I wasn’t sure whether the title should be “Christian Politics” or “Political Christians.” I’ll leave it up to you to decide which is better.
The question of how faith should be applied to politics is a tricky one, especially since it is possible to turn that statement around. Politics, indeed, has been and is being applied to – or rather imposed upon – faith. More than a few surveys report that there are quite a few people who use their religious label as a partisan identifier.
When it comes to Christians and politics, there is a substantial problem. The early Christians – from the very first ones in the book of Acts through the persecution and illegality of Christianity in the Roman Empire up until its legalization by Constantine’s Edict of Milan in 313 AD – simply did not like politics.
At all.
Don’t get me wrong. They lived happily with their fellow citizens. They didn’t withdraw into enclaves or separated communities. They didn’t look weird or act weird, as the delightful “Letter to Diognetus” (from 130 AD) makes clear.
And, contrary to general opinion, the early Christians were not standoffish. They weren’t sniffy about their non-Christian friends. They didn’t act as though everyone else had cooties.
Their problem was with politics and government. They did not hate it. They prayed intensely for civil authorities. But they harbored many doubts about the necessities of the State.
The State in a fallen world simply has to use force and the threat of death in order to suppress evil, as St Paul makes clear in Romans chapter 13. In a world that had fallen contrary to the Creation God had intended it to be – which was the Garden of Eden – the State inevitably deployed force, domination, coercion, even violence, destruction and death.
The early Christians saw themselves as the continuation of the Christ Who is Peace Himself. When they became Christians, accepting Jesus into their heart as personal Lord and Saviour, they tried their level best to act just like Him.
So they took the Beatitudes as their personality test. They became aware of their own utter dependence upon the generosity of the Father. They mourned for those who suffered, for the victims of a fallen and cruel world. They became meek, gentle, and kind. They desired righteousness and social justice. They gave out mercy and forgiveness and grace. They were “pure in heart” – that is, they recognized the face of Jesus in their neighbor, and knew in their hearts that how they treated the “least of these” was ultimately and immediately how they treated Jesus Himself.
They made peace wherever they lived, whether they were welcomed in society or were denounced and persecuted.
The early Christians were pretty, let’s say, “radical.” They really did hold “all things in common” (Acts 4.32).
Everyone shared their substance with each other and the poor around them. They shared their goods freely and “without measure.” Every Saturday night at Vespers they liberally distributed bread, oil, and wine – much like the Feeding of the Five Thousand.
They established the first one-stop welfare offices, the first hospitals. They collected money for famine relief and the freeing of slaves. They regularly saved unwanted babies who had been abandoned in infanticide by exposure, which was common in the Roman Empire. Peace and justice, gentleness and mercy, and generosity, comprised the character of early Christianity.
It follows then that the Christians of the first three centuries refused to participate in violence and death. Consequently, the church discouraged Christians from participating in government and the armed forces.
And to complicate things further: the early Christians did not seek to impose their radically new character on society and the state. How could they? Having “all things in common” could never work in the “real world.” The high morality of the Beatitudes could never be legislated.
How could early Christians ever get involved in the politics of the world? Especially when you have Jesus, the Son of God, Who utterly, totally “took upon Him the form of a slave, and was made in the likeness of men: And being found in fashion as a man, He humbled Himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the Cross” (Philippians 2.7-8).
How can you square this radical humility, this fellowship of the Sermon on the Mount, with the scrum of self-promotion, the homo homini rattus, the violence of realpolitik in the world?
Emperor Constantine changed all this in 313 AD, when the Christian church became an imperial institution. Then it became possible for Christians to apply their faith to politics.
It also became just as possible for powerful and wealthy interests to impose their politics onto the Christian religion.
Both possibilities have gone on ever since, especially right now.
Which is exactly why I left the title up to you.
Comments