Theological Journal – August 22 Lee Camp: Scandalous Witness (12)

Proposition 12

Liberal Pussiance is not the Goal

Christians live not in a controlling way (political dominance from the top down) but in an out-of-control way owing to the fact that we follow a Messiah without a Messianic-complex who wants only to foolow God even if to a cross.

Reasons the church does not dominate politically in a top-down fashion:

-“ultimate and radical liberty provides the ground of Christianity . . .

-and  . . . must also characterize any and all means of the spread of Christianity.” (Kindle Loc.1987)

This rules out any violent means of coercion in the practice of the church.

God allows his people and indeed all people the freedom to reject him and go their own way (not without consequences, of course).

Nevertheless, it seems both God and Israel used some violent and coercive means.

“This appears to be true, at a minimum, because Israel was founded as a geographically bounded nation. Given that Israel’s God was committed to Israel’s flourishing in the world as a light to the nations, and given that human history was bloody and violent, and given that survival as a geographically bounded nation entailed practices of war, this God of Israel got his hands dirty, we might say. Precisely because this God was not unconcerned with the injustices of the mighty and the violence of the wicked, this God refused to allow the wicked and the unjust to overthrow God’s people. Thus, the geographically bounded Israel coincided with the legitimation of, even call to, war.”

However, God promised through Israel a Messiah who would show differently, better, and more fully his intended way.

“The distinctive of his alternative kingship is not that it is spiritual— many of the kings and presidents and prime ministers have their own spirituality, after all. Instead, his alternative kingship is located precisely in the manner of his bearing of authority the gentiles, he said, lord authority. But among you, it shall not be so. You shall be servants of all, not lords of all.”

This new form of kingship entails a new form of peoplehood: one not defined by boundaries or ethnicities but embodied among all peoples and nations. This rules out Christian participation in war for Christians reside among all people and brother/sister must not fight other sisters/brothers.

This does not mean that God in uninterested now in judgment. It is just that he keeps the prerogative for judgment to himself (Rom.12:19).

“While it should be clear already, it may be helpful to note again that this call to nonviolence is most certainly not a call to passivity or codependence or any form of cowardly shrinking away from injustice or oppression. We are not called to let others run over us, and we must not equate “turning the other cheek” with any such passivity. Jesus enkindled within his followers a fertile imagination to look for a third way between violence and passivity, between retaliation and running away.”

Christianity’s acceptance as the official religion of the Roman Empire (often called Constantianism after the Emperor Constantine who started this process) made it an ally of the state, a situation which persisted in the West for about 1500 years. This alliance allowed the church to practice coercive and violent ways of trying to spread the church and the faith that the church of the first 3 centuries eschewed.

“It is too simple and too naive to say, Oh, we know better than those medieval barbarians; we have separation of church and state. The matter is more subtle and dangerous than that for the Christian. The issue is not simply whether to post the Ten Commandments in the Supreme Court House of Alabama 

or to enforce a policy of school prayer or some such explicit so-called religious practice or totem. It is the Constantinian logic that is of greater danger: if our goal is legitimate, then state-sanctioned coercive violence is a legitimate means toward that end. It is often the secularists who find great allies among the Constantinians on this score. Democracy and capitalism must prevail; thus by hook or by crook we shall prevail, and we will not go down without a fight to coercively enforce our will upon the world: whether tromping from sea to shining sea based on some delusion of Manifest Destiny; whether by subversion of the legitimately elected president of Chile, leading to the ruthless Pinochet dictatorship; whether by propagation of the promise of a world conflagration if we are threatened with the very weapons that we alone have employed, as in the rise of the US policy of MAD—“mutually assured destruction” by means of nuclear weapons; or whether by a state of perpetual war, as that in which we now find ourselves, our drones as fiery manifestation from the sky of judge, jury, and executioner.”

 

“The issue is whether we Christians explicitly set aside the teachings of Jesus in order to effect some desirable social end; whether we will take seriously as a sociopolitical stance Jesus’s insistence that it is the gentiles who lord authority over others, but that it is not to be so among us; or Jesus’s teaching that we should love our enemies, pray for those who abuse us, and forgive seventy times seven; or Jesus’s proclamation that the kingdom of heaven comes by mercy and peacemaking and truth telling and a willingness to suffer in the pursuit of the new order of God in the world.”