A Brief Alphabet of Christianity and Politics (5)

 

Eclectic – the dictionary definition of eclectic is “not following any one system, as of philosophy, medicine, etc., but selecting and using what are considered the best elements of all systems.” Christianity’s relation to politics should always be non-partisan and non-doctrinaire, hence, eclectic. Or perhaps we might call it ad hoc. Since no social or political arrangement this side of the new creation even closely reflects God’s design for human community, the church’s engagement with its society will necessarily be issue by issue based on its own criteria from a position of co-belligerents with those who agree but not allies. The latter implies a greater degree of commitment and shared values and strategies than can exist.

Nicholai Berdyaev offers needed wisdom here.

"Christianity cannot be wholly either with the rightist camp, nor with the leftist camp, nor with the centrist camp, since in all these camps there can be the same triumph of the godless kingdom of Caesar.

 "To judge people by whether they are of the right or of the left is a great spiritual perversion. The right or the left, monarchism and republicanism, are in essence totally insignificant and pitiful things, things third-rate before the face of God, before the face of authentic spiritual life.

 

"People become spiritually close and united or spiritually distant and divided not at all because they are rightists or leftists, not because they are for monarchy or for republic. It is not at all in these external spheres that the relationships of people are determined.

 

"The Church of Christ in this world always was and will be oppressed—either by a false protection, converting it into a tool of the state, to Caesar's ends, or by persecution."

 

"The third period of Christian history brings with it a final freeing of Christianity from the temptations of a pagan Roman imperialism, from utopian visionary dreams about the universal might of tsar or pope... The Christian world is being freed from those pagan and anti-Christian temptations, is being cleansed, is being rendered more spiritual and deeply profound.

 

"In the Kingdom of God there will be nothing of a resemblance to the kingdom of Caesar, to the present order of the natural world. It will be a real transfiguration of the cosmos, a new heaven and a new earth."

 

While Berdyaev was too optimistic about the “final freeing” of Christianity from identifying itself with earthly powers, he was spot on about the temptation itself and the need for a Christian eclecticism (which will, of course, differ from place and time from time). We may at least be hopeful, however, that today in America this “freeing” is happening. The more the right and the left reveal themselves as mere partisans for their political causes, the more it will become clear that the church of Jesus Christ has nothing to do with such commitments. It has rather a passion for “faith working through love” and a robust hope in God’s renewal of all we truly value and need.

 

Lee Camp describes this eclecticism or ad hoc engagement with our political situation well:

 

“Christian social engagement must always be ad hoc. Given that we live between the time of the inauguration and the consummation of the kingdom of God, there is no ideologically pure or utopian social arrangement among the nations for which we should strive. Any given social structure—no matter its strengths—is prone to fall under the sway of the powers of sin. Once one injustice is corrected with some new practice of equity, the new practice will, in turn, struggle with its own infidelities with regard to greed or pride or coercive force. Then a new corrective must be sought, and then again yet another. 

 

“To continue ever to seek such new correctives—gracious and fair and equitable social practices—with patience and peaceableness and truth telling and without coercion or violence or disdain, this is what it means to be living as a Christian, as a Christian community, in the world prior to the consummation of the kingdom of God.”