The church as a political reality

Two recent pieces in the Herald (Susan Fish, Kathryn Wiens), both ostensibly about a Christian view of marriage, especially as it pertains to legislation regarding same-sex marriage, bring into sharp relief the fact that such discussions are perhaps more concerned with our understanding of Christian political responsibility than with a theological analysis of sexuality. That is, when Susan Fish takes her kids to buy corn on the cob specifically as a response to the World Trade Center attacks, when she responds to the same-sex marriage issue by nurturing her own marriage in creative ways, she is as fully “political” as Kathryn Wiens when she speaks out against Bill C-38 by attending rallies and contacting her MP in the hope of defeating this piece of secular legislation. It is not that Fish has decided to be apolitical and Wiens political – they are both political, albeit in different ways.

I’m aware that Christian political theology is a field of hotly contested debate, but in my view it is a very important discussion, partially because embedded within this interlocking set of issues is (or ought to be) our understanding of what it means to be the church. At the risk of having oversimplification warp things beyond recognition, I want to suggest that our Christian understanding of being politically responsible often looks something like this: the church has to take some “stand” on an issue, and then mobilize the Christians of our land in order to convince the government of the day to write legislation that is as “Christian” as possible.

The church/state relationship in this account of things has a bipolar shape, and we have to figure out how to move from one pole to the other, often by using conventional (and at times coercive) methods of political pressure. Understood this way, politics has an autonomous existence, but it is there that real change is affected and that is where Christians must put their efforts. Crassly put, this view suggests that the primary calling of the Christian is to be usefully active in public affairs.

Kingdom values

What if we were to modify such a polarized view and begin to pay more serious attention to the church as a political reality? By this I mean to say that the Christian community called into existence by our Lord is itself a political entity in the sense that it is a structured social body held together by a common commitment to the values of the Kingdom of God. Thus acting as part of and living in the church has an impact on whatever society the church finds itself in, without being determined in any ultimate way by that society.

Such a view takes history seriously as it tries to understand where and how God has been working, but isn’t committed to believing that it is only what the secular ruler does that counts as meaningful; it also takes hope seriously (one might say it includes a robust eschatology) and resists any kind of truncated view of our current reality that assumes that what is going on around us is fully transparent. That is, Christians believe that there is more going on than can be accounted for by some cause and effect explanation.

We are not and cannot be informed enough to know exactly what will happen if this or that legislation is passed, no matter how good our social scientific data may be, and therefore we disavow any notion of “effectiveness” conventionally understood, as though controlling society is our moral yardstick. We simply are not called to nor can we presume to control the handles of history or of government and make things turn out the way we would like them. (I acknowledge the influence of John Howard Yoder on this argument.)

Not quietism

Such a view of history, eschatology and politics does not function in such a way as to underwrite an escape from political responsibility, or a withdrawal into quietism. Rather, it shapes a way of engagement that finds its way through the confession that Jesus is Lord, that He has called into existence a community of faithful disciples which endeavours by the grace of God and the power of the Holy Ghost to follow the way of the cross set before us.

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, leading theologian Karl Barth (in)famously said that he would “endeavour to go on working with his students at Bonn, doing theology and nothing but theology, now as before, as if nothing had ever happened. With perhaps a slightly raised tone, but without direct allusions: something like the chanting of the hours by the Benedictines nearby in the Maria Laach, which would go on undoubtedly without break or interruption even in the Third Reich.” Thus, Barth vowed to carry on his work. He is often understood to be sidestepping Christian responsibility here with unconscionable naïveté, but this is to misunderstand him. Barth refused to let Hitler determine what the Christian church would believe or do, he refused to take an unconditional oath of loyalty to the Fuehrer – after all, Barth was already committed to the lordship of Christ. Insofar as the church stayed true to its own confession, it was able to resist the lordship of other powers of the day.

For the church to confess that Jesus is Lord is far more “political” than any rally or campaign. Therefore, it seems to me that in our deliberations about the issues that confront us in our day, the church as a moral category must be taken more seriously than is often the case, and the lives and actions of faithful disciples of Christ (in worship, fidelity in marriage, and so on) need to be understood as fully meaningful political realities.

Paul Doerksen teaches part-time at Mennonite Brethren Collegiate Institute, Winnipeg, and is a doctoral candidate at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ont.