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The Right
Not to Remain Silent:
Defining the Church's Relation to the Modern
Liberal Nation-State
by
Ben M. Dillon
[Mr. Dillon, a native of Enid, Oklahoma, graduated from Dartmouth College.
This essay was written for a Seminar in Political Theology in the spring
semester of 2006 at Yale Divinity School taught by Joe R. Jones, then
Visiting Professor of Theology. Mr Dillon received his MAR degree from
YDS in May 2006. Used here by permission. Copyright©Ben M. Dillon.
Posted here 2/24/07.]
In this paper, I address the peculiar relation of the Christian church
to the modern liberal nation-state. More specifically, I am interested
in the way in which the church’s distinctive discourses relate to
those of the state. After arguing that the church and the nation-state
are seriously at odds in their views of the human person, what makes a
human community, and what is justice, I will consider two possible ways
in which the church might understand its relationship to the politics
of the nation-state: a “realistic” view, which attempts to
witness to civil society on the terms defined by the nation-state’s
politics, and an “idealistic” view which, having rejected
the politics of the nation-state in favor of its own distinctive politics,
seeks to withdraw from the world as far as possible. Both views, I contend,
are based on fundamental misunderstandings of the church’s identity.
In their stead, I will propose a third way. Drawing on John Howard Yoder's
analysis of Jesus’ farewell discourse in Luke 22, I will suggest
one way in which the church might engage with the political system in
this country, while remaining faithful to the distinctive witness to which
Jesus has called it. As a test case, I will examine how the strategy I
propose might deal with the use of human rights language.
Part One
From the perspective of the church, the basic problem with the modern
liberal nation-state, as typified, for example, by the United States,
is that it is predicated upon violence and the threat of violence. The
term ‘state’ is notoriously difficult to define, and the very
concept of ‘the state’ is therefore rather vague. At its most
general, a state is an assembly of institutions that organize and preserve
order within a certain social space. My discussion, however, focuses on
that particular kind of modern nation-state to which the United States
government and its enthusiasts refer when they talk at length about ‘exporting
democracy.’ The most salient feature of this political system is
its monopoly on violence. The nation-state claims for itself the exclusive
prerogative to use both violence and the threat of violence. The government,
then, functions as a professional system of social coercion which seeks
to maintain some degree of order through its monopoly on violence. The
principal justification of the state is protection, security, and even
peace. These are the goods that state guarantees, and how it justifies
its own existence. Yet ironically, the basic means by which the state
achieves these goods is the force it uses against its own citizens.
Even the seemingly most innocent functions of the state are predicated
on this threat of violence. For instance, most everyone will agree that
it is good and even necessary to impose at least some rules for parking
cars on public streets, and most would view the means by which the police
enforce these rules as basically harmless. However, consider what happens
when someone doesn’t have the right coins needed to operate the
parking meter: when she is caught, she is given a fine by an agent of
the state. If she chooses not to pay, the state will increase the amount
in fines assessed. Should she continue doing nothing, the state will summon
her to one of its courts. If she does not come when they ask, they will
forcefully drag her to the court. Should she continue to resist the state’s
agents, they will use the threat of deadly force, and if she still resists,
they will finally kill her. This example, though it actually happens rather
rarely, serves aptly to illustrate the logic of the state: it maintains
order through the persistent threat of lethal violence. The message that
the state sends to its citizens is this: obey our commands or die. Now
in everyday practice, the state’s relation to its subjects does
not usually play out in an explicit choice between obedience and death,
and so this illustration may seem rather outlandish. However, as anyone
who may try to resist the United States’ government will quickly
learn, this ultimate threat of lethal violence—though most often
lurking in the background—forms the very foundation of the state’s
order.
Everyone living within the boundaries of the nation-state is implicated
by their government’s use of violence. Because the state insists
upon total obedience from its subjects, it is not possible to escape its
demand without placing oneself into the serious danger of severe bodily
harm. Each of us is being subtly threatened with lethal violence at each
moment, whether by the gun displayed ominously in every police officer’s
holster, or by our culture’s obsession with the spectacle of legal
proceedings which is manifested everyday in the newspaper and on the television
news. Moreover each of us is implicated in this violence because all of
us, by participating in the political and economic system in this country,
both contribute to and benefit from this ultimately violent system. But
why should this be a problem? Millions of Christians live under the rule
of modern liberal nation-states everyday, and most of them never seem
to face the choice between obedience and death. Yet this is problematic
insofar as the logic of the state, which claims that preserving the order
of the status quo is worth inflicting lethal harm on those who threaten
that order, contradicts the logic of the gospel, that particular way of
life to which Jesus Christ has called the church. In his sermon on the
mount, for instance, Jesus provides a number of basic principles for those
who wish to live a faithful life. Among these guidelines are the consistent
non-resistance of enemies, or ‘law of non-retaliation’,[1]
the willingness to renounce claims to private property,[2] and an ironic
stance towards possessions in general.[3] Just the opposite, however,
is true of the principles which govern the nation-state. Its laws place
a high importance on private property and seek to legitimate the individual’s
claim to whatever possessions she is able to acquire. These laws are,
moreover, enforced by the constant threat and occasional use of violence,
thereby contradicting Jesus’ command of non-retaliation and radical
generosity.
While the problem I’ve just presented belongs to the realm of moral
philosophy, the second problem is more ecclesiological in nature: the
modern liberal nation-state seeks to exercise absolute authority over
the bodies of its citizens. There are many Christians, I realize, who
are not bothered by the state’s coercive nature, as I have just
described it. The state, they claim, has been divinely ordained, and so
its use of ‘the sword’ is justified. However, even those Christians
who think that the state’s violence is justified ought to be bothered
by this further problem, namely that the modern liberal nation-state—by
its very nature—oversteps the bounds of what might be appropriate
statecraft and makes claims on its citizens that infringe upon the claims
that Jesus makes on his followers; in-so-doing, it threatens the community
of Christians that is the church.
In the first place, the state demands absolute allegiance from its subjects.
Whether this demand is made explicit (as in the case of ‘loyalty
oaths’) or remains implicit (as in the state’s insistence
that its citizens be willing not only to give their own lives for its
preservation, but to take others’ lives as well), it is clear that
the state makes an ultimate claim over the bodies of its citizens. Christians,
however, know that they have been bought with a price,[4] and therefore
belong to another master, one who is not identical to the nation-state.
Indeed, Jesus tells his followers that it is possible to serve only one
master, for ultimate allegiance to the state makes it impossible to fully
obey Christ, just as ultimate allegiance to Christ makes it impossible
to be the sort of citizen that the nation-state aims to create. Thus Christians
are to affirm with Peter that “we ought to obey God rather than
men.”[5] Although the interests of the state and the church may
sometimes overlap, we must remember that the state is not the church;
their ends are fundamentally different. And so anytime a Christian pledges
her allegiance to the state, she is in effect trying to serve two masters,
whether she acknowledges it or not. Yet as Jesus explains, she will ultimately
serve either the state or the church, but not both at once.
Moreover, in line with its demand for ultimate allegiance, the nation-state
aims to fulfill a pastoral role in the lives of its citizens as well.
Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault and Quentin Skinner, Daniel Bell
describes how with the inception of the specifically modern state, a new,
pastoral kind of relationship between the state and the individual was
established:
Under the old regimes of sovereignty, the sovereign’s relation
with his or her subjects was relatively loose and impersonal. The sovereign
essentially taxed and ruled on death. With the emergence of reason of
state, however, the state is no longer content just to tax; now it must
organize productive activity. It is no longer satisfied with ruling on
death; now it administers life…The state, therefore, takes an abiding
interest in the individual details of its subjects’ lives. Each
individual is now addressed in terms of how that individual’s life
may contribute to or detract from the state’s strength.[6]
In order to achieve these ends, the state must address its citizens directly
as individuals. Hence the state aims to destroy distinctive communities
like the church, because such communities threaten the state’s hegemony
over the details of its citizen’s lives. Indeed, the success of
the modern liberal nation-state is predicated on a peculiar anthropology,
one which understands each person as a generic “everyman,”
an individual instantiation of the generic class of “human beings.”
Liberal notions of justice, therefore, insist that justice is “blind,”
and that every person is to be treated without respect to her particular
situation in life. Augustine’s notion of justice as giving everyone
her due is replaced by the notion of “justice as fairness.”[7]
Ironically, although the myth told by liberalism claims that rights are
universal and belong to human beings as such, rather than being endowed
by custom or positive law, the liberal nation-state at the same time justifies
its own existence by claiming that a coercive state is necessary to protect
and guarantee these rights.
This peculiar anthropology consists not only in the claim that every human
can be understood as an instance of a generic ‘humanity as such,’
but also in its positing of the human as a fundamentally self-determining
rational agent. The subject of ethical thinking, according to liberalism,
is the autonomous individual, free from social roles, traditions and particular
communities, constructing moral meaning for herself. Justice, then, is
that principle by which the different needs and wants of individuals in
a liberal society are made compatible with each other. Such a focus leads
to a strong emphasis on rights. Once we have understood ourselves in terms
defined by Enlightenment thought, we begin to imagine that our identities
as persons are not defined primarily by our relationships with others
in our community, but rather, being autonomous individuals with no necessary
commitments to any others but ourselves, we are free to define ourselves
as we choose. On this account, human society is composed of discrete,
morally self-determining individuals, the liberal ethos assumes that there
are not, nor can there be, any agreed upon accounts of what goods we ought
to hold in common. Nor can we agree about the kind of people we ought
to be. Any attempt to determine such goods or suggest virtues commensurate
with citizenship is rejected as coercive and threatening to our freedom.
This is why late-modern liberalism posits the existence of a tertium
quid, or value-free social space within which a disinterested political
community can be established.
The nation-state thrives upon this construal of personhood, because once
its citizens have internalized this kind of anthropology, the state steps
in and places its claim upon these supposedly autonomous agents. Indeed,
the discourse of rights usually presupposes a large state apparatus to
police the many ways that people can interfere with one another’s
freedoms. As William Cavanaugh argues, “The effect of rights is
to build a protective wall around the individual. To do so, however, the
state often assumes greater control and surveillance capabilities. The
result, as Rousseau saw, is that the object of the state is to make citizens
as independent as possible from each other and as dependent as possible
on the state.”[8] By virtue of living in a liberal democracy, the
state tells its citizens, they have implicitly assented to a social contract
by which they have agreed to submit to the state in exchange for the guarantee
of their indelible human rights, which they possess by virtue of being
a self-determining, autonomous agent, but which are grounded in the state’s
guarantee of them. Just what these rights amount to, however, differs
across time and space. The human rights belonging to citizens of eighteenth
century New England are not identical to those belonging to their twenty-first
century counterparts, nor are the rights belonging to contemporary Americans
identical to those belonging to contemporary Scandinavians. In effect,
what counts as a human right is determined by the interests of the state.
“As the state itself becomes the guarantor of rights, human rights
become tied, in bitter irony, to the security of the state.”[9]
Building on this account of the human person, the modern liberal nation-state
seeks to create individuals, and then to establish direct relations between
itself and these individuals, without the mediation of a community.[10]
This sort of anthropology which understands humans as autonomous self-reliant
individuals is at fundamental odds with the gospel, which declares that
Jesus came to dwell with us, and to summon all of humanity into community
with one another. Moreover, the very impetus behind the formation of a
powerful state-form is the protection of one’s own autonomy against
the claims of the other. This ‘survival of the fittest’ attitude
conflicts with Jesus’ summons for us to renounce our claims against
others, and to love the other as the self.
While rights language is grounded in a robustly individualistic and distinctively
Enlightenment account of the self, Christians claim that God has summoned
all of us to live together in a self-giving community of love and mutual
respect, defined by the crucified Lord. Thus, there are many cases in
which a thoroughly secular liberal will denounce a particular action as
evil, on the grounds that it violates universal human rights, while a
Christian will denounce the very same action as sinful, because the moral
agent failed to love the neighbor as himself, or failed to respect the
dignity of his fellow human being, who is created in the very image of
God. Yet the way that each of these people conceives of this evil action,
and of what precisely makes it evil, is fundamentally different. The Christian’s
theological account is not ultimately reducible to a human rights account
that is commensurate with the project of liberalism.
Part Two
In the previous section, I tried to show how the politics of the modern
liberal nation-state, and their grounding in a particular modern anthropology,
are fundamentally at odds with the church’s reconciling and community-building
mission. Assuming this, how then is the church to respond? Clearly there
is some commensurability between the interests of church and those of
the state. For instance, both institutions are interested in promoting
human flourishing, however they may conceive of that category. More concretely,
both the state and the church are interested in seeing, for example, the
number of murders in the inner cities decline. For the church to pursue
a relentless anti-statist ideology by refusing to co-operate with the
state to reduce violent crime is clearly a wrong-headed approach. Yet
on the other hand, churches have historically gone along all too willingly
with the harmful interests of the nation-states in which they have lived.
How then should the church avoid being dashed against the rocks of collaboration
with the destructive designs of a malevolent nation state, while at the
same time steering clear of the whirlpool of stubborn sectarianism? As
the history of the church has demonstrated, this is not an easy question
to decide. Let us begin by considering two different ways that the church
has historically attempted to relate faithfully to the liberal nation-state.
The first of these ways is to identify the church’s politics with
that of the nation-state. This doesn’t necessarily entail the official
adoption by the church of a particular political platform.[11] Rather,
it means allowing the state to define what counts as politics, and to
accept the politics of civil society as a given that exhausts the possibilities
for political engagement by the church. This is what Daniel Bell has deemed
the “dominant” understanding of political theology. In his
article “State and Civil Society,” Bell offers a critical
account of historical views on church and state relations.[12] Maintaining
that all theology is always already political, Bell contends that “to
address the issue of the state and civil society in political theology
beginning with political theology’s contemporary manifestations
is to commence the story too late.”[13] This is because to accept
the dominant politics of the nation-state as given, and “to begin
the conversation once the state and civil society have been ensconced
in our imaginations…such that they appear as simply ‘facts,’
is to have acquiesced, perhaps unknowingly, in a crucial theological judgment
regarding the character of Christianity's political presence in the world.”[14]
It is, Bell claims, to have yielded the imaginative space properly belonging
to the particularly Christian story, and accepted instead the counter-story
told by modernity.
On the contrary, Bell argues, politics and the designation “political”
do not in the first instance refer to the machinations and deceits of
state and party officials, but to the social arrangement of bodies, and
the organization of human communities, which is the root meaning of the
term polis. Moreover, intrinsic to this organization, of which
politics consists, is an act of imagination: “Although always concerned
with the arrangement of bodies, every politics involves the (re)production
of vision, a mythos, of community.”[15] Thus, Bell contends,
to accept the politics of the nation state as given is essentially to
allow the mythos of the secular state take the place of the distinctive
Christian mythos.
To counteract this dominant mythology of the modern liberal nation-state,
Bell begins by offering an account of a time before “state”
and “civil society” assumed the modern forms that we tend
to take for granted or view as inevitable today. In medieval Christendom,
Bell explains, “society was an organic whole, governed by two parallel
and universal powers—the Pope and the Prince.”[16] Indeed,
whenever “the state” appears in political discourse in the
fourteenth century, it refers not to a bounded space ruled by princes
rather than popes, “but rather to the state or condition of the
temporal princes themselves.” In the wake of the religious wars
of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, European thought began to
distance itself from the notion of state-sponsored religion and political
power being invested in the church. The modern state as we know it emerged
from this new view of politics. In the modern era, “the state”
refers to a centralized power with a monopoly on the use of coercive force
within a defined territory: “Henceforth, religion was construed
as a private matter and the public, political realm was to be watched
over by a sovereign and secular state charged with keeping the peace.”[17]
This view, which has dominated Western society throughout modernity, is
exemplified by Max Weber’s account of politics. We inhabit, Weber
claimed, various “life spheres,” each of which has its own
laws and ethical functions; such spheres, while distinct, interact in
a complementary manner. “Weber noted that religion was principally
about the task of furnishing ideals, whereas politics was fundamentally
about the manipulation of means in order to attain not the ultimate end
or ideal, but what was pragmatically possible.” Politics, Weber
wrote, is about “the leadership, or the influencing of the leadership,
of a political association, hence today, of a state.”
The result is that politics is now about “statecraft,” the
manipulation of state power. The dominant modes of political theology
done in the church today, Bell contends, are in fundamental agreement
with Weber.
From the perspective of the emergent tradition, the embrace of the modern
mythos, with its account of politics as statecraft, by the dominant
tradition is symptomatic of the political captivity of that tradition.
What Bell means by this is that the dominant tradition is politically
reductionist. This is not to claim, as is frequently done, that political
theology merely reduces faith to temporal-political matters and dismisses
the transcendent-spiritual dimension of Christianity. Rather, the charge
of political reductionism pertains precisely to the ways in which the
dominant tradition has attempted to distance itself from the charge of
reducing faith to politics. Bell claims that the dominant mode of political
theology—whether in the form of political theology proper, Latin
American liberation theology, or public theology—assumes the givenness
of the modern state and civil society. In all of these cases, the “general”
or “indirect” role accorded the church as a guardian of values
reduces Christian political engagement to the options offered by the world,
more specifically, by the regnant liberal order.[18] This is to say that
the dominant tradition, whether in its conservative or progressive modes,
basically conceives of Christian political engagement on the world’s
terms.
Another slightly different way this doctrine of distinction of planes
has played out in the American church has been the view, prominent among
conservative evangelicals, that the state’s power is something the
church should try to gain control over and wield in order to shape the
world. Most would never explicitly appeal to a distinction between temporal
and spiritual planes, and moreover, the way the ‘dominant’
and ‘religious right’ political theologies operate are quite
different. While the dominant political theology maintains that the church
should effect political change by affecting its members, who then act
as citizens rather than as Christians, the religious right seeks to place
as many of its members as possible in positions of great power, so that
the language of the secular realm becomes as identical as possible with
that of the church. This is not necessarily to say that the state becomes
conflated with the state; indeed, much of the religious right would deny
that they are the same, even though they may conflate them in practice.
Rather, the state, as a divinely ordained institution, is one way for
Christians to exercise influence over the world. Both the dominant mainstream
and the religious right traditions herald the state as an agent of freedom;
the salient difference is that the dominant tradition severs the church
from a concrete political presence in favor of an apolitical, or at most,
an only abstractly and generally political presence as a custodian of
values, while the religious right seeks to use the state as a tool of
conversion, hoping the state will impose the values of the religious right
on the population at large.
Both modes of ‘dominant’ political theology, whether ‘conservative’
or progressive,’ place the church at risk of becoming indistinct
from the world. As Cavanaugh warns us:
Christians in modernity have often bought into a devil’s bargain
in which the state is given control of our bodies while the church supposedly
retains our souls. This arrangement would be bad enough if it stopped
there. But the state cannot be expected to limit itself to the body; it
will colonize the soul as well…the nation state tends to develop
its own Weltanschaung, a worldview and a discipline which
aspires to train us in certain virtues, to mold our thoughts and our actions.
It does so by taking hold of our bodies.[19]
By positing a distinction between a spiritual plane which is identified
as the proper realm of the church, and a temporal plane, which can be
left to the nation-state to govern, the church risks forfeiting its body
and soul, which are inextricably linked.
Along with its adoption of the mythos of civil society, the church has
often accepted unquestioningly the categories and particular modes of
discourse that belong properly to liberalism. Thus, the church begins
to understand its members as autonomous, rights-bearing individuals. Such
a view stands in clear contradiction to the older, distinctively Christian
view of the human person as wholly dependent upon the grace of God; it
stands in opposition to the fundamentally interpersonal nature of Christian
anthropology, which insists that the basic form of humanity is co-humanity.
This tension results in serious practical problems for churches in America.
Members of the church begin to appropriate rights language and apply it
inappropriately to the church. Christians begin to say things like, “The
pastor has no right to tell me how to run my life!” or, “How
dare that preacher preach his politics from the pulpit. I have every right
to vote the way I choose.”
At the other end of the spectrum of possibilities for political theology
is the view that the church, as a political community in its own right,
and having no need for the politics of the nation-state, should withdraw
as much as possible from secular politics. One might take the critique
offered by Bell and Cavanaugh seriously and conclude that in order to
shake off the hegemony of civil society’s politics, the church should
reject every aspect of civil society. Such a position might entail the
outright refusal to vote in public elections, to hold any sort of office,
or to participate in any activity related to the secular state, even those
activities whose immediate purpose is well-intentioned, such as public
education or the U.S. Mail, because ultimately it is merely an arm of
the illegitimate and predatory state.
This attitude is ultimately misguided, however, because withdrawal is
undesirable, if not an entirely impossible solution to the problem. In
fact, the church and the world live in the same geographic and social
space; the church shares many languages and practices with the world.
Indeed, genuine withdrawal from civil society would require that the church
conduct its own insular scientific and artistic projects. Such an approach
is clearly ridiculous. Not only would the church stand to lose from such
an arrangement, but the world would not benefit from the church’s
sanctifying and truth-bearing presence at all. Most importantly, this
would contradict the very notion and purpose of the church, which is to
serve as a witness to God’s saving work on behalf of the whole world.
As Karl Barth puts it: “Called out of the world, the community is
genuinely called into it…The ultimate purpose of the community is
to exist for the world.”[20] To remain true to our identity as a
community in solidarity with the world, we must find some other way of
maintaining our distinctive witness, while still engaging with the world.
Part Three
I have just presented two very different ways in which I think the church
has failed to engage the state authentically. The first cedes too much
to the world, whereas the second neglects to engage sufficiently with
the world. How, then, should the church interact with the modern liberal
nation-state? The first point to keep clear is that the church exists
both in the world and for the world. This proposition
consists of both a descriptive and a normative claim. The descriptive
claim is simply the obvious point that the community of Christians lives
within the world. This is to say that the church shares the same limits
and horizons of time, culture, and language as the world does; it experiences
the same problems, and must find solutions to these problems. Moreover,
the church has been called out of this world, which means not only that
it is composed by members of the same human communities, but that because
of this, the church has been inescapably influenced and concretely shaped
by the world in which it exists, and by those whom it encounters: “It
is influenced by language, historical memory, institutional practices,
power structures, values, traditions, and other things.”[21] Thus,
even if the church wanted to withdraw from the world, it would not be
able to.
However, the normative claim that the church exists for the world means
that the church should not even want to withdraw from the world in the
first place. The intercourse between the church and the world is not only
historically unavoidable; it is also commanded by God. The very raison
d’etre for the church’s existence is its witness in and
relationship with the world. Moreover, if we are to maintain a faithful
witness to which Jesus has called us, we must be intelligible to the world.
This means using language that the world will understand, in hopes of
speaking to those outside the church, rather than merely speaking at them.
Moreover, it is not the case that the church is opposed to everything
in the world that is not part of the church. It is important to affirm
that even when the church is counter-cultural, the church is always basically
and unreservedly for the world. Yet, as Joe Jones points out, “this
being-for-the-world arises from the call of the Gospel and is not grounded
in the world’s own discourses and practices.”[22] This is
why, in order for the church to be the best possible witness for the particular
world in which it lives, it must engage wholeheartedly with the world
in order to concretely understand and adequately assess both its strengths
and its weaknesses. This complicated relationship between the church and
the world constitutes what Jones calls the continuing dialectic between
the church and the world: “Some aspects of this dialectic can be
positively construed as a dialogue or conversation with the world: (a)
to listen to the world, to know the world’s self-understandings,
maybe better than the world knows itself; (b) to listen to the world characterize
the church and its Gospel; and (c) to speak to the world, to address the
world, to challenge the world, to answer the questions and critiques of
the world, and to be ‘good news’ to the world.”[23]
If we, as the body of Christ, are to be intelligible to the world, then
what are we to do with those particular language games and concepts which
are based in systems that the church rejects? One example of this sort
of discourse that runs contrary to the church’s beliefs and practices
is human rights language, which as I attempted to show in §1, is
founded upon an anthropology that takes no account of Jesus Christ, and
is designed for a basically church-less world. Yet many in the world seem
genuinely to achieve some good by using rights language. Should the church
really be condemning language that serves some good, even if it runs counter
to its theological commitments? Or should the church ever use human rights
language? Similarly, how is the church to relate to debates that concern
the politics of the nation-state? I propose looking to the work of John
Howard Yoder for a potentially fruitful answer to these and similar questions.
In his essay, “The Christian Case for Democracy,”[24] Yoder
suggests that an attitude of what he terms “Gospel realism”
about the nature of the state is better suited to engaging public discourse
than either an assimilationist model that would minimize the boundaries
between the church and the world, or a sectarian idealism that would rather
withdraw than engage. Identifying the political choices made by Jesus
and the apostles as embodying this more realistic and more faithful attitude
of Gospel realism, Yoder points specifically to Jesus’ words in
his final meal with his disciples as a model. While the story appears
in all of the synoptic gospels, Yoder uses Luke’s version, where
Jesus says: “The rulers of the nations lord it over them; and those
who exercise authority let themselves be called benefactors. But it shall
not be so among you; you shall be servants because I am a servant.”[25]
In this statement, Yoder identifies three separate levels of discourse
Jesus which deliberately distinguishes from one another: the facticity
of dominion; the moral rhetoric used by those in power to legitimate their
power; and the alternative ethic of Jesus and his followers.
Jesus’ approach to the first level—the historical fact of
political dominion—is purely descriptive. He does not suggest that
this phenomenon of “lording it” or exercising dominion is
one which will go away, nor does he present any immediate alternative
to it. As Yoder points out, “He is not an anarchist either in tactics
or in theory. He admits the fact of dominion among the nations.”[26]
However, Jesus neither ratifies nor valorizes this fact, nor does he “affirm
that it is a work of Providence or a divine institution. He does not affirm
the divine right of rulers, as a majority of Christians since Constantine
have done, including the transfer of such moral ratification to democratic
regimes since 1776…There is in his words no ethical evaluation of
‘dominion’ as a good or bad system for the nations. He is,
one might say anachronistically, a positivist. He just says that it is
that way.”[27] Likewise, when Jesus distinguishes the second level—the
moral rhetoric used by the political powers in order to legitimate their
power—from the first, he again merely describes and does not pass
moral judgment. “Jesus does not say that the rulers of the nations
are benefactors. He reports that they make that moral claim.”[28]
However, when he distinguishes the third level from the first two, Jesus
moves from merely describing facts about the world to prescribing moral
guidelines for his followers. His basic claim is that those who follow
him are not to play according to the rules of the ‘Gentiles’
who seek to dominate one another; instead, they are to be servants.
As Yoder points out, this speech occurs in the immediate context of the
passion narrative, just as Jesus is demonstrating to his disciples why
they should see through and reject the Zealot option which they had assumed
Jesus would take up. Thus, Jesus’ remarks here have particular relevance
to the question of how the church ought to respond to the politics of
the nation-state. The pericope begins with their dispute about who will
have the most authority in the coming kingdom, and it ends with Jesus
setting aside this paradigm and replacing it with what Yoder deems the
“cross-and-servanthood alternative.”[29]
Yoder makes several points about Jesus’ tripartite distinction.
The first is that we must keep these rhetorical levels separate in our
own thinking. One of the most insidious aspects of the nation-state’s
totalizing project is the hegemony it seeks to exercise over our imaginations.
The church, as a prophetic community offering an alternative political
vision, ought to resist this hegemony and reject the deceitful rhetoric
that the rulers use to describe themselves. Next, Yoder points out that
the primary reason we have confused these levels is due to the Constantinian
mindset of the contemporary American church. The pre-Constantinian Christians,
Yoder points out, had been pacifists, rejecting the violence of army and
empire not only because they had no share of this power, but because they
considered it morally wrong; post-Constantinian Christians, on the other
hand, have considered imperial violence to be not only morally tolerable
but a positive good and even a Christian duty. Before this shift, the
Christian was a minority figure, who had no reason to think she had any
power to control the state. Since Constantine, however, and in what has
become known as ‘Christendom’, Christianity became identified
with the majority culture, and Christians lost sight of the particularity
inherent in being in the minority position, which is the position from
which the biblical authors write. Thus, Yoder concludes that the church
is not to view itself as part of the regnant social order that seeks to
use violence and the threat of violence to order the world as it sees
fit.
Finally, Yoder argues, once we accept the fact that these levels are,
and indeed ought to be, separate, and once we have rejected the Constantinian
mindset, we can use the ethical claims of the ruling class in order to
effect change in the social order.
Having accepted our minority place within society we shall be freer
than before to make fruitful use of the self-justification language of
the rulers, whoever they be, as the instrument of our critical and constructive
communication with them. If the ruler claims to be my benefactor, and
he always does, then that claim provides me with the language I can use
to call him to be more humane in his ways of governing me and my neighbors.
The language of his moral claims is not the language of my discipleship,
nor are the standards of his decency usually to be identified with those
of my servanthood. Yet I am quite free to use his language to reach him.[30]
On the whole, Yoder admits, the American church has allowed its thinking
to be more influenced by the norms of “the nations” than by
the distinctive norms given to us by scripture and tradition. Just as
those who wield political authority confuse the first two parts of this
distinction, we as Christians have further blurred the line that separates
them from the third part, namely how we, as followers of Jesus, are to
view our own relationship to political power and the state.
Yoder also proposes that we draw three “semantic frames” from
Jesus’ tripartite division. Each of these represents a particular
mode of discourse that the church should be free to use, depending on
the situation in which it finds itself. As Yoder explains, “The
ethic of the Kingdom and the ethic for speaking to the kings of nations
will use parallel sets of terms, will answer parallel questions, but in
each circumstance they will have a different meaning.” For instance,
there will be one kind of beneficence language used by the leaders of
the Christian community to explain their pattern of leadership and the
decisions they make, but this language will not promise to the community
the kind of gratification of pride and greed which is often a part of
the promises made by the pagan “benefactor” to his electorate.
Leaders within the church “will promise not bread and circuses but
a mixture of the blessings of voluntary community and the cost of the
cross.”[31] Yoder introduces three categories, each of which corresponds
to one of Jesus’ categories in Luke 22: 1) the nations speaking
on their own terms, 2) the faith community speaking to the nations, and
3) the faith community speaking internally. Applying several examples
to this schema, Yoder explores how this threefold distinction might play
out in the practical life of the church.
Yoder’s examples deal specifically with the “generalizability
criterion” of post-Constantinian ethics, exemplified by someone
like Immanuel Kant or John Rawls. According to this criterion, an ethical
claim is judged by whether it can be applied universally to all rational
agents. Such an account of ethics is instrumental in liberalism’s
project, since the value-neutral community that liberalism seeks to create
can only have an ethics that could be demanded of anyone, and which do
not depend upon any particular commitments, nor could be arrived at using
religion alone. The ethics of Jesus, on the other hand, not only depend
upon special revelation, but are so stringent as to preclude their being
applied universally, as the one value system. Common to all rational agents.
This kind of generalizability, Yoder insists, “must be denied when
it operates to determine the way in which the sons and daughters of the
Kingdom participate in the world of the nations. They can act responsibly
and honestly only if they recognize that there is not one common value
system. Their witness to the bearers of power will always be modulated
by awareness of that distance.”[32] While Yoder agrees with liberalism
that Christian ethics should not be required of everyone, he disagrees
with the claim that there is some one universal value system out there
that is accessible to all rational agents, and therefore justifiably expected
of all. Normative human behavior, on the contrary, is something that is
possible only by the grace of God, for it depends upon following the distinctive
and rather unusual example of Jesus Christ.
Within the community of Christians, however, we can and ought to call
for an even greater homogeneity of values, one that is defined by the
example of Jesus Christ. This is because, rather than belonging to a value-free
community, as liberalism would have it, we belong to the church, which
is a community defined by its distinctive beliefs and commitments. Thus
Yoder dismantles the notion of a ‘public theology’ that would
seek to place crypto-Christian demands upon society at large by using
‘value-neutral’ language. Yet at the same time, he maintains
that the church should hold its own members to a strict standard of obedience
to Christ. Because the church is a voluntary community, defined by its
witness to Jesus Christ, it need not and should not be governed by the
‘generalizability’ criterion that liberalism would demand
of all ‘public’ matters. But how does all of this relate to
the use of rights language?
Let us refer back to Yoder’s three categories. In the first of these,
namely the beneficence language used by the ruling class, the government
officials claim to be the protectors and guarantors of human rights. The
church ought to be fully aware and acknowledge that this is the claim
made by the state. Moreover, a thoroughly realistic understanding of this
discourse will demand that the church study this “foreign language”
in order to understand how such claims function in the politics of statecraft,
and how those who use such claims defend them. This is not necessarily
to make a normative judgment about these claims, although the church may
very well feel called to pass normative judgments. At the very least,
though, this is simply a normative assessment: the rulers claim that their
subjects have these particular rights, and that such rights are grounded
in the social contract and protected by the state.
Our primary calling, then, is to provide a prophetic witness by sharing
the church’s particular view on things. To do this, I contend that
the church must actively participate in public discourse in order to shape
public opinion. This is not to say that we identify the politics of the
nation-state as our own politics. On the contrary, Jesus has told us to
be “wise as serpents and innocent as doves,” which means finding
shrewd ways of sharing our good news without resorting to violence and
coercion. One way of doing this is, as Yoder has pointed out, to appeal
to the state’s own claims of beneficence. If a lawmaker claims to
have concern for the poor, then we ought to show her—and her constituents—how
she can really use her power to help the poor. This involves being informed,
writing letters to newspapers, writing letters to elected officials, and
even voting when it won’t compromise our witness. In other words,
it involves being “good citizens.” Yet we do this not for
the sake of being good citizens, but for the sake of the gospel.
In the second category, that of the faith community speaking to the nations,
the church should demand of state officials that they live up to their
claims to protect these rights. For instance, when the Governor of Oklahoma
justifies his own prerogative to rule by invoking typical liberal rhetoric
of having been given a mandate to ensure a just society and respect the
rights of all, then the church should by all means hold him to his claims.
Even though they may reject the theoretical grounding for these rights
to which he refers, it is wholly acceptable for Christians to appeal to
rights language to influence the governor into acting for the greater
good. For instance, the church might oppose the lethal injection of a
condemned prisoner by appealing to the constitutional right to be protected
against cruel and unusual punishment. In this way, the church can use
the world’s language to achieve its own ends, without capitulating
to the world’s interests. While the church may not be committed
to the constitution itself, it should not be so pretentious as to miss
the opportunity to save someone’s life merely because it chooses
not to stoop to the level of using constitutional rhetoric.
Moreover, the church should also appeal to the general population, which
lives under the illusion that it is ruled by popular vote, to demand that
their rulers respect the rights of every person. For instance, if this
same governor signs a budget that has a deleterious effect on the poor
by protecting the interests of the affluent at their expense, the church
should speak loudly within the public square, appealing to the citizenry
to oppose this bill. We may reject the state’s myth that it is controlled
by the interests of “the people” rather than by a select few
of the powerful and wealthy, but that doesn’t prevent us from appealing
to such rhetoric. We need not even use theological language to do so,
and we may even use some language that we would reject within our own
community. This is not to accept the liberal concept of rights, nor is
it to cede the debate to the liberal position. Such appeals might also
be accompanied by prophetic witness that exposes the ways that the nation-state’s
politics are controlled by special interests whose goals are not to foster
the common good, but to enrich their own purses. One way of providing
prophetic witness is to engage in this sort of demythologizing. We ought
to point out that although many will use rhetoric of rule “by the
people and for the people,” the United States is still governed
by an elite, most of whose decisions are not submitted to the people for
approval. Similarly, it is crucial that we ourselves avoid contributing
to these dominant myths. We must remember that when we participate in
the political arena, is not “we, the people” governing ourselves.
Rather, we are appealing to the language of the political authorities
in order to make the oppressive structures less oppressive.
Indeed, within the faith community itself we realize that rights language
is bankrupt, and so the third mode of discourse, that of the faith community
speaking internally, should reject such language, or at least its philosophical
underpinnings. When it becomes necessary for the church to use such language,
it should maintain an ironic distance from the rhetoric of the nation-state.
Yet this ironic stance should be governed by a genuine engagement with
the culture. For instance, we may identify many of the same behaviors
as wrong, but for different reasons than rights theorists will. While
a liberal democrat might denounce the death penalty because it goes against
the human rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, a Christian will
oppose the death penalty precisely because Jesus tells us not to kill,
and because we believe that every human being is made in the image of
God. Such language is not appropriate for the politics of the nation-state—not
due to the ideological reason that religious convictions have no place
there, but rather for the pragmatic reason that such logic will simply
not achieve much.[33] The claim that Jesus commands us not to kill will
only persuade those who already accept Jesus as Lord.
The position I have outlined calls for Christians to be proactive in public
discourse, and even to participate in the political arena in some limited
ways that do not involve bearing ‘the sword.’ These might
include membership on city councils, school boards, and other civic institutions.
It may also include a great deal of explicit engagement with the system,
including public lobbying and forming NGO’s. One potential objection
to this position is that participation in such functions that are one
step removed from actually doing things that the church opposes is just
as wrong as direct participation in the most egregious functions of the
state, such as participating in the military or enforcing capital punishment.
Because the seemingly harmless functions are actually intricately related
to the explicitly harmful ones, we ought not support them either. Yet
on the account I have just offered, such participation can potentially
achieve a great deal of good, and to refuse on principle seems overly
idealistic in a way that ignores the sort of biblical realism of Luke
22.
Since the church is already grounded as its own distinctive Christian
community, it need not expend much effort in arguing against the claims
that the nation-state makes against its members, nor need Christians reject
such claims by appealing to our rights as sovereign individuals. On the
contrary, we Christians form a community that recognizes that we belong
to Jesus Christ, and have been called to give ourselves in self-sacrificial
love and to exist for the world as witnesses to Christ’s redeeming
work. been bought with a price, and we relinquish all claims of sovereignty
in favor of a servanthood ethos. It is already clear to us to whom we
belong. Because of our solid grounding in our own political community,
we can use the claims made by those from the outside to make claims on
them in return. We can use their mistaken notion that our primary allegiance
is to their system in order to make society a more humane place. Yet in
engaging them with their own language, we need not, and absolutely must
not, forget that we belong not to the American state but to the body of
Christ.
Endnotes
[1] Matt. 5:38-39, 41.
[2] Matt. 5:40, 42.
[3] Matt. 6:20-22, 25-33.
[4] 1 Cor. 6:19-20.
[5] Acts 5:29.
[6] Daniel M. Bell., Liberation Theology at the End of History: The
Refusal to Cease Suffering (New York: Routledge, 2001), 24.
[7] As in John Rawls’ (in)famous expression. See his very accessible
Justice as Fairness: (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001).
[8] William T. Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics,
and the Body of Christ (New York: Blackwell, 1998), 192.
[9] Cavanaugh, 193.
[10] Both Bell and Cavanaugh have pointed to Foucault’s analysis
of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon as accurately summing up the project
of modern liberal statecraft (Bell, 73-74; Cavanaugh, 192, ff).
[11] Although it does sometimes take this form, as when the religious
right identifies its politics with that of the Republican Party, or when
the German National Church of the 1930s aligned itself with the Nazi Party.
[12] Daniel M. Bell, “State and Civil Society” in the Blackwell
Companion to Political Theology, Peter Scott and William Cavanaugh,
eds. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 423-27.
[13] Bell, 424.
[14] Bell, 424.
[15] Bell, 423.
[16] Bell, 425.
[17] Bell, 426.
[18] Bell, 429-31.
[19] Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist, 196.
[20] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/3, Geoffrey Bromiley, trans.
(Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1968), 764.
[21] Joe R. Jones, A Grammar of Christian Faith: Systematic Explorations
in Christian Life and Doctrine. 2 vols. (Lanham. Md.: Rowman &
Littlefield, 2002), 50.
[22] Jones, 51.
[23] Jones, 52.
[24] John Howard Yoder, The Priestly Kingdom (Notre Dame, IN:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1984).
[25] Yoder’s own translation of Luke 22:25-27.
[26] Yoder, 156.
[27] Yoder, 156.
[28] Yoder, 156.
[29] Yoder, 157.
[30] Yoder, 158.
[31] Yoder, 159.
[32] Yoder, 158.
[33] This is one area in which I differ from an advocate of ‘public
theology,’ for since I reject the very possibility of a neutral
public square, I have no principled objections to using specifically
Christian language in the nation-state’s politics. However, from
a pragmatic standpoint, I realize that when such specifically Christian
language appears in political rhetoric, it is often misused to achieve
ends far from the liberating message of Jesus Christ, and so such language
is probably not the best method of achieving the church’s ends.
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