Christianity and Politics - short version
by J. H. Oldham
Synaxis of the 70 Holy ApostlesAnno Domini 2020, January 4
Ideal and Fact
[...] There are no short cuts to wisdom. To fail to bring this truth home to the people is to deceive them. It is not kindness to suggest that there is an easy or quick solution to our problems.
The book betrays a somewhat naïve faith in the goodness of the common man. The same high hopes were cherished at the time of the French Revolution. It was believed by many ardent spirits that it was only necessary to get rid of kings and aristocrats and the natural goodness of the people would ensure a reign of justice, goodwill, and happiness. What has followed ought to have disillusioned us. But once again we have the suggestion that we have only to rid the world of tyrants and capitalists and all will be well. It is the perennial temptation to locate evil in some external foe or oppressor and to forget that its seat is in the heart of man.
The experience of Russia ought to enlighten us. Communism began as a revolt against social injustice. It raised in the most challenging form the question of radical social reconstruction, and thereby awakened high hopes throughout the world. It may yet prove to be a turning-point in human history. But subsequent developments show the folly of believing that any class as such has a superiority in virtue. No class or group is immune from the corrupting influence of power.
The excessive optimism about human nature is especially apparent in the chapter on the international order. If we have a chance in this country of creating for the benefit of mankind as a whole a more Christian order of society, we owe it to a long-established Christian tradition that has left a deep mark on our culture and habits, our laws and standards, and to a training extending over centuries in the art of self-government and the exercise of responsibility. It is purely fanciful to imagine that other peoples who have lacked this experience, training and discipline are likely either to accept our democratic ideas or, if they did, to be able at once to apply them in practice.
The Church and Politics
Finally, the question is raised by this book of the attitude of the Church to a political program of the kind which it advocates. No real answer can be given to this question until we have made certain distinctions in respect both of the Church and of what we mean by politics.
As regards the Church, we must keep clearly in mind the distinction between what is proper to the Church in its corporate capacity as a society organized for religious worship, preaching and teaching, and what ought to be expected from its members acting in their capacity as citizens or as sharers in the economic activities of the community, and exercising their individual judgment and responsibility in these spheres. Failure to make this vital distinction has been a source of endless confusion.
In the political field it is necessary to distinguish three issues which concern Christians in different ways.
The first is the question of a fundamental social and political philosophy. By this is meant a common tradition and outlook underlying the differences between political parties and binding the nation together. In Great Britain this tradition has been the unreflecting acceptance of certain common values and standards, derived largely from Christian teaching, together with a belief in liberty, a readiness to give and take, and a reluctance to push one’s own view too far – what Adolf Löwe has called a tendency to “spontaneous conformity.”
This underlying political philosophy, which has been the bond of unity in the nation, has been largely unconscious. Because it has been taken for granted we have failed to realize its basal importance. It has now become a serious question whether these traditional assumptions are strong enough to meet the challenge of the new rival philosophies of nationalism and communism, and still more to stand the new strains resulting from a fundamental change in the position of this country in relation to the rest of the world. The habits which have served us well in the past were formed under the protection of a security which no longer exists.
It is one of the gravest weaknesses in our national life that, in contrast with the totalitarian states, we lack a clear and definite social purpose. It may be a condition of our survival as a nation that we should discover such a purpose and, having found it, should make it the inspiration and driving force of our educational system. The whole of our education has suffered from the fact that through fear of bringing in party politics we have refrained from teaching ultimate beliefs.
With this aspect of politics – i.e., the formulation and propagation of a true social philosophy – both the Church as a teaching body and individual Christians have a direct concern.
Secondly, there is the wide field covered by parliamentary, executive, and administrative action. In the whole of this sphere moral issues are involved, but are also for the most part inextricably entangled with technical questions, demanding knowledge of a complex body of facts and a skilled estimate of the probable consequences of a particular course of action. Where judgment depends on expert knowledge, the Church as a corporate society is not competent to pronounce judgment. The demand that the Church as an ecclesiastical body should keep out of politics is a proper demand, in so far as it means that the clergy, or assemblies mainly guided by the clergy, are not as such competent to dictate policy in political and economic affairs.
But it remains true that the whole mass of legislative, executive, and administrative action is imbued from first to last, with moral significance. Every decision, even in the fields which seem most technical – often precisely in those fields – has its effect in determining whether society moves in a Christian or in a reverse direction. Hence if the Church, as a corporate society, must in the main keep out of party politics, it is vital that its members should discharge their responsibilities in the light of their Christian faith. In this sense a recall to religion is necessarily a recall to politics.
There is a third sense in the political sphere to which we may not close our eyes in times like these. There may be periods in history when not only individuals but the Church as an institution is confronted with the necessity of making a fundamental choice. Its power to serve men in the days to come may depend on its choosing rightly. A revolution always attacks the religion which is associated with the system which it supersedes. The experience of the Church in Russia is a sufficient illustration. To discover amid the confused struggles of today which forces are making for greater justice and a nobler future may be beyond the power of finite minds. But to be blind to the possibility of momentous choice and to the consequences that may follow from it would be a grave default. History has its moments of great decision. An understanding of the signs of the times should drive us to unceasing supplication that God may bestow on the Church the gifts of wise discernment and great courage.
*Originally published in The Christian News-Letter No 24, The Supplement, April 10, 1940
**Full version available to Eighth Day Patrons and Pillars
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"What is it that has ordered the things of heaven and those of earth, the things which move through the air and those which move in the water; nay, rather the things which proceeded them: heaven and earth and the natures of fire and water? What is it that combined and arranged them...set them into motion and put them on their unceasing and unhindered course?..But who is the architect of these things? Or did not he who made them also bring them into being? We shall certainly not attribute such power to spontaneity." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 3 This comes after St. John of Damascus sets out to delineate between the created and the uncreated, a fact which, while at the core of existence, seems for him to be, for this very reason, the simplest to believe. Everything but God is created and, thus, susceptible to change. This means people, but this also means demons, angels, the rest of the created order across the entire cosmos. Everything is vulnerable to unrest. Except for God. If you have ever tried to explain the Holy Trinity to a child for the first time, maybe you have felt as I have the weightier, inexpressible side of God's unchangeability: how do I possibly communicate this essential fact to the person in front of me? (This is usually when my faint stutter starts to pop up again.) I like that here, like St. Patrick reaching for a three-leaf clover, St. John brings us back to earth to better understand the cosmos. Fire and water are no less mysteries than heaven and earth. And yet here we are, cooking and washing, eating and drinking, filled and sustained on what we can neither fully explain nor claim to have created. Only God is unchanging. Vice versa, God is the only constant we need. Maybe the rest is better left unsaid. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
"Now, one who would speak or hear about God should know beyond any doubt that in what concerns theology and the Incarnation not all things are inexpressible and not all are capable of expression, and neither are all things unknowable nor are they all knowable. That which can be known is one thing, whereas that which can be said is another, just as it is one thing to speak and another to know. Furthermore, many of those things about God which are not clearly perceived cannot be fittingly described, so that we are obliged to express in human terms things which transcend the human order. Thus, for example, in speaking about God we attribute to Him sleep, anger, indifference, hands and feet, and the like." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 2 When I was studying Fiction in graduate school, one of the first methods I learned to really situate the reader in the story you were about to tell them was disorientation; if you wanted to ground them in one story, first you had pull the rug out from under their feet. So it's fitting that in the beginning of St. John Damascene's On the Orthodox Faith, before rebuilding our foundation, he first puts us squarely in limbo, seesawing back and forth between certainty and uncertainty. To paraphrase, there is no doubt (certainty) that about God some things can be expressed...but not all things (uncertainty). Some things about God are truly knowable (certainty), but some are unknowable (uncertainty). Oh, and while we're speaking about God (certainty), let's admit there's a gap, too, between what we say and what we know (uncertainty). My favorite line in this spiraling excerpt, "...it is one thing to speak, and another to know," takes me back to the final lines in Wendell Berry's poem, "How to Be a Poet," which he wrote primarily as a reminder to himself: Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. Wherever your preferences fall on the cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology (whether you lean more toward what we can say about God or what we cannot), Berry's poem, I think, would nod along with St. John: before we say too much, let our words be preserved by the silence from which they came. I'm thinking of the silence, that filling, restorative quiet I feel when I step into a cathedral or in some of my favorite moments with my kids in the early hours. Even before praying, can we hear the One already praying in us? Let's start there. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
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