Some comments on Christianity and politics

Paul asked me what I thought of his essay “The Biggest Fallacies About Religion and Politics” on Daily Kos. Paul, I think it’s a great essay, well worth reading. I agree with the general thesis that “Christianity” (for want of a better word) is always “political” (for want of a better word). But allow me to pick at some of the details, as someone who is neither a political theologian nor a commentator on current affairs. This is not so much a critique as pulling at some threads that interest me. I quote Paul in bold text, then add my tuppence or two cents.

The Judeo-Christian religion has been rooted in politics from the start.

I agree that the existence of the Judeo-Christian “people of God” has mostly been politically determined, both internally and externally. From at least the Exodus through to the collapse of the Christian West, it has been a long troubled story of the management of the identity, life, and mission of a priestly people in relation first to hostile and then to friendly nations.

Or to put it another way, biblical religion is nationist, from the formation of the nation of Israel, liberated from Egypt, to the foreseen rule of Christ over the nations liberated from Rome.

The biblical word for that is “kingdom,” which means that this aspect should be of considerable interest to people who are interested in the good news of the kingdom of God—that is, evangelicals. Are you listening?

The modern terms “political” and “political-religious” are useful because “kingdom of God” has been misunderstood to the point of meaninglessness, but these terms may need qualifying. I’ll get to that.

…prophets such as John the Baptizer, Jesus, the apostle Paul, and Jewish writers such as we read in the Dead Sea Scrolls… preached that God would intervene to create a new order on earth ruled by righteous Jews.

It seems to me that John the Baptist, Jesus, and Paul had their prophetic focus not on the overthrow of the oppressor but on the judgment—the destruction—of unrighteous Israel, which was my argument in the post on the politics of Jesus that Paul commented on. A new order would follow, as day follows night, but they have almost nothing to say about the substance of it.

When the apostle Paul looks further afield, it is the end of the idolatrous and degrading religion of the Greeks that he sees, not the defeat of imperial Rome—unless we think that he wrote 2 Thessalonians and that the man of lawlessness is Caesar. I suspect that in Romans Paul sees Rome as a legitimate force restraining Jewish violence towards believers in Jesus. This sets him apart from a major strand of Jewish apocalyptic thought, including the book of Revelation.

Jesus’ first recorded sermon was about politics. He stood up in a synagogue in Nazareth and read from Isaiah…. In our context-free Bible analysis today, we read that as flowery words, but at the time talking about the poor, the prisoners, and the oppressed meant calling out the government (that eventually killed him for his politics).

Jesus’ words in Luke 4:18-19 about liberty for the poor, good news for the captive and imprisoned, and sight for the blind are not just flowery words, but have a rather narrow political-religious programme in view, nevertheless: the redemption of Israel. The passage is often misread in more broadly social-justice or liberationist or even Marxist terms. But Paul is right to highlight the political aspect.

When Jesus died, he cried out to God: “Why have you forsaken me?”

It’s not clear why this was included, but Psalm 22 certainly ends with a resounding political affirmation: “For kingship belongs to the LORD, and he rules over the nations” (22:28). It seems unlikely that Jesus would start reciting a psalm without having the end in mind. It is one of the few places where the Synoptic Gospels glance briefly, indirectly, covertly at what lies beyond the all-consuming crisis of the war against Rome.

Paul wrote of Jesus leading an army of freshly resurrected righteous people who would meet Jesus in the sky and then come down from heaven to create an everlasting kingdom on earth, presumably in line with Jesus’ teaching.

I think it may be significant that in 1 Thessalonians 4 the parousia event remains suspended in mid-air. It’s not so clear that Paul expected Jesus to continue on to earth to establish an everlasting kingdom. The thought is only of the re-uniting of Jesus and his followers. In that sense it is in line with Jesus’ teaching, as Paul says, but it’s a different line.

Generally, the New Testament expectation seems to have been a rule from heaven over what is happening on earth. But it’s political nevertheless.

Christians were said to have fled the city… because, like Jesus and Paul, they expected a miraculous intervention that would lead to a Roman defeat, at which time they would return to the city.

I disagree that Christians fled Jerusalem because they expected a Roman defeat. I don’t see either Jesus or Paul predicting the defeat of the armies that would come against Jerusalem. Am I overlooking something?

The foreseen miraculous intervention was the destruction of Jerusalem not the prevention of it. This was the decisive vindication of the proclamation of the kingdom and the call to repentance—the call for a deep reformation of national life.

The point, however, is that when Judaism and Christianity were birthed, religion and politics were the same thing. To lament today that politics is ruining religion ignores the fact that they are part and parcel of cultural identity and cannot be separated, not only now but from the time and circumstances in which they were birthed.

I wonder about this. Yes, religion and politics were the same thing. I can’t say I’ve thought this through very well but I think that for the church (less so for Israel) the situation has changed quite dramatically since the collapse of Christendom.

The original political-religious settlement in Europe was properly the concrete fulfilment of the emerging hopes of “kingdom”—the rule of Jesus over the nations. It grew as big as western colonialism and perhaps survives anachronistically in the American politicisation of evangelicalism, but the dispersed presence of the church in the world requires a rethink of the political aspect of its life and mission.

So perhaps the “kingdom” or nationist paradigm has now given way to something more like an NGO—a dispersed, global entity with a mandate that still has political implications insofar as its presence as new creation impinges on the full spectrum of human social existence.

In practice, this is hardly a new idea, but it helps me to draw a line between the kingdom politics of scripture and post-nationist—and post-colonial—politics of our own age. This is not just an accommodation to a modern perspective. We factor into our eschatology, in effect, the historical impermanence of the biblical kingdom expectation and the unexpectedness of modernity. A narrative-historical reading of the Bible gives us good reason to generate new and disruptive solutions in the face of massive and global change.

Of course, this does not alter the fact that Jesus remains seated at the right hand of God, “far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the one to come” (Eph. 1:21). The church remains a new creation, a priestly people serving the God who made all things, empowered by the Pentecostal Spirit of prophecy. But we are not in Kansas any more.

Since the time of Jesus…, there has been no consensus as to who he was and what it means to follow him.

Yes and no, I think. There was no doubt a period of “ferocious debate” and consolidation after the death of Jesus. But Christendom was a massive, fifteen hundred year consensus about the place of Jesus in the grand scheme of things, and the idea of following him, as such, was pushed to the ragged dissenting extremities.

Following Jesus has come back into vogue in recent years because it seems to offer a way to recover a sense of proportion and integrity after Christendom, which we now all think was such a bad idea.

But I would say that following Jesus is not really what it’s all about now, other than in a loosely and, frankly, inaccurately metaphorical sense. We cannot follow a first century Jewish prophet-messiah, whose focus was almost entirely on the wretched fate of his people in the decades to come. His disciples emulated his mission to Israel through to the end of the age of second temple Judaism, in the power of the Spirit of Pentecost. But then the relationship shifts to the vertical axis: we don’t follow the Palestinian Jesus, for all his excellence; we confess and serve a risen Lord, and even that is always to the glory of the living God.

Schweitzer studied centuries of theological developments and came to the realization that each generation reinvents Jesus to fit their own cultural beliefs. In practice, people read their own cultural views into Scriptures.

This is undoubtedly true, but I would say, nevertheless, that we are much better able these days to bracket out our own presuppositions and recover a historical Jesus , with whom we may feel quite uncomfortable. It’s what Schweitzer did, and it’s what Paul has endeavoured to do in his essay.

For now, I am reasonably confident that the western church is moving towards a new consensus, at the core of which will be a much more historical reading of the New Testament. But it will be a slow and fitful process, with no guarantees, for reasons which Paul has ably identified.

The American church is stuck on the edge of the larger current of history in a bit of an eddy, which is perhaps becoming a whirlpool, which will suck it into oblivion. Who knows? One way or another, things will move on.

The story of Sodom and Gomorrah is an example. In Genesis, the author seems to use the story to illustrate God punishing cities for rampant sexual misconduct. The prophet Ezekiel, however, says that God’s punishment was judgement for the cities’ inhabitants inhospitality and ill treatment of the poor. Setting aside historicity, how does one reconcile the discrepancy, except that the authors told a story in a way that justified their own cultural practices and beliefs?

I think that Ezekiel’s account is much closer to the original story in its intention than this dichotomisation suggests:

The description of Sodom as wealthy but contemptuous of the poor is likely to be an explanation of the great “outcry” against the two cities, which prompted the visitation of the angels in the first place (Gen 18:20–21). But Ezekiel adds: “They were haughty and did an abomination before me. So I removed them, when I saw it.” So the narrative continues: Sodom was guilty of grave social injustices, the angels investigated, the men of the city committed a gross “abomination”… which was witnessed by the angels (and therefore seen by the Lord), and for that reason the city was destroyed.1

I make this point not just to promote my book but because it’s a good example, I think, of how a narrative-historical reading of the Bible can overcome the polarisation between conservative and liberal reductionisms that besets so much application of scripture.

It’s the same with Jesus’ reading of Isaiah 61:1-2 in the synagogue in Nazareth, discussed above. The “evangelical” or “gospel” message here is neither that individuals are set free from a metaphorical captivity to sin nor that the poor are always and everywhere the object of Jesus’ liberating compassion. It is that YHWH is about to deliver the “poor” (a term that carries a great deal of theological freight) in Israel and establish them as righteous priests of the Lord in the midst of the nations (Is. 61:1-9).

Even in the wisdom literature, scripture rarely speaks beyond the large and tumultuous contingencies of Israel’s historical existence to address human universals, at either the personal or the social level.

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  Andrew Perriman, End of Story? Same-Sex Relationships and the Narratives of Evangelical Mission (2019), 41-42.