciples me." The direct object of disciple/train in Matthew 28:19 is "all the nations/ethnicities," and "nations/ethne" is thus the "them/autous" moving forward in the passage. Therefore grammatically, it is the "nations" that Jesus commands His apostles to disciple, baptize into the Triune Name, and teach to observe all that He commands, as their King of kings and Lord of lords. Our translations do us a disservice by making the verb "matheteusate" into a verb and a direct object ("make disciples") and then making this eisegeted noun "disciple" the focus of the sentence. It lowers the bar considerably, as well as shifts the overall focus of the Great Commission.

Long before she was welcomed into the imperial court, the church was remaking Roman politics, city by city, as she practiced the politics of the kingdom.

This is how the Church wins. She does not refuse political power when it comes, but she doesn't rely on it (and certainly does not sin to obtain it or keep it). Instead, she is an outpost of the Kingdom of Heaven among the kingdoms of men, and by her sacrificial love, her purity, her prophetical witness, and her faithfulness even unto death, she challenges the surrounding nations, transforming them more and more into her likeness. She changes the world by faithfully being who she is: The Family of the Father, the Body/Bride of the Son, and the Temple of the Holy Spirit. This is how the City/Temple of God descends from heaven to the earth, as was the pattern that was shown to John on the mountain (Revelation 21:9-22:21).

A penetrating critique of liberalism must start from the universal Christian confession of the “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church.” The sheer existence of the Christian ekklesia challenges liberalism’s claim to monopolize political order.

According to Kant, we are bound to reverence for autonomy itself: “Autonomy is therefore the ground of the dignity of human nature and of every rational nature.”70 And “the dignity of man consists precisely in his capacity to make universal law. . . .”71 I owe respect, or reverence, to Jones precisely because Jones is a rational/autonomous being, and I must respect Jones as a final end in himself or herself.72 By contrast, in the biblical understanding, the imago Dei is present in humanity as a dynamic means—our relationships with our fellow image-bearers are designed to lead us to a stronger relationship with God.

Political institutions are the works of men. The church is first and foremost the work of Christ Himself, through the Spirit. It is formed up first and foremost socially, by a Lord, by a Father, by a Priest, and by a Brother. It is a polis, a family, an ethnos. Indeed, it is ultimately the polis, the family, the ethnos.11 It does not seek power to build worlds because it ultimately is the power that builds its World.

In the world of the liberal order, the man is a member of a community only by voluntary action, or by coercion. It comes and it goes with the utility of such relations. The Christian claim is radically different; the church is the place—the only place— where actual ontological convergence of individuals takes place, and each Christian is brought into this “one man” as part and parcel of his conversion and baptism.

We are transformed by our weekly experience of sharing a meal with one another, a meal that implements a vision of a glorified future. And by this common world-wide practice, communion proclaims to the world a new social imaginary, an understanding of community formation that has the telos of the actual uniting of individuals into a transformed whole.

The claim that we are all made in God’s image is not about moral treatment of others, although it does produce moral behavior towards others. The Christian claim is that man is a sign, an image of God Himself. In our view of the man, a sign of God, we learn about the reality of Him. As we treat the sign of God, so we also treat Him (Gen 9:6; Jas 3:9).

The church has drunk deeply of the Enlightenment’s old man anthropology: its reduction of the human person to the autonomous individual and its voluntarist assumption about community life. Our—and I mean the church’s—social imaginary has been formed by this understanding to our shame. Too often, our self-understanding starts with the individual person, who, standing outside the church, enters into it from some social distance. The authenticity of one’s membership in the church is equivalent to one’s consent in his participation. Like the world, our social bonds are often weak and largely utilitarian. Our forms of church government follow democratic institutions rather than biblical models. Our leaders are chosen by vote, and our submission to them extends as far as our personal tastes allow. Needless to say, Christ’s prayer in John 17 has not been answered yet among us.

I have said this exact thing (using far less sophisticated phraseology) so many times over these last few months. The Western Church is sick with the disease of Enlightenment Liberalism. We see ourselves first and foremost as autonomous, disconnected individuals seeking the spiritual, and we use Christ's corporate Body to pursue these pietistic aims.

Democratic peoples become so distracted with the pursuit of small pleasures that the soul’s highest good, God Himself, can be eclipsed. For the most part, Tocqueville argues, modern people will not consciously reject God. But they will tend to ignore Him. God does not get thrown out; He gets crowded out.

God’s word is choked out when the hearer becomes inundated by less worthy pursuits. Riches and well-being come to consume one’s attention, rather than focusing on God and His word. “Choking” happens after a thousand small decisions to prefer the inferior over the best.

Tocqueville goes on, “As soon as they have lost the custom of putting their principal hopes in the long run, they are naturally led to wanting to realize their slightest desires without delay, and it seems that, from the moment they lose hope of living eternally, they are disposed to act as if they had only a single day to exist.”

Tocqueville wryly observes, “In democratic societies, each citizen is habitually busy contemplating a very small object, which is himself.”

The state’s coercive power is then taken, usually implicitly, to be the assertion of real power, as opposed to the merely consensual power of voluntary organizations, a category typically taken to include the church. As I argue below, this common understanding ignores that in the Christian self-understanding, at least when carefully considered, the church is a “government” that holds authority, both inducements and penalties, greater than that of the civil government— to wit, the keys of the kingdom.

It is not the assertion that an all-encompassing ecclesial realm displaces the appropriate vocation of temporal social and political organizations. It is not the claim that the church can or should administer the civil jurisdiction. It is a claim, however, that the proper vocation and telos of these other organizations and institutions can be fully understood and appropriated only from within the understanding of the church. Both the “now” and the “not yet” aspects of this claim are critical for developing our ecclesiocentric social and political theories.

The church is the Christian’s family; the church is the Christian’s ethnos; and the church is the Christian’s polis. Tempering this a bit with a nod to the integrity in this age of the family, ethnos, and polis, we might amend the thesis to assert that the church is the Christian’s first or primary family; the church is the Christian’s first ethnos; and the church is the Christian’s first polis.

While many, if not most, modern American Christians—including, if not especially, American evangelicals—hold an atomizing understanding of the faith as being about “the salvation of individual souls” and about “going to heaven when you die,” the Scriptures provide bracing corporate images of redemption in which redemption—full redemption—is as a polis, a bride, a family or oikos, a temple, a new ethnos, a body.

As a result of the unease with which modern Christians view ecclesial power, modern Christians have come up with ways of trying to dismiss or minimize Jesus’ teaching regarding the power of the keys. Perhaps the most common way is for modern churches simply to refuse to use or apply it.

It is because of the exclusivism of Christian truth and because the central core of God’s truth offers grace to the non-believer—a category that included, at one time or another, all who are brought within the domain of the church—that ecclesiocentric political theory welcomes the non-Christian to the polis.

Liberal antifoundationalists base their theories on the liberalism of fear, but the antifoundationalism they turn to can provide no principled basis for objecting to the very cruelty they fear. If excessive or misdirected religious zeal is to be feared, so too is a philosophy that can give no reason to shun cruelty and respect others nor provide any sturdy guidance as to the meaning and boundaries of human dignity.