A friend told me, recently, that our democracy and Russia's dictatorship are "equally worthless," that God's presence is what is needed.
Of course God's presence, the Kingdom of God, is infinitely higher and transcendent. But, against my friend's opinion, it is not incongruous.
Christians can no longer believe that all the governmental forms of the world are of equal value or worthlessness. Most are worse, and horribly so. Some are better.
Time and the aggregate of history have made things clearer. Democracy in its various forms -- like the federal republic that is the United States -- is not only better, but it is something that Christianity should recognize as being more consistent with the theology of the Incarnation than any authoritarian form.
Orthodoxy, especially, should know this best of all.
Orthodoxy is all too familiar with authoritarianism, because it has had to endure various forms of it for centuries -- they were all bad, some less so, some more so. Despite the fact that Orthodoxy has seen fit to anoint Caesars and Tsars and Kings with holy oil, it remains true that the Church has never correctly or essentially wedded itself to earthly power.
It is a grievous error to long for the good old days of the monarchy -- worse, to long for such in religious haughty language draped with the glutinous veils of sentimentality is to fall from the witness of Orthodox Christology, of Christ as Friend saying "My Life for yours -- and vice versa." Perhaps our vestments from the old Byzantine imperium make us forget that fact.
Earthly powers, ie the State, have only been divinely-ordained with the "short sword" (Romans 13.4), the power to wield death to restrain evil. The State now can never be used (if it ever should have been used) to advance the Kingdom of God. Its agency is only negative (ie, a restraint and corrective), never positive. The State is expected to do the minimum -- restrain evil, and evil includes starvation, homelessness, poverty, unaided sickness and disability, racial injustice, and environmental spoliation.
The State cannot be used, as some want it to be, as a bulwark against the rising tide of secularization, or the transgressiveness of post-modernity. The Church responds to contemporary temptations and perils for her people in pastoral care, in catechesis, in ascesis, in humility and meekness. But to transfer this pastoral concern into partisan politics is to adopt ideology at the expense of theology and fidelity to the Orthodox witness as salt and light -- the witness of an itinerant Preacher Who was crucified as a rebellious slave.
To rise in anger and anxiety at the changing present, and lobby for a change from democracy to Church collusion with the State in coercive morality, is not only a betrayal of the American legacy, but it is apostasy from the evangel.
To rise in anger and anxiety at the changing present, and lobby for a change from democracy to Church collusion with the State in coercive morality, is not only a betrayal of the American legacy, but it is apostasy from the evangel.
Thus Orthodoxy in the twenty-first century can only endorse democracy and condemn authoritarianism.
To embrace an authoritarian power is to reveal a deficiency in Christological doctrine.
Indeed. Christ said "I have come to serve and not to be served." Christ's power is a kenotic power, a power of self-renunciation and sacrifice.
Christlikeness is incongruous with state power, domination, and violence.
In other words, authoritarianism -- including monarchy, dominionism, neo-integralism -- is ontologically opposed to Christology.
It should be self-evident that Christianity—especially Orthodox Christianity—can and must only militantly denounce white nationalism and all extremist ideologies. An Orthodoxy that is concerned about changing demographics is simply no longer Orthodoxy.
And it is a crying shame that some American jurisdictions have prohibited their clergy from denouncing the moral failure of the Moscow Patriarchate in its craven approval of the invasion of Ukraine. Such approval is a clear failure in Christology.
Things have changed at the Incarnation. The Old Testament can only be interpreted allegorically* now.
Enemies must be loved. Nations can no longer be invaded for the sake of culture wars. Partisan politics cannot and must not be imported into the church.
Authoritarianism must be rejected. Times have changed.
There can no longer be a Christian Tsar. Or a President elected as a culture warrior. Strong Man adherents like Putin, Xi Jinping, or even putatively Christian ones like Orban, must be rejected -- theologically and prophetically. The Antichrist is not the "liberal West." The spirit of antichrist lies in exactly what we've always been told: in violence, domination, oppression and cruelty. Not in vacuous concepts like "soft totalitarianism," but in the realities of hard totalitarianism, dictatorship.
Exactly in the ways of "dear leaders" who ever attempt to make their short swords long. At the cost of the death of children, grandmothers, and of their own people.
Exactly in the ways of "dear leaders" who ever attempt to make their short swords long. At the cost of the death of children, grandmothers, and of their own people.
* NB: I take allegory in its widest meaning, admitting poetic and even teleological interpretations. Someone suggested I was being Marcionite with this line: no, one should know that I live my life in the Psalms. Perhaps I could have used "symbolic" instead. Or just stopped with "non-literal." Or simply said, "We can no longer use Joshua or the imprecatory Psalms as license for committing violence." But that's too wordy. I'll stick with allegorical, for the necessary Christological reinterpretation of the Old Testament. And no, that re-interpretation is not anti-Semitic.
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