Editor’s word: The articles in our political theology sequence are the opinions of the authors, not these of Logos. We’re publishing a breadth of voices to mirror various views throughout the church.
G. Ok. Chesterton claimed he by no means mentioned something besides politics and faith. “There’s nothing else to debate.” By this, Chesterton meant these two matters compass the entire of human exercise and thought: “Nothing of significance will be separated fully from its social impact, which is politics, or from its final worth, which is faith.”
Beforehand, I might have mentioned I’m not like Chesterton—nor do I wish to be. Chesterton is simply “being Chesterton” right here, I might have mentioned. I believed that valuing faith and politics with equal fervor, as Chesterton expresses, is exactly what’s flawed with a lot of our strategy to faith and politics.
However I’ve modified.
The social imaginary I inherited early on in my Christian formation concerned a sure method of relating values, establishments, legal guidelines, and symbols. Holding my political playing cards shut whereas being daring with my theological convictions struck me as the proper method—the solely method—to protect the gospel from being decreased to one thing utilitarian.
However then I encountered one other social imaginary.
Following the footsteps of Cornelius Van Til, my theology professor John Body helped me see that neutrality doesn’t—certainly, can’t—exist within the public sq., together with in Christian engagement with that public life. I started to use Jesus’s educating that “nobody can serve two masters” (Matt 6:24) to my political theology. A brand new social imaginary was invading my protected world.
As Radical Orthodoxy thinker John Milbank says, “As soon as there was no secular.” Christ needs the wedding of our liturgical life and political life, and what God has united man shall not pull asunder. You’ll be able to solely serve one grasp.
Our fraught political context
Many more and more sense our society has entered one thing of a brand new “world.” Aaron Renn has proposed that, whereas American society as soon as held Christianity in excessive cultural esteem (what he calls a “constructive” world), and later noticed it as one thing to be fairly tolerated (“impartial” world), we now inhabit a “unfavourable” world wherein American tradition is overtly hostile to Christian religion. Christians aware of those developments surprise how one can reply.
No matter one finally thinks of Renn’s proposal, its present narrative energy owes itself to the truth that it highlights shifts in our tradition that many really feel. These shifts clarify why narratives of decline resonate with so many, and why conceding a story of hope appears like admitting defeat to a secular narrative. We’re witnessing the fracturing of a society that Christians helped construct.
On high of this, Christians don’t at all times share the identical political theology. This eclectic combine spans all the things from the dying non secular proper of the Reagan period; to varied iterations of Protestant thought like Neo-Calvinism and devoted presence; to the perimeter but resurrected faculty of Theonomy in locations like Idaho; to Niebuhr-esque realism and sensitivity; to the Benedict Choice popularized by the Orthodox author, Rod Dreher; to Catholics that search to revive the integralist proposal. Human rights and human freedom are usually not simply contested realities between the church and tradition, however throughout the church. The identical goes for our views of the state, household, the person, and now even companies.
Briefly, the explanation politics is so fraught right this moment is that its foundations are so deeply contested—not solely in secular society, but in addition within the church. No surprise we really feel such intense polarization in our present cultural second!
Reimagining our political exercise
What’s the Christian’s main political accountability in a context like this? Most of us think about our political obligation as what we do “on the market.” It’s voting. It’s coalitions. It’s conventions. It’s neighborhood involvement. It’s on-line influencing.
Nonetheless, as I prompt at a latest Theology on Faucet occasion, what we do because the church is political and what we do on the earth is liturgical. That’s, the church’s work of being the church—its worship—is political, whilst one thing like marching in Washington, DC, is liturgical. Briefly, liturgy is political and politics is liturgical.
Whereas this probably inverts how many people view the connection between politics and faith, Scripture’s witness and the church’s Nice Custom can be much more snug with this inversion than we’re right this moment.
The church’s witness to the dominion in its gathered worship, previous to its witness within the public sq., is to be our first and first political accountability.
As I wish to argue, the church’s witness to the dominion in its gathered worship, previous to its witness within the public sq., is to be our first and first political accountability. To state this extra provocatively, we’re doing politics in gathered worship.
Political liturgies and liturgical politics
For a while now, evangelical church buildings have skilled a revived curiosity in liturgical worship. Traditionally, although, liturgy functioned as a civic phrase earlier than it was a churchy phrase. As Nicholas Wolterstorff factors out,
In classical Greek the phrase was used to consult with a service carried out by a person for the good thing about the general public, often at his personal expense. For instance, if a warship needed to be outfitted, generally, as a substitute of taxing the citizenry as a complete, the officers invited a rich particular person to do the outfitting as a private contribution to the general public. Such a public service was a liturgy, and the particular person performing it, a liturgete (leitourgos). Etymologically the phrase leitourgia comes from two Greek phrases, leitos and ergon, that means, respectively, “of the individuals” and “motion.”
From the mix of those two phrases, we get what we right this moment name “liturgy.” But as Wolterstorff argues, what the church initially took up as its “liturgy” shouldn’t be what we might think about right this moment as “liturgy.” Moderately, the church’s liturgy grew out of a political soil that we ought to be snug digging our arms into. The church and its worship are political.
The politics of God’s kingdom
Jesus and the apostles talked about politics so much, and never in the best way we regularly do, the place we level to some Bible verses to tell how we vote. A extra foundational actuality bears repeating—Jesus used political kingdom language as his main metaphor for the gospel: “The dominion of God is at hand” (Mark 1:15). Because the works of N. T. Wright and Peter Leithart have proven, the entire mission of Jesus to Israel and the world was political by means of and thru.
Jesus picked twelve disciples from totally different political camps inside Israel and arranged them round himself (Luke 6:12–15). Twelve represents the twelve tribes of Israel, symbolizing that Jesus was rebuilding a political neighborhood round himself referred to as the ἐκκλησία (ekklesia)—the church.
Εκκλησία, like liturgy, can be a civic phrase. It means the “gathering of these summoned.” In historic Greece, the residents in a metropolis–state, when summoned, would assemble collectively in an open area referred to as the agora. We first discover this in Homer’s Odyssey the place the phrase connotes each the meeting of the individuals in addition to the bodily setting. What we name the church, in different phrases, is a company physique summoned by a political chief—the Lord Jesus.
The church is its personal politic and its churchly actions are its political program.
Jesus’s followers name him Lord (κύριος) near 200 instances within the New Testomony—a profoundly politically charged phrase within the first century, because it means that if Jesus is Lord, then Caesar shouldn’t be (Mark 12:17). What this implies is that the church is its personal politic and its churchly actions are its political program.
Use Logos’s Search software to search out all of the areas within the New Testomony the place κύριος is used to deal with Jesus.
The church as politic
We confess that the church is the physique of Christ (1 Cor 12:27), the temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor 3:16), the bride of Christ (Eph 5:22–33), and the household of the residing God (Eph 2:19). However the church can be the middle of God’s functions and program in historical past (Eph 3:10). Christ based the church to be the sacrament of the dominion (Matt 16:18–19): the previous is a visual signal pointing to the invisible actuality of the latter. Which means that your native church is a visual manifestation of that common, everlasting actuality.
We’re mistaken, then, to deal with the aim and mission of the church—worship, evangelism, mercy ministries—as if they’re one thing lower than the central political program that we Christians pursue. The mission of the church is our politics. We don’t have a politic “out there.” We are a politic, as a result of our first loyalty is to the one who has ascended a throne and is named the King of kings and Lord of lords (Rev 19:16).
What this implies is that our fraught context (see above) doesn’t require a brand new method of partaking the world, however merely a thickening and deepening of our company id because the church-as-politic. How we reply to political challenges, whether or not on this age or any age, stays the identical.
As my clergy pal, Ken Robertson, has famous, we’d like a framework for political discipleship as a lot as we’d like a framework for sexual and vocational discipleship. If we’re not being shaped by Christ within the space of politics, we’re leaving a vacuum on this one space of Christ’s Lordship, which frequently will get stuffed with partisanship or privatization. The hazard of partisanship and privatization is that our religion turns into a servant of another agenda, and Jesus turns into an adjunct for a lesser objective.
If we’re not being shaped by Christ within the space of politics, we’re leaving a vacuum on this one space of Christ’s Lordship.
Political discipleship will imply that the church and its members pursue worship as passionately as they do voting. And consequently it means the church’s ministries will essentially mirror kingdom priorities whatever the partisan echo they might create.
Seeing the political throughout the liturgical
Though types of worship differ throughout church buildings, I might contend that each one are liturgical—some liturgies are simply “thicker” than others. So to shut, I wish to counsel church leaders strategy their gatherings like political assemblies and their orders of worship like political paperwork.
Take into account, what would it not appear like to “thicken” that liturgy for the sake of political discipleship? How would possibly you join some dots on your individuals? Start to ask your self and assist your individuals ask themselves:
- What’s the liturgy doing to us?
- What’s it inviting us to stay into every week?
- What’s it speaking, and the way does it apply politically?
- Does it mirror {that a} King is current and reigning?
- What does it suggest about our citizenship in heaven—but in addition on earth “as it’s in heaven” (Matt 6:10)?
As an example, Anglican liturgical worship incorporates the next actions, every of which will be seen politically:
1. Processional entrance
Anglican worship begins with a procession: an historic liturgical observe that survives right this moment in most marriage ceremony companies, however on this case it’s a procession of the cross as a substitute of a bride. This alerts Christ’s entry because the reigning King (Mark 11:1–11) and his main of us in triumph (2 Cor 2:14). Worship begins not with a minister saying, “Hey, thanks for being right here,” however with a political assertion: The world’s rightful King is amongst us, and he has triumphed by dying on a cross for his enemies.
2. Opening acclamation
Following this, a loud acclamation declares that the dominion is now in our midst: “Blessed be God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And blessed be his kingdom, now and eternally.”
3. Abstract of the Regulation
Subsequent we recite Jesus’s abstract of the legislation (Matt 22:37–40), thereby declaring love as a critical theological and political class.
4. Confession & Absolution of sin
God’s individuals confess their sins and obtain contemporary forgiveness every week. This historic observe varieties us to see these with blood on their arms as not simply “out there,” however within the gathered meeting. Talking into our political context, this ceremony overturns our sense of the responsible and cultivates honesty and humility amongst God’s residents.
5. Passing of the peace
Having acknowledged the peace that God provides to his reconciled individuals, we then lengthen that peace to every one other. Now we have peace with each other, not on the idea on worldly allegiances, however solely on what Christ has executed. This stands in sharp distinction to the divisions that so usually exist in society.
Abstract
Many extra examples abound, from the Eucharist, to the singing, to petitioning a king. Every a part of the liturgy goals to (re)calibrate the guts, thoughts, and physique across the gospel of the dominion, and so varieties us as its residents. The liturgy politicizes us to be mature kingdom individuals who work together and intersect, dialogue and disagree, anchored in these areas of final concern.
To this finish, we now make it our goal to “by no means focus on the rest besides politics and faith.”
Important studying on the intersection of church, liturgy, and politics
