10/22/14. BEING GOD’S NEW HUMANITY IN THE POLITICAL ARENA

BLOG 1022/14. GOD’S NEW HUMANITY COLONIES IN THE POLITICAL ARENA

In a couple of weeks we have a national election in this country. One comic quipped that there were three things they didn’t talk about in her church: sex, politics, and religion. The more is the pity since we should be talking about all three profoundly, theologically and Biblically if we are to be faithful in our calling to be God’s new creation people. With the news media full of campaign reports, political charges and counter-charges, we certainly need to know how to respond to the political context in which we live. After all, the church was launched in a political context in which Caesar was god, and to profess that Jesus was Lord was an act of sedition punishable, often, by death. To be a follower of Christ was to be part of a counter-culture, which was totally controversial, and subversive to all of the political, economic, social, and cultural principalities and powers that sought for themselves the role of being god. The followers of Christ were always challenging the idols of the day. Why?

It begins with the command of Jesus, which stands at the threshold of our entrance into God’s kingdom/new creation: repentance. We are not called into some never-never-land of comfortable spirituality or religion—we are called from darkness to light, from the dominion of Satan/darkness and into the dominion of God’s dear Son—from one ultimate loyalty to another. The consequences of repentance are total and with political implications: we renounce all other lords and loyalties, and obey the teachings of Jesus Christ as our authority, our guiding line.

The church during those early centuries was dynamic, and transformational, and growing at an unbelievable rate against all kinds of resistance, persecution, both from local authorities and from the empire. It bewildered even officials of the empire. My readers would do well to Google: the Letter to Diognetus, in which the reporter to his Roman superior states of Christians: They dwell in their own countries, but simply as sojourners. As citizens, they share in all things with others, and yet endure all things as if foreigners. Every foreign land is to them as their native country, and every land of their birth as a land of strangers.”

The church was faithful to this calling until about the beginning of the 4th century, and with the Emperor Constantine’s ostensible conversion to Christ at the Milvian Bridge. He then made the Christian religion the ‘official’ religion of the empire, and so co-opted the church to his own political ends. And this subversive co-opting has prevailed over the millennium and a half since, what with the ‘divine right of kings’, of “God save the queen,” of “God bless America,” … all in various cloaks of patriotism. And in our day few churches stop and reflect on what God’s purpose for our presence in the civil magistrate might be, or how we might filter the political claims and counter-claims of this toxic political climate through the radical teachings of Jesus, i.e., the common good of humankind, economic justice, the welfare of the helpless.

We are to be, on one hand, the salt and light, the leaven of love and justice, in whatever place we live. We are definitely not to be part of the culture of discontent, but we are by, virtue of our repentance and our obedience to Christ’s teachings, to be an incorrigibly subversive folk. Martin Luther King, Jr. challenged racial injustice, and when told that what he was proposing was against the law, responded: “I appeal to a higher law.” Later (after his Nobel Peace award) he challenged the military policies of this nation in Vietnam and was pronounced unpatriotic. The counter-cultural voices of the faith have often come from the radical edge of the church in such persons as William Stringfellow and the Berrigan brothers in their troubled decade. Now it’s our turn.

So here we are facing an election in a culture of discontent. We have always been subversive. Go for it! G. K. Chesterton told us: “Jesus promised his disciples three things: that they would be completely fearless, absurdly happy, … and in constant trouble.” Welcome to true discipleship demonstrating God’s new humanity in Christ.

About rthenderson

Sixty years a pastor-teacher within the Presbyterian Church. Author of several books, the latest of which are a trilogy on missional ecclesiology: ENCHANTED COMMUNITY: JOURNEY INTO THE MYSTERY OF THE CHURCH, then, REFOUNDING THE CHURCH FROM THE UNDERSIDE, then THE CHURCH AND THE RELENTLESS DARKNESS. Previous to this trilogy was A DOOR OF HOPE: SPIRITUAL CONFLICT IN PASTORAL MINISTRY, and SUBVERSIVE JESUS, RADICAL FAITH. I am a native of West Palm Beach, Florida, a graduate of Davidson College, then of Columbia and Westminster Theological Seminaries.
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