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the council, like most American Christians, assumes that the key to our political effectiveness lies in translating our political assertions into terms that can be embraced by any thinking, sensitive, modern (though disbelieving), average American. Peace with justice.
we are one in our agreement that we should use our democratic power in a responsible way to make the world a better place in which to live.
Such thinking is a form of Constantinianism, which, ironically, underwrites a culture of unbelief.
We argue that the political task of Christians is to be the church rather than to transform the world.
Big words like “peace” and “justice,” slogans the church adopts under the presumption that, even if people do not know what “Jesus Christ is Lord” means, they will know what peace and justice means, are words awaiting content. The church really does not know what these words mean apart from the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth.
Political theologies, whether of the left or of the right, want to maintain Christendom, wherein the church justifies itself as a helpful, if sometimes complaining, prop for the state.
The loss of Christendom gives us a joyous opportunity to reclaim the freedom to proclaim the gospel in a way in which we cannot when the main social task of the church is to serve as one among many helpful props for the state.
We have come to believe that few books have been a greater hindrance to an accurate assessment of our situation than Christ and Culture.
In Christ and Culture, liberal theology gave a theological rationale for liberal democracy.
Niebuhr failed to describe the various historical or contemporary options for the church. He merely justified what was already there—a church that had ceased to ask the right questions as it went about congratulating itself for transforming the world, not noticing, that in fact the world had tamed the church. It was Niebuhr who taught us to be suspicious of this kind of talk as “sectarian.”
the problem remains within the structure of his categories—the temptation to believe that Christians are in an all-or-nothing relationship to the culture; that we must responsibly choose to be “all,” or irresponsibly choose to be sectarian nothing.
The church is the one political entity in our culture that is global, transnational, transcultural. Tribalism is not the church determined to serve God rather than Caesar. Tribalism is the United States of America, which sets up artificial boundaries and defends them with murderous intensity. And the tribalism of nations occurs most viciously in the absence of a church able to say and to show, in its life together, that God, not nations, rules the world.
In saying, “The church doesn’t have a social strategy, the church is a social strategy,” we are attempting to indicate an alternative way of looking at the political, social significance of the church. The church need not feel caught between the false Niebuhrian dilemma of whether to be in or out of the world, politically responsible or introspectively irresponsible. The church is not out of the world. There is no other place for the church to be than here.
The church’s only concern is how to be in the world, in what form, for what purpose.
More helpful than Niebuhr’s typology in Christ and Culture is that of John Howard Yoder
Yoder distinguishes between the activist church, the conversionist church, and the confessing church.
The activist church is more concerned with the building of a better society than with the reformation of the church.
The difficulty, as we noted earlier, is that the activist church appears to lack the theological insight to judge history for itself. Its politics becomes a sort of religiously glorified liberalism.
The sphere of political action is shifted by the conversionist church from without to within, from society to the individual soul.
the confessing church finds its main political task to lie, not in the personal transformation of individual hearts or the modification of society, but rather in the congregation’s determination to worship Christ in all things.
For the church to set the principle of being the church above other principles is not to thumb our noses at results. It is trusting God to give us the rules, which are based on what God is doing in the world to bring about God’s good results.
The confessing church seeks the visible church, a place, clearly visible to the world, in which people are faithful to their promises, love their enemies, tell the truth, honor the poor, suffer for righteousness, and thereby testify to the amazing community-creating power of God.
The confessing church can participate in secular movements against war, against hunger, and against other forms of inhumanity, but it sees this as part of its necessary proclamatory action. This church knows that its most credible form of witness (and the most “effective” thing it can do for the world) is the actual creation of a living, breathing, visible community of faith.
The cross is not a sign of the church’s quiet, suffering submission to the powers-that-be, but rather the church’s revolutionary participation in the victory of Christ over those powers.
the cross is a sign of what happens when one takes God’s account of reality more seriously than Caesar’s.
The overriding political task of the church is to be the community of the cross.
We would like a church that again asserts that God, not nations, rules the world, that the boundaries of God’s kingdom transcend those of Caesar, and that the main political task of the church is the formation of people who see clearly the cost of discipleship and are willing to pay the price.
The Gospels make wonderfully clear that the disciples had not the foggiest idea of what they had gotten into when they followed Jesus. With a simple “Follow me,” Jesus invited ordinary people to come out and be part of an adventure, a journey that kept surprising them at every turn in the road.
The church exists today as resident aliens, an adventurous colony in a society of unbelief.
The liberal adventure was the creation of a world of freedom. By labeling certain principles as naturally “self-evident,” by offering equality and rights, the Enlightenment hoped to produce people who were free.
It was an adventure that held the seeds of its own destruction within itself, within its attenuated definition of human nature and its inadequate vision of human destiny. What we got was not self-freedom but self-centeredness, loneliness, superficiality, and harried consumerism.
There was a time when unbelief also appeared to be adventuresome, when the denial of God was experienced as an exciting new possibility, a heroic refusal to participate in oppressive social convention. In our day, unbelief is the socially acceptable way of living in the West.
The Good News, which we explore here, is that the success of godlessness and the failure of political liberalism have made possible a recovery of Christianity as an adventurous journey.
Our biblical story demands an offensive rather than defensive posture of the church. The world and all its resources, anguish, gifts, and groaning is God’s world, and God demands what God has created. Jesus Christ is the supreme act of divine intrusion into the world’s settled arrangements. In the Christ, God refuses to “stay in his place.”
The colony is God’s means of a major offensive against the world, for the world.
to speak of the church as a colony is to speak of the colony not as a place, a fortified position, be it theological or geographical. The colony is a people on the move, like Jesus’ first disciples, breathlessly trying to keep up with Jesus.
salvation is not so much a new beginning but rather a beginning in the middle,
The story began without us, as a story of the peculiar way God is redeeming the world, a story that invites us to come forth and be saved by sharing in the work of a new people whom God has created in Israel and Jesus.
I disagree here. It is the story of people with God, but it is told, not by God, but by the people.
In scripture, we see that God is taking the disconnected elements of our lives and pulling them together into a coherent story that means something.
How does God deal with human fear, confusion, and paralysis? God tells a story:
Idolatry is condemned only on the basis of a story we know about God.
In telling that story, Israel comes to see itself as a people on a journey, an adventure.
Story is the fundamental means of talking about and listening to God, the only human means available to us that is complex and engaging enough to make comprehensible what it means to be with God.
in a more sophisticated and engaging way, by the very form of their presentation, the Gospel writers were able to begin training us to situate our lives like his life. We cannot know Jesus without following Jesus.
In a sense, we follow Jesus before we know Jesus. Furthermore, we know Jesus before we know ourselves.
To be saved is to be on the road again. Too often, we depict salvation as that which provides us with a meaningful existence when we achieve a new self-understanding. Here, with our emphasis on the narrative nature of Christian life, we are saying that salvation is baptism into a community that has so truthful a story that we forget ourselves and our anxieties long enough to become part of that story, a story God has told in Scripture and continues to tell in Israel and the church.
When it comes to the confirmation of the truth of the gospel, disciples are often more surprised than anyone else when, wonder of wonders, what Jesus promises, Jesus really does give.
He relieved them of false baggage so he could lay upon them even more demanding burdens. For in laying upon them the necessity to trust not their possessions but only him, Jesus showed them that here was a journey which required the cultivation of certain virtues.
The quest requires the adventurer to rely upon and develop his or her virtues in ever new ways.
