The Gospel: Necessarily Political and Politically Necessary 

“The state exists in order to give judgment, but under the authority of Christ’s rule it gives judgement under law, never as its own law”¹

“The church is truly a political body”²

“Christianity is a very political religion. . . . In a certain sense, then, it is a politically subversive religion”³

Jesus answered him [Pontius Pilate], “You would have no authority over me at all unless it had been given you from above.”⁴

In today’s polarized culture, politics really divides not only the room, but the sanctuary and pulpit as well.  The rhetoric, the rancor, and the reviling reach new levels, morally low levels.  Congregations are either politically “all in” or they ignore it, often slipping into some form of dualism that denies the Christian’s duty to this world, God’s world, today.  These latter groups are tempted to conclude that

Politics is DIRTY and therefore No Christian should be Involved in Law & Public Policy . . .

And often these “isolationist” congregations justify their non-engagement by sloganizing: “It’s NOT a Gospel Issue”!

Have you heard such things?  This sounds pious, but is actually poisonous to Scripture which witnesses to Christ’s robust Lordship.⁵ How so?  Let’s get to the gist.

Scripture realistically understands the real conflict – and temptation – existing between Christ and Caesar (unredeemed politics) and doesn’t sugar-coat it.  One clear example of this stems from Caesar Augustus.  He set himself as a Divine rival to the true King and Redeemer of Creation, Christ:

As Ethelbert Stauffer, in Christ and the Caesars, points out, Augustus saw himself as “the world’s saviour who was to come.”When, in the year 17 B.C., “a strange star shone in the heavens, he saw that the cosmic hour had come, and inaugurated a twelve-day Advent celebration, which was a plain proclamation of Virgil’s message of joy: ‘the turning-point of the ages has come.’” The political order embodied and manifested the divinity inherent in being, and salvation was therefore in and through this high point of power, Caesar. “Salvation is to be found in none other save Augustus, and there is no other name given to men in which they can be saved.” Conflict between Christ and Caesar was thus escapable.⁶

Because conflict does exist, we need to understand how the Faith approaches the political.  Christ came into history in a particular context:  Imperial Rome.  The Caesars considered themselves Divine.  Peter understood this inherent conflict between rival kings.  Notice how Peter confronted this rivalry directly echoing and referencing – indeed, almost mocking – Caesar Augustus’s prior proclamation: 

¹² And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men³ by which we must be saved.”⁷

Peter here is subverting the extant worldly political order and saying, using Western cowboy jargon, “there’s a new sheriff in town.”  Jesus is Lord and Caesar Augustus is not, nor is any other political figure.  By this statement, Peter informs us that human Politics is neither ultimate, nor central – and certainly not salvific – in the Christian economy.  Yet the political sphere remains important in the nature of the case since Christ is Lord of and over all, as we shall see. 

Too frequently, Christians react wrongly to politics. They tend to make politics (and the State) the focus and solution for society and culture in two opposite directions.  Either they identify the faith with politics – baptizing an Elephant or a Donkey and/or a political party’s leader – thereby making politics our guide.  Or, they isolate from politics claiming “politics is dirty” and by default abandon the public square thereby by allowing it to be unconstrained or informed by Christian ethics.  This move also makes politics central and our guide to societal life.  Neither option is particularly Christian.

The Christian view must avoid both errors: making politics either ultimate or irrelevant to living a faithful Christian life.  And the way to do this is to understand the reality and presence of the political economy and also understanding that the Christian faith, the church, and its worldview are itself inherently political but with a different platform and agenda. As Peter Leithart notes:

The church is truly a political body, where each member is dependent on the healthy operation of all the others.  And it is a body growing up to maturity through the mutual exchange of gifts and the continuous offering of thanks to God.  Christianity’s vision of the church is thus more socially and politically disruptive than the formation of an alternative society.⁸

This is demonstrably true.  Consider how the Christian worldview, while Christians lacked political power and social capital, nevertheless disrupted then changed the culture and the laws.  Armed with the Christian view of reality and its ethics, these early Christians, though lacking worldly power, were not silent, nor did they just “preach the Gospel” in some narrow-truncated way, like only focusing on individual souls.⁹ Instead, they contended for public justice. They, armed with the comprehensive Gospel, exposed, opposed, and ultimately foreclosed extant evils culturally and then legally:  Gladiatorial combat, slavery, and infanticide, to name a few.¹⁰

In doing so, Christians instantiated a proper view of the State, its power, and its role.  Caesar is accountable to Christ and His ethics.  As O’Donovan notes:

“The state exists in order to give judgment,” O’Donovan argues, “but under the authority of Christ’s rule it gives judgement under law, never as its own law”. The revelation of God in Christ has a relativizing effect on the powers that be: “The legislative activity of princes, then, was not a beginning in itself; it was an answer to the prior lawmaking of God in Christ, under which it must be judged. Christendom in effect refused the classical commonplace that the ruler was ‘living law,’ his personal authority indistinguishable from the authority of the law he gave”¹¹

He concludes:

And so from the matrix of Christendom “we witness the birth of constitutional law”: “Law not only proceeds from the ruler; it precedes him. His own legitimation must be a matter of appeal to law”.¹²

These conclusions cohere and follow from Jesus’ interaction in Court with a politician:  Pilate.  Jesus minces no words.  He declares to this political official that ALL earthly authority, including Political authority, must be derived “from above” (Jn. 19:11) – it is NEITHER autonomous NOR independent – it either aligns and coheres with the Higher law or it doesn’t – the penultimate authorities must cohere with the ultimate authority.  Writing in 1981 Richard John Neuhaus put it this way:

Jesus Christ is Lord.  That is the first and final assertion Christians make about all of reality, including politics.  Believers now assert by faith what one day will be manifest to the sight of all:  every earthly sovereignty [States, Nations, et al] is subordinate to the sovereignty of Jesus Christ.¹³

Politics cannot “be dirty” because Christ Himself holds a political office:  King of kings.  And if this is true – and it is – it impacts how we live our lives today.  If Christ is Lord, then the:

Christian faith is either relevant to all of life or it is relevant to none of it:  the claims of God are either total, or He is not God.  To ask Christianity to stay in its own territory is to ask it to stay in all of life.¹⁴

The isolationist proposition, while sounding pure and pious, functionally enervates the foundational confession of Christianity:  Jesus is Lord!

What then is the vector or trajectory of a God-informed proper pollical effort?  Daniel Driesbach describes it this way:

The cause of liberty is the cause of God; God favors and approves the cause of liberty, and tyranny and arbitrary rule are offensive to Him. Indeed, a state of tyranny, slavery, or sin represents a disordering of God’s moral structure of a purposeful universe. Slavery, in particular, was often depicted as a condition worse than death. Liberty, in short, is the most cherished possession of a free, civilized people. The discourse on liberty emphasized that liberty must be distinguished from license.¹⁵

How then should the Christian act politically along this trajectory of liberty?  First, understand that the Faith is itself a political religion:

Christianity is a very political religion.  It aims at a polis, and not just any polis, but one whose builder and maker is God.  In a certain sense, then, it is a politically subversive religion, for it has turned its back on the city that is built by men and populated with gods, in favour of the city that is build by God and populated by men. . . .  It seeks . . . to inculturate its own hope for the coming city of God within the city of man.¹⁶

Second, understand that we have a duty to engage in public theology and ethics – for the common good – to foster virtuous liberty.  This occurs along two vectors:  (1) Confessing true political ethics and (2) Critiquing counterfeit political ethics:

First, we must offer a potent and relentless critique of our society’s habitual evasion of truth. What we need to point out to our fellow citizens, taking a page from Leo, is that man is not and cannot be philosophically or theologically neutral. Neither then can politics, if politics means to be human. There is no presuppositionless political sphere, no sphere in which nothing is directly implied about the nature of God or of man. There is no polis that has no determinate loves, that makes no commitments, that renders no firm judgment of good and evil, that no God or gods.¹⁷

This is the inescapable political implication of the Christian faith. It is Christian secularism. The state does not address the Church or the Christian citizen with an independent authority capable of overruling the law of God, whether as natural law or as the law of Christ. The state, indeed, does not address any citizen with such an authority. The state performs a limited service (both to God and to civil society) and can lay claim only to a limited and derivative jurisdiction. Where is steps beyond that or presumes to have its authority without being under authority, it does so without any moral warrant and its laws are not morally binding, as Leo declares in his encyclical On the Nature of Human Liberty.¹⁸

Put bluntly, Farrow asks a pivotal – and in my view, decisive – question:

[A]re we really to suppose that the state functions best when it concerns itself as little as possible with what is actually [1] right or wrong, [2] good or evil, [3] conducive to happiness or unhappiness?¹⁹

John Murray called the church to execute and answer this question with moral clarity, moral conviction, and moral courage:

When laws are proposed or enacted that are contrary to the Word of God, it is the duty of the church in proclamation and in official pronouncement to oppose and condemn them…It is misconception of what is involved in the proclamation of the whole counsel of God to suppose or plead that the church has no concern with the political sphere. The church is concerned with every sphere and is obligated to proclaim and inculcate the revealed will of God as it bears upon every department of life.²⁰

Why should this matter?  Because this is the way we follow Jesus socially.  This is in part what it means to love our neighbor, especially those trapped in deceitful pagan lies:

The hard, good work of politics is a way to love your neighbor in a tragic, fallen world.  If politics is the art of the possible, [Politics] can also be a prudential way to secure justice, beat back evil, and mitigate the effects of the Fall.²¹ . . .

If we truly love our neighbors, we will bear witness to the fullness to which they are called. If we truly desire their welfare, we should proclaim the thickness of moral obligations that God commands as the gifts to channel us into flourishing, and labor in hope that these might become the laws of the land, though with appropriate levels of expectation. This would be political action that recognizes that humanity’s natural end is supernatural, that the fullness of human being is elucidated in the gospel, not the minimalism of “nature.”²²

The Gospel therefore CANNOT rightly be narrowly compartmentalized or crammed into tidy theological tweets or mini-moral McNuggets.  The Gospel is comprehensive and wherever it is proclaimed, it impacts far more than the hearer’s soul and eternal destiny.  Two episodes from the Book of Acts make this plain.  There, the Gospel implicates political considerations, matters of the public good, as it advances redemption and reconciliation:

[Acts 16] Paul’s exorcism of the girl (an initially “religious” problem) quickly translated into loss of income (an economic problem), and this was turned, vengefully, into the accusation that Paul and Silas were Jews (an ethnic problem) who were teaching customs that it would be illegal for Romans to practice (a political [and legal] problem).²³

[Acts 19] The silversmiths, led by one Demetrius, stirred up civic pride. “Who does this fellow think he is, coming here to tell us that our great goddess doesn’t exist?” A theological proclamation had produced economic challenges, which were then interpreted as civic insults. The Silversmiths started to chant their slogan and soon the whole city took it up: “Great is Ephesian Artemis! Great is Ephesian Artemis!” A riot had begun.²⁴

There is therefore NO necessary clash between the Gospel and Public Theology, as some claim today. We must stop acting like there is – notwithstanding the rude and boorish political agitation we see on social media.   A better way exists and it’s not optional.  And more to the point: much is at stake.

Closing query:  Who wants to win the world for Christ?  The way to do so is simple, yet not easy:

“Those who want to win the world to Christ must have the courage to come into conflict with it”²⁵

And, this notion of conflict, conflicting serving redemption²⁶, is the way of Christian maturity:

Christian maturity is tested by its willingness to go against the odds, to go against the intellectual and practical fashions in the service of the King.  It is easy enough to be a Christian when that merely requires us to be nice people.  But love for Jesus which is motivated by his great sacrifice, requires far more.  It calls upon us to renounce what Scripture calls the “wisdom of the world,” the fashionable ideas and practices of our society, and to count them as rubbish for the sake of Christ.  We honor those like Noah, who built an ark though the world scoffed; like Abraham, who set aside the evidence of his senses and the laughter of his own wife to believe that God would miraculously provide a son; like Moses, who stood up to Pharaoh and brought him the word of God; like Daniel, who faced lions rather than worship an earthy king; like Peter and John, who told officials that “we must obey God rather than men.”  (Acts 5:29).²⁷

Let’s press and encourage one another to maturity in thought, word, and deed.  After all, loving our neighbor won’t be an issue in the eternal state.  Now is the time.

1. Oliver O’Donovan, The Desire of Nations:  Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology (2008) 233 ↩︎
2. Peter J Leithart, Gratitude; An Intellectual History, (2014), 76 ↩︎
3. Douglas Farrow, Desiring a Better Country (2015), ix ↩︎
4. John 19:11a ↩︎
5. Naturally, the opposite error – baptizing and identifying with some political party – presents an equally poisonous option.  This Dicta edition predominately addresses the isolationist error. ↩︎
6. Quote by Ethelbert Stauffer: Christ and the Caesars, 81-89. (1955) Rousas John Rushdoony, The Foundations of Social Order (1978), 64 ↩︎
7. Acts 4:12 ↩︎
8. Peter J Leithart, Gratitude; An Intellectual History (2014), 76 ↩︎
9. All that I am asserting here coheres with a robust (and properly contextualized) proclamation of the Gospel:  The King has come in the work and person of Jesus the Christ and He will make all things just and right. ↩︎
10. See generally, Steven D. Smith, Pagans and Christians in the City:  Culture Wars from the Tiber to the Potomac (2018) and Tom Holland, Dominion:  How the Christian Revolution Remade the World (2019) ↩︎
11. Oliver O’Donovan, The Desire of Nations:  Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology (2008) 233, 234 ↩︎
12. Id at 236, cited in James K. A. Smith, Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology (2017), 100, 101 ↩︎
13. D.A. Carson, Christ and Culture Revisited, (2008), 203 quoting Richard John Neuhaus. ↩︎
14. R.J. Rushdoony, Thy Kingdom Come, (1970), 178. ↩︎
15. Daniel L Dreisbach, Reading the Bible with the Founding Fathers (2017), 203.  The Exodus exemplifies this:  a people are liberated from tyranny and then law is given to organize them societally.  There is liberty yet without license. ↩︎
16. Douglas Farrow, Desiring a Better Country (2015), ix ↩︎
17. Id at 57-58 ↩︎
18. Id at 95-96 ↩︎
19. Id at 90 ↩︎
20. D. James Kennedy, What If Jesus Had Never Been Born? (1994), 240. ↩︎
21. James K. A. Smith, On the Road with Saint Augustine – A Real-World Spirituality for Restless Hearts; (2019), 190 ↩︎
22. James K. A. Smith, Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology (2017), 163 ↩︎
23. N. T. Wright, Paul: A Biography (2018), 181 ↩︎
24. Id at 261 ↩︎
25. Rev. Titus Brandsma, martyred at Dachau in 1942 ↩︎
26. This has been redemption’s modality since Gen. 3:15. ↩︎
27. John M. Frame, The Doctrine of the Christian Life, (2008), 728,729. ↩︎