See the Kingdom

Note: This essay was first posted in December of 2001.

Let’s Keep Moving!

Dear brothers and sisters and saints of God:

A hundred and more years ago, the pioneers of the Church of God movement were fiery evangelists who went from place to place preaching a twofold message. They really saw it as a single message, inseparable sides of the same coin: holiness and unity. They also preached, as they thought, the gospel of salvation and also of “full salvation” which meant that no one need settle for anything less than being fully rid of all sin. Now that was rather radical stuff, and they were often hounded out of the very places they had been invited to preach. Sometimes they would be invited to speak in a meeting house belonging to a particular denomination, and immediately preach a hard message which included all of the above, but which also had to touch on the necessary path to salvation and sanctification and unity, as they saw it. This was to “come out from among them, and touch not the unclean thing” etc.; and that specifically meant forsaking the sin of division in the form of loyalty to a particular denomination, hierarchy, sect, or creed.

Now in many ways, these years later, much of the purpose of those pioneers has been accomplished, at least as it relates to denominations. Broadly speaking, you don’t routinely see most Presbyterians assuming that you can’t get to heaven unless you are a Presbyterian, nor do you see Methodists refusing fellowship with Baptists. You get the idea. And here we are, once the forefront of that successful movement toward more general unity in the church, and the very success that we have seen in denominational walls coming down has made us feel kind of useless, because the church and the world has moved, has changed, and it has been God’s doing and only partly ours. The whole church has moved, and we, focused on our own memories of those heady days, see only dimly the truths our pioneers proclaimed with such fire. Thus we are at a standstill or a crossroads, as Gil Stafford puts it, wondering what we are supposed to be doing by now. Some are even asking if we should forget about all this heritage stuff and just dissolve organizationally, becoming “a loose association of vaguely evangelical congregations.”

But though denominationalism is not so much of a burning issue anymore, because more of God’s people are grappling with that sin and overcoming it, we have, as I see it, much more work ahead. There are many sins of division that were noticed by our pioneers. Some of these received less emphasis so that they could get to what seemed to them like the most immediate problem, something they could address directly, namely “sectism” and “creeds”. But these other issues they saw included such things as sexism, racism, and political partisanship. We’ve carried the banner, with very limited success, on fighting the first of these three; and have from time to time, especially recently, struggled with frustration on the second. Much more needs to be done on both, but for the moment I want to focus on the last one.

TOWARD A CHRISTIAN VIEW OF POLITICS

by John K. Stoner

Christians and politics–a puzzle, to be sure.

Like the eagle on their dollar bill, which holds olive branches in one set of talons and arrows in the other, Americans, and American Christians in particular, are of two minds in their thought about politics. That is, Americans believe that their democracy has achieved far more cultural transformation than it actually has, but simultaneously, they believe that due to the drag of sin, true cultural transformation is impossible. What we need is a political attitude which transcends this contradiction.

Here is the problem. Americans ask you to look, on the one hand, at what their experiment in democracy has done: it has ended King George’s British tyranny over the Colonies, produced the Declaration of Independence, written the world’s greatest document of governance, the Constitution, freed the slaves, fed the world, made space for God and religion, melted the pot, developed the West, invented the light bulb, given women the vote, birthed Henry Ford, produced the car, gone to the moon, built the mall, televised the NFL, won two world wars, isolated Castro, and woven the world wide web. All of this is affirmed periodically by going to the polls and voting. Democracy works, isn’t it wonderful!?

But next they describe all of the elements of culture which are fixed in stone and can never be changed: Indians are lazy, war is inevitable, education costs too much, more prisons are needed, public transportation doesn’t work, the car is sacred, old growth forests must be cut, homosexuals must be isolated, rain forests are an outdated luxury, acid rain can’t be helped, blacks are lazy, arms sales strengthen the economy, land mines create jobs, nuclear weapons keep us free, global warming is a myth, advertising fills a need, fetuses are good, immigrants are bad, and poverty can’t be helped. Humans are born in sin, and culture is trapped where it is.

Sin, Americans believe, guarantees the permanence of cultural depravity. The triumphs of democracy, on the other hand, are proven and perpetuated by right and practice of voting. In this view, voting is the ultimate political involvement, the elixir of society’s ills, the perfect tribute to democracy’s success in the past and the guarantor of its achievements in the future. To vote, and only to vote, is to be a responsible member of society. The meaning of politics, and the essence of political action is reduced, for all practical purposes, to the single act of voting.

But politics is vastly more than voting. Politics is the challenge of achieving human community. The root word is “polis,” or city, which is the essential symbol of human community. Of course narrower definitions are possible, such as the art or science of winning and holding control over a government, or activities characterized by artful and often dishonest practices. A moderate definition would be “the art or science of governing.” This may be useful, if we think of governing as guiding the process of achieving human community.

As the challenge of achieving human community, politics deserves the attention and energies of Peace Church and all Christian people, because God, by all indications, has an interest in the development of human community. There will, of course, be people who make a specialty of governing, and that should not be surprising. However, it is not to be expected that those specialists should be left alone to, by themselves, define the meaning or content of governance. Every person has an interest in defining the shape of the human community, and narrow definitions of governing should not be permitted to obscure the fundamental goal of serving the needs of humanity as a whole.

For Christians it is worth remembering that the central message of Christ Jesus, whose name we bear, was that the kingdom of God has appeared in the midst of human affairs. I shall proceed to argue, in fact, that this kingdom memory must be decisive for our political thought. Christians are bound to ask what Jesus Christ can teach them about politics, or else maintain a discreet silence about BOTH Jesus AND politics. This is an argument, I fear, which will not find easy acceptance with my readers, whose indulgence for some moments I nevertheless beg. If this seems like strange politics, I respond that any discussion which includes Jesus is, by definition, strange in a way, and anyone who brings up Jesus has brought up a voice which is, in profound ways, quite alien. This really can’t be avoided. Jesus taught us to pray, “Thy kingship come, they will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” That crosses over some planets, and if we pray the prayer we are committed to making the leap. (Or we could, of course, abandon the prayer….)

Kingdom denotes reign, or governance. The message of Jesus was that God is present and taking charge. The will of God is being done on earth as it is in heaven. This is thoroughly political, and only centuries of compromise with earthly kingdoms, growing out of a fear to challenge kings as directly as Jesus challenged them, has made it seem otherwise to most Christians.