Jan Luyken (1649–1672), Execution by Fire of Anneken Hendriks in Amsterdam, 1571, 17th century. Wikimedia Commons
Exemplary Political Witness Is the Goal
SUMMARY
While our task is not liberal political puissance, is not to make things turn out right, is not to “make America great again,” and is not to run the world, it is nonetheless a grand and majestic calling to the world: to bear witness to the world, even to the powers of the world, what the world was intended to be, and what it shall be when the consummation of the end of history comes.
But how to navigate the messy relations between church and world? Three historical models are considered here, providing clues for constructive work as well as signs of potential dangers.
EXPOSITION
As said repeatedly by now, we are seeking to fashion a politic neither right nor left nor religious. In the New Testament, the church is not some religious club. Instead, we repeatedly see instances in which the church embodies an alternative politic. In fact, claims the letter to the Ephesians, it is “through the church the wisdom of God in its rich variety might now be made known to the rulers and authorities” (Eph. 3:10). If indeed it is the calling of the people of God to exhibit the wisdom of God to the principalities and powers, the next obvious question of how turns out to be a hotly debated one in the Christian tradition. What is the social shape, the rightful ordering of our common life, such that God’s wisdom may be exhibited to the world, may be exhibited to the powers?
The Christian tradition has exhibited a great plurality in this regard. Three examples are given here, each of which will simultaneously provide exemplars and counterexemplars.
A Stereotypical Medieval Catholic Stance
In medieval Christendom, the teachings of Jesus, especially the so-called hard teachings of Jesus, are reserved for a special elite called “religious.” The religious have a special vocation, have taken vows to keep the challenging teachings of Jesus. Meanwhile, the mass of nominal Christians in the world are not expected to keep such demanding teachings. As one example, priests were expected not to participate in warfare, while laymen were expected to do so if the war was thought justifiable according to the tradition of the so-called just war tradition. Then, such laymen were expected—because the church took seriously that war was always an evil and never to be glibly celebrated—to undergo practices of penance when returning home even from a justifiable war, given that they had shed blood.
The rise of monasticism can be interpreted, and has been by some, as a moment of renewal in the life of the Christian tradition. The mass of nominal Christianity had grown so unchristian that some believed it necessary to develop their own intentional communities to facilitate a common life in Christ. The monastic move can be deeply appreciated in this regard. And it could be a viable option in numerous historical contexts, just as some are calling for a reappropriation of this sort of witness today in the diverse and varied movement of new monasticism.
This overall approach, however, taken on the whole, lends itself to a grave fragmentation of Christian witness. In numerous instances it leads simply to setting aside the way of Christ. The Norman Conquest of England in 1066 by William the Conqueror provides a classic example. William goes to war carrying the pope’s ring as a sign of the pope’s blessing and assurance that the war is justified. William is ruthless and bloody, and his infamous “Harrying of the North” lays waste shires, burns buildings, murders villagers, and slaughters livestock. He conquers with little mercy. And he is memorialized in the choir screen in magnificent York Minster, a tribute to kings, too often carrying about a nominal Christian faith with their bloody swords. Or in London the quaint chapel in the White Tower in the midst of the celebrated Tower of London—that foreboding and impressive architectural monument to ruthless power and decapitation and imperial power suffused with the Christian religion—serves as a living reminder of this sociopolitical interpretation of Christianity.
While this approach presents grave shortcomings—so much so that in many instances we may find it difficult to call it Christian—there remain significant gifts that arose from the social strategies of Christendom.
For one, Christendom models have taken seriously fostering relative political goods. While the hospital in the West may be traced back at least to the Roman military, it was Christendom that began to make hospitals available to civilians; they were often attached to monasteries. Similarly, systems of education, particularly the universities, would not be what they are today apart from the preservation of such goods in Christendom. And while much early scientific research is indebted to Muslim scholars, the promulgation of much scientific inquiry is also indebted to the complex and extensive forms of human goods made possible by Christendom. The Christendom model insists, we might say, that relative political goods are of great importance. Even if particular goods may not exhibit the fullness of Christian faith and practice and confession, they remain true goods of life and community, and we do well to engender and foster them.
There are many gifts given by God’s grace that remain good whether one professes the lordship of Christ or not, and thus we must not fail to participate in the cultivation of such goods in whatever ways afforded us.
A second exemplary gift of Christendom is its ability to check the power of rulers. In spite of the problems with the attempt to wed coercive power to the church—or if not wed it, to find some sort of too-easy alliance between the two—one of the great strengths of this approach was the manner in which the church could, when it chose to exercise such courage, chastise and discipline the wayward ruler. While famed cases like Thomas Becket, with his own harrying of the powers that be through means of excommunication, are complicated and complex, there is nonetheless therein a sort of integrity and courage that should be remembered: that we dare not let rulers—especially those who claim to be Christian—off the hook easily. Henry II’s exasperation with Becket, exemplified in the legendary words he uttered to his aides—“who will rid me of this turbulent priest?”—finally led to Becket’s demise, a nasty murder by four knights with Becket’s blood and brains smeared on the stones of the floor of Canterbury Cathedral.
This was, of course, the reason that Protestants in America distrusted John F. Kennedy as a Catholic. They feared he would be under obligation to the pope or other church hierarchy. A good patriotic Protestant will have none of that. And, following the narrative given in proposition 11, Kennedy turned out to be more Protestant than Catholic on this score.
Luther and the Protestant Reformation
With the Protestant Reformation, another general posture is discernible. For Martin Luther the key dividing line does not run between two classes of people in the church, between the religious and the lay. The key dividing line, we might say, runs through every individual. Thus, Luther draws a sharp distinction between the secular and the spiritual, between the inner self and what one does in the world.
The Sermon on the Mount, for Luther, pertains to the realm of the inner man and personal relationships. But it does not apply to the realm of the secular. For Luther the secular and one’s vocational roles in the secular have their own ethical logic. If one is called to be a lord or a lady, then, in effect, says Luther, read the job manual. But don’t read the Sermon on the Mount.1 If one is called to be an executioner, the lord will tell you what to do, and you should do it and not think that you are violating Christian duty, because the Sermon on the Mount does not pertain to what one does in the secular realm but only within oneself and in one’s personal relationships. So: if you must decapitate, do so, and do so while loving in one’s heart (but not with one’s sword) the one who is being decapitated. Luther thereby fragments Christianity in his own way. The Christian witness lacks integrity within every soul.
This privatization of Christian faith has done immense harm. And yet there are other potential failings with this approach, perhaps even more harmful.
First, Luther may be seen as sowing the seeds of a deep sociopolitical conservatism that may pit the governing authorities against those who plead for justice against oppression. He himself railed against the peasants who cried out for justice against the rich and the mighty. He called on Christians to take up their swords to “stab, smite, and slay” the peasants who had themselves taken up the cause of armed rebellion. More frightening, one might make the case that Luther’s anti-Semitism, when sown amidst the seeds of his implicit sociopolitical conservatism, plowed the ground for the social conservatism that gave Lutheran Germany the plague of Nazism, though Luther undoubtedly would have decried that madness, just as he had insisted that a Christian soldier ought never obey an unjust order by a superior. He worthily considered and set forward criteria for the proper occasions for civil disobedience.
Second, Luther and the Protestant Reformation fragmented Christianity in yet another deeply disturbing way: the rise of the nation-state. Coupled with the rise of modernity, the Reformation helped fragment Christianity by means of the rise of the nation-state in that each Christian becomes susceptible to pledging allegiance to his or her own local authorities. Given that the nation-state takes, typically, a role of self-interest with regard to its own survival and success, this allegiance pits a Christian in one land against a Christian in another. (The very sociopolitical meaning of baptism is thus subverted.)
With Luther privatizing fundamental Christian witness to the realm of the spiritual and the personal, the nation-state takes on the role of historical Messiah, takes on the role of the primary bearer of the meaning of history. Seeds of the bastardization of Christian hope are thereby sown. Christians become willing to slaughter, in vast numbers, other Christians in service to their local, sectarian allegiances. Even where I sit while writing these words, bullets flew and bayonets killed not many decades ago, the Union Christian struck down his fellow baptized Confederate, and the Confederate brother made a widow of his Union sister in Christ.
The relatively primitive nature of that sort of killing of Christians by Christians in service to their sectarian allegiances was, nonetheless, something that gave way to a new thing in the history of warfare in the West: the rise of total war, in which civilian populations become the legitimate target of military violence. It was a development that both medieval Christendom and the Protestant Reformation would have rightly decried. The just war tradition, after all, ruled out such grotesque forms of violence. But the totalization of war and privatization of Christian faith would only grow more perverse with the rise of industrialization, by which nominally Christian nations aligned themselves one against the other. The blood-spattered and vermin-infested trenches of World War I would in time yield to the horrors of World War II, in which the sociopolitical conservatism and anti-Semitism of Luther, sown into the soil of the nation-state and love of fatherland (again, well beyond anything he would have ever imagined or in any way desired) would yield the fruit of Nazism. Christians on all sides pledged their sociopolitical allegiance to their own nation-state while pledging a privatized spirituality in their hearts, and out of such a divided household strove with all possible industrialized efficiency to kill the Christian on the other side of the arbitrary line drawn by the powers that be.
(The hypothetical question, What about Hitler? is often raised as a sort of rhetorical dismissal of taking seriously nonviolent Christian witness. But other hypothetical questions are certainly just as apropos: What if German Christians had refused to fall prey to the dangers of nationalism? What if German Christians had refused to propagate anti-Semitism? What if German Christians had refused to take up the sword for the fatherland because their baptism was more important than their national identity?)2
Yet to be fair to Luther, his insistence on such a posture is grounded in a desire to preserve the relative goods of social order. The “orders of creation,” he insists, are gifts to preserve life and society. There are numerous points to be lauded in the integrity by which he seeks to hold this desire along with Christian allegiance. As one poignant example, Luther insists that social order is more important than one’s own personal existence. Consequently, he says, personal self-defense is no reason to set aside the Sermon on the Mount. It shows too great an attachment to one’s own life.
And there is another tradition extending from Lutheranism that can provide us immense help: the notion of realism, which insists that we take realistically the sinful nature of human history. The question, however, is whether we may employ such realism without falling prey to Luther’s other failings.
The Radical Reformation and the Anabaptists
A third form of Christian life is seen in the so-called Anabaptist model. The Anabaptists were called such because they, so far as their Catholic and Lutheran antagonists were concerned, were “baptizing again.” Infant baptism had become the sociopolitical-religious means of induction into Christendom, into the practice of a nominal Christianity. The Anabaptists understood clearly, on the other hand, that adult believer baptism is a significant sociopolitical act: it allows adults a voluntary choice to reject or accept Christian faith and practice.
Adult believer baptism, in that context, was accounted a pushback against the assumptions of Christendom. It granted a believer a substantive voluntary will in taking up Christian faith and taking up the way of the nonviolent Jesus. This was a threat to both Lutheran and Catholic models of the day, which presumed the legitimacy of Christendom. To allow individuals to choose against the nominal Christianity of Christendom was a threat to the very social fabric. Thus Luther angrily insisted that these radicals should set their aim to denounce the pope, not infant baptism. The radicals, however, would not accept the self-contradictory rejection of the authority of Christ. One of the leaders, Peter Chelčický, satirized those who would balk “at eating pork on Friday but who saw nothing wrong with human slaughter any day of the week.”3
The radicals, as they have come to be known in histories of the Reformation, were enough of a threat that they were hunted down, persecuted, tried, and executed in demeaning ways: tongues cut out, flesh torn with red-hot tongs, burned alive, decapitated, or tied with ropes, stones affixed to the ends of the rope, and thrown into the river. The irony and tragedy are thick in that these Christians were executed and demeaned by other Christians in a deep struggle regarding the rightful political shape of Christian witness.
(And to put more of a point on it: it is too easy for Christians to act as if it is the secularists or the so-called liberals who have somehow duped Christians into falling prey to forsaking the way of Christ. It is very often Christians themselves, often the official apparatus of church hierarchy, who are duping the church into its own unfaithfulness.)
Jan Luyken (1649–1672), Execution by Fire of Anneken Hendriks in Amsterdam, 1571, 17th century. Wikimedia Commons
These Anabaptists were, of course, heralds of the way forward. Their insistence that the church had to yield its old Constantinian and Christendom presumptions would in time become conventional wisdom. They, of course, did not insist this for the same reasons that the spokespersons of modern liberalism articulated. The latter wanted to marginalize the church in service to other goals: individual autonomy or the triumph of the secular state. Anabaptists, on the other hand, wanted Christians to prioritize the way of Christ in all realms of life.
These radicals insisted on a voluntary community of believers who would be an outpost of the present-and-coming kingdom of God. They would, in their life together, seek to exhibit the reconciling and suffering love of God to the world. Their task, to use the language of the twentieth-century Georgian Clarence Jordan, was to be a demonstration plot exhibiting what it might look like to let the seeds of God’s goodness be grown in our midst. The persuasive power of the gospel had to be located, for these radicals, in its winsomeness, not in its terror.
This strand of Christian witness has insisted that their task is not to run the world, is not to make the world safe for democracy or free-market capitalism; their task was first and foremost to embody the way of God in the world revealed in Jesus of Nazareth. Thus, they insisted on certain particulars that were a great threat to the Christendom of their day. They would tell the truth and not play games with oaths. They would make allegiance only to the lordship of Christ and no prince or ruler of this world. They would allow, as noted, the free acceptance or rejection of the good news of God’s coming into the world through adult, believer baptism. They would not take up the sword against the enemies of Christendom or their own personal enemies but seek to love them.
Some discount the radical tradition as a form of wrongheaded withdrawal. Before considering this claim at some length in the next chapter, we may note that the body of Christ is gifted with a variety of giftings. Thus the Amish withdrawal to rural agrarian life or the monastic withdrawal to pray in the hills of Kentucky both may make significant contributions to the Christian witness in American culture. But we need not see this sort of withdrawal as the faithful form of Christian witness or even as the primary form of the radical witness. Surely particular communities of Christians might, however difficult it may be, find ways to bear witness to the grace of the gospel in a great variety of social contexts.
There are in fact plenty of examples from within the radical tradition in which a different posture prevailed. These saw that their greatest contribution to so-called civil society could be made neither in privatizing their faith nor in spiritualizing away the import of the Sermon on the Mount or setting aside the way of Christ—but that their greatest contributions could be made precisely in holding onto all these things in public. In fact, the case has been made that this tradition played a key role in the development of modern democracies. Durnbaugh observes, “One point that must be made is that the effect of the life and witnesses of the Believers’ Churches helped create modern western democracy. It can even be said that these groups have made their most effective contributions to politics by their faithful, even stubborn, adherence to their religious views.”4
But one of the key differences with the Lutheran and Constantinian traditions lies here: that even when, for example, the Quakers were tasked with local governance, they refused to set aside the teachings of Christ, thereby refusing to participate in the war making that was expected of them.5
This must be one characteristic of an alternative politic neither right nor left nor religious: that the authority of Christ is trumped by no other. It will require, for example, an explicit rejection of Luther’s ethic of vocation as well as a rejection of a Constantinian watering down of the way of Christ. From this single simple but far-reaching conviction—that the authority of Christ is trumped by no other—there is a great diversity and plurality of faithful witness.
This vision might be best encapsulated by the vision of the prophet Jeremiah to the Jews in Babylonian exile: “seek the peace of the city wherein you dwell,” he said (Jer. 29:7). There is the fact of exile, the fact of a distinct divergence of commitments and values and goals and peoplehood between the Jews and the Babylonians. And yet this fact does not preclude fertile, even joyous, participation in “the city.” We are called to seek the peace of the city, and we do so precisely through our own cultural contributions to the communities in which we live.
Some may understandably object. All this talk of the church as exemplary, as providing an alternative sociopolitical witness to the waiting world, is nothing but wishful thinking, so great is the hypocrisy and failings of the church. (And, in fact, my storytelling here has indicated some of these grave failings.)
This is a weighty objection. The particular failings of the church in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries pose a great indictment on Christianity in the Western world. The militarism, racism, sexism, homophobia, and conspicuous consumption—not to mention the horrific scandals of abuse or other grotesque forms of marginalization—have too often been propagated if not celebrated by a large part of the Christian church. All these failings remain not merely as a stain but as a deep wound on the church.
Of course, we must not confuse church with any given institutional configuration. But this observation must not become an easy out, an easy way to avoid a serious critique.
The following are three brief considerations with regard to the failings of the church.
1. A primary place to focus some of our concern is with the church itself, not for the sake of the church but for the sake of the world. If the church takes seriously the formation of its own—including, obviously, those in various leadership roles in the church—then we may do a great deal of good for the world by inhibiting some of the damage we have done to the world. “A Modest Proposal for Peace,” lines the head of an old peacemakers’ poster, “That the Christians of the World Will Not Kill Each Other.” Not merely not kill one another but also not abuse, demean, or objectify one another, and beyond the “do no harm” starting point we will learn to do good to one another.
2. We must accept that the charges of hypocrisy are true. The charge of hypocrisy, in some measure, will always be true because we live between the times. Our attempts at proleptic living will always fall short of that which we proclaim to believe. But to accept the charge of hypocrisy as true can then lead in one of two directions: (1) a sort of glib acceptance that “we are all bastards but God loves us anyway,” or (2) a sort of chastened and joyous path toward truth telling about ourselves: “yes, we are indeed all bastards, but God loves us anyway and calls us to keep growing, yearning, changing.” This latter course opens up the necessity of learning to tell the truth about ourselves and learning to tell the truth about our failings. In this process of truth telling we may become an example to a world that desperately needs spaces and practices of such authenticity, for only such authenticity can lead to genuine freedom.
3. There is no guaranteed method to do church without the risk of grave failure. But this does not mean we have been left without gifts and promises. For example, the promise that God would sustain the people of God and that the gates of hell would not prevail against it. The promise that Christ would never leave us or forsake us. The promise of the Holy Spirit, ever convicting, enlivening, and making all things new. And the gifts of Eucharist and baptism and proclamation and all the varied charisms of the body.
Out of such promises and gifts we need not fall prey, then, to despair, even though the failings of the church are so grave. Just as we must not, living between the times, fall prey to ideological political partisanship, so must we not fall prey to idealizing the church. But such a realism leaves us then with a more solid grounding—that this is not an easy calling, risk free, guaranteed to be faithful. But we have been promised that we would not be left alone, not be left friendless, and not be left without daily graces.
1. This sort of distinction runs throughout Luther’s Commentary on the Sermon on the Mount, trans. Charles Augustus Hay (Philadelphia: Lutheran Publication Society, 1892), https://archive.org/details/commentaryonserm00luth.
2. For an extensive look at these sorts of questions, see the fine book by Robert Brimlow, What about Hitler? Wrestling with Jesus’s Call to Nonviolence in an Evil World (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2006).
3. Peter Chelčický, quoted in Donald Durnbaugh, The Believers’ Church: The History and Character of Radical Protestantism (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1985), 255–56.
4. Durnbaugh, Believers’ Church, 260–61.
5. Durnbaugh is the classic text recounting the history of the varied radical or believers church traditions. He deals with the Quakers on church and state questions in chapter 10.