Christ and the Common Life

Political Theology and the Case for Democracy

Luke Bretherton

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780802876409
• eBook ISBN: 9781467456425
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

In  Christ and the Common Life  Luke Bretherton provides an introduction to historical and contemporary theological reflection on politics and opens up a compelling vision for a Christian commitment to democracy.

In dialogue with Scripture and various traditions, Bretherton examines the dynamic relationship between who we are in relation to God and who we are as moral and political animals. He addresses fundamental political questions about poverty and injustice, forming a common life with strangers, and handling power constructively. And through his analysis of debates concerning, among other things, race, class, economics, the environ­ment, and interfaith relations, he develops an innovative political theology of democracy as a way through which Christians can speak and act faithfully within our current context.

Read as a whole, or as stand-alone chapters, the book guides readers through the political landscape and identifies the primary vocabulary, ideas, and schools of thought that shape Christian reflection on politics in the West. Ideal for the classroom,   Christ and the Common Life  equips students to understand politics and its positive and negative role in fostering neighbor love.

CHAPTER 1

What Is Political Theology? What Is Politics?

We are immersed in talk of politics. It dominates the news cycle and conversations with friends and family. It shapes critical aspects of our lives and can even determine our sense of identity. Political talk arouses strong emotions, divides society, and can lead to war. It should therefore matter a great deal what kinds of speech count as political speech, how we talk together about politics, and whether we understand what people mean when they use a term like “democracy,” “state,” or “government.”

How anyone speaks about politics matters, but a specific challenge exists for Christians: many political terms are also terms Christians use to talk about who God is and who we are in relation to God. Words like “ruler” and “kingdom” have obvious political overtones. But even seemingly churchy words like “liturgy,” “ecclesial,” and “bishop” are explicitly political in origin. The symbiosis between talk of God and talk of politics sets up all sorts of potential connections, conflations, and confusions. Political concepts can illuminate but also be overidentified with theological ones, and vice versa. For example, when we talk of God’s sovereignty, is that the same as talking about the sovereignty of a state? Or should we understand these uses of “sovereignty” very differently? The potential for confusion becomes even more pronounced when we talk about the interaction between church and state or between the Christian life and political life. The attempt to talk rightly about the interaction between Christianity and politics generates different schools of thought, which articulate divergent understandings. For example, how Calvinists frame church-state relations (as involving a connected but mutually disciplining relationship) differs markedly from how Anabaptists understand it (as necessitating separation). If Christians are to understand each other, let alone their non-Christian neighbors, then greater clarity is needed about the ways in which different Christians approach political life. Added to this is the need for more generative and theologically robust ways of articulating how Christians should talk and act with others as moral and political animals. This book aims to address both needs.

Theological reflection on politics has come to be called, perhaps unsurprisingly, “political theology.” But what, precisely, is meant by this term? To answer this question, I first examine how confessing Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior inherently makes a claim about the nature and purpose of politics, but also, how all theological claims emerge from a political process. Second, I set out a theological rationale for politics. Third, I reflect on how political theology is not just a confessional endeavor. It can also constitute a form of “political philosophy”; that is, it can be a way of thinking about the nature and purpose of politics independent of whether or not someone confesses Jesus Christ as Lord. The division between confessional and nonconfessional approaches to political theology raises the question of how to classify different political theologies. This question is taken up in the fourth section. These initial parts focus on the theological dimensions of political theology. The fifth section analyzes its political aspects, exploring how politics is two-faced. On the one hand, politics denotes statecraft—top-down, unilateral, and coercive ways of ordering life together. On the other hand, it denotes a relational, bottom-up, and nonviolent craft for forging and sustaining a common life. Building on this distinction, I delineate in the sixth part how political theology both works with and reconfigures Greco-Roman ways of understanding the nature and purpose of politics, arguing that the ways it does so is paradigmatic for subsequent interactions between confessional political theology and other political philosophies. The final part extends this analysis to show how political theology also generates ways of reimagining economic and familial relations.

Political Theology as Theology

Politics is a foundational part of forging a good or flourishing life. The good life is not reducible to individual happiness: we are social creatures whose flourishing emerges out of and depends on being embedded in some form of common life. Moreover, a truly good, happy, and meaningful life cannot be built on the domination of others. Therefore, to ask what the good or moral life is necessitates asking about how such a life is symbiotic with the flourishing of others. It requires asking what the interpersonal, structural, ecological, and cosmic conditions of human flourishing are, and conversely, how their absence constitutes a form of suffering.

As the central way humans create and order their common life, politics determines whether this common life is just or unjust, generous or heartless, peaceable or violent. Politics is therefore central to the nature and form of the good or moral life, and thus any analysis of the nature and form of morality must include reflection on the nature of political life.¹ Unsurprisingly then, from the Bible onward, political life has figured largely in theological reflection on the meaning, purpose, and ordering of human life in response to the revelation of God given in Jesus Christ. But such reflection is also always already contextual, as theological and political questions arise through having to negotiate a common life in a specific time and place.

Theology is not reducible to politics. That is to say, politics does not exhaust the meaning and purpose of theology. However, theology always has a political valence, and its formulation and articulation involve political, economic, and social processes. An example of this is the Nicene Creed, which, after Scripture, is a primary document of Christian confession. It is a vital formulation of Christian belief and means of paradosis (the handing on of faith between generations). It contains reflection on the nature and form of politics. And it was written as the result of a political process involving Roman imperial authorities. But no single one of these three elements should wholly determine how to interpret the creed. Rather, each of these elements is important for understanding this creed as a form of Christian confession.

To pick up on just one of these elements, the creed testifies to the centrality of politics to questions about who God is and who we are in relation to God. Alongside Mary and Jesus, the figure of Pontius Pilate is the only other human person named in both the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed. His inclusion signifies something vital about the nature of politics and the nature of the relationship between Christianity and all forms of political order.² Politics is always time and site specific, involving particular persons making judgments in specific places. When talk about politics becomes too abstract, it loses touch with how granular histories are the forge in which political life is cast. Political theology must account for how sweeping historical forces such as capitalism, or systemic injustices such as racism and sexism, determine conditions for action. But a Christian account of political life must avoid any fervor to see the world wholly in structural terms. Rather, it should always keep in view how it is nameable persons who must take responsibility and be held accountable for the right and wrong judgments they make or omit to make.³ Here the contrast between Pilate and Mary is instructive. Mary, someone without status and oppressed in multiple ways, acts in faith and love toward God, and in so doing changes the cosmos. Pilate, someone with high status and authority over life and death, acts out of fear and pride, rejects God, but his actions achieve nothing but their own negation.

Pilate points to how God judges and condemns the Roman Empire and the form of political order it represents and embodies. Jesus was judged to be an enemy of the dominant religious-political order, and so was condemned to be shamed and humiliated through crucifixion. The form this humiliation took was a parodic exaltation designed to make a grotesque spectacle of and thereby mock the pretensions of Jesus to be a king. But God the Father glorified Jesus, inverting the parody, thereby mocking and shaming the established authorities of the day. As a way of humbling the self-proclaimed rulers of the age, Christ’s crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension are a twofold response. First, there is a reversal that upends sovereignty understood in imperial, tyrannous, and exploitative terms so that such forms of lordship are dethroned and shown to be anti-Christic.⁴ The drama and radical newness of this reversal—whereby ancient forms of dignity and glory are revealed to be preposterous and pretentious, and a seditious, possibly lunatic slave embodies and becomes the criterion for identifying what is true, good, and beautiful—are often lost on contemporary readers.⁵ Pilate is in the creeds because this reversal is vital for understanding why the gospel is good news. Pilate, far from being the center of the story (and in the archive of recorded history, it is the Pilates of this world who are always the center of the story), is a marginal figure. Jesus is the main character, and in the creeds, Jesus’s story is the turning point of all history.

Second, Christ’s crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension reveal the impotence of fallen principalities and powers, who, when challenged, can only constrain, punish, and kill, and in doing so expose the limits of their power and their fear of their own limits. In contrast to Pilate, and in him all worldly authorities of which he is a type, the resurrection and ascension unveil the deepest and only life-giving source of power: the power of the Spirit. The Spirit brings calm out of storms, health out of disease, and resurrection out of death. And at Pentecost, this power is poured out on all flesh so that all may have abundant life. By implication, at the most basic level of confession, Christians are to realize that the institutions and structures of this world, and those who rule them, while fearsome, are not in control, and do not have the last word. Jesus is the Alpha and Omega and, as Lord of the cosmos, relativizes and points beyond all human structures and authorities that shape our common life. His Lordship admits no other—there is only one, and this one is like no other—meaning that it defines and relativizes all other claims to rule (Deut. 6:4–5). Conversely, politics and economics neither exhaust nor explain what it means to be human; while bread is necessary to live, we cannot live by bread alone.

Echoing how the creeds position Pilate, political theology is bifocal. It articulates the nature, form, and purpose of political life in the light of the revelation of God given in Jesus Christ while at the same time attending to the historical realities in which that life is lived. Political theology discerns the consonance and dissonance between the form of rule incarnated and inaugurated by Jesus Christ and the orders and authorities shaping this age between Christ’s ascension and return. At times, it identifies how penultimate authorities obey Christ, while at other times it detects how they are anti-Christic. Political theology aids our discernment of how to act appropriately in this time, in both its historical and its eschatological register. To be Christian, any process of discernment must itself be subject to the gospel, which is no easy matter, as the gospel is anarchic, fissile material, at once disruptive and creative in its political effects.

So What Is Theological about Political Theology?

As already indicated, “theology” in the term “political theology” refers to reflection on the nature and form of political life in response to Jesus Christ as the revelation of God. Thus, it is woven into and out of theological anthropology, that is, the articulation of what humans are as creatures and sinners who are redeemed and fulfilled in and through Jesus Christ and in the power of the Holy Spirit. Theological anthropology constitutes the normative basis of political theology. And it is the Bible, along with its reception in myriad subsequent confessions of belief and practice (e.g., the creeds), that is the primary point of reference for envisioning and describing what it means to be human and how to situate political life within a wider drama of divine-human relations. This book tracks various understandings of what it means to be human—some more theological than others—and has a whole chapter devoted to just this question. Put schematically, driving the constructive elements of my arguments is the attempt to think through political theology from the standpoint of what it means to be a creature, to be in covenantal relation with God and neighbor (whether through the institutions of the church or not), and to be open to conversion (to be a sinner in need of and receptive to the work of the Spirit in healing and delivering creation, thereby reopening creation to its eschatological fulfillment).

As creatures, situated in various covenantal relations, and in need of conversion, we are always already in relationship with others. Our personhood is the fruit of a social and wider ecological womb as much as a single physical one; that is, we come to be in and through others not like us, including nonhuman others. This means we cannot exist without some kind of common life with a plurality of human and nonhuman ways of being alive. The theological claim is that we cannot enjoy a fullness of existence without communion with God. Given what it means to be a fallen, finite, and frail creature whose survival and flourishing depend on the care of others, the formation of a common life is necessary to live. And the formation of any form of common life entails politics. We act politically, for better or worse, when we do the work of forging and sustaining patterns of common life. The character and form of a distinctively Christian vision of political relations—and thence the basis of a common life—are based on neighbor love. I spell out below what I mean by neighbor love and how it incorporates love of the stranger, the enemy, and the friendless.

If one foundational warrant for political theology is our relationship to God and others, another is our relationship to time and space. If humans are to participate more lovingly and justly in forms of common life with each other, with nonhuman life, and with God, then the current social, political, and economic structures need to change. That the current spatial and temporal order of things is not inevitable or necessary, and that it can and should change, is a central scriptural theme. Abram and Sarai must leave Haran to become Abraham and Sarah. God delivers Israel from Egypt. The institutions of kingship in Israel are ambiguous in origin and wayward in practice, so that prophets must remind the king of a higher law than their own writ. Babylon is a place of exile, not the way things should be. And while Jesus Christ has come, creation still groans as we await Christ’s return. In these stories and tropes, the Bible deconstructs and offers an alternative to any attempt to write a particular social, economic, and political order into the cosmic order in such a way that a contingent and fallen way of ordering time and space is inscribed with an immutable character and posited as inevitable, natural, or “just the way things should be.” However, the tension between the world as it is and the world as it will be in the kingdom of God gives rise to a dilemma at the heart of political theology. We must strive to see present political arrangements from the standpoint of eternity so that we can understand them as spatially and temporally contingent. However, to make political judgments as if one is already a full-fledged inhabitant of God’s eternal realm is to render what is contingent sacrosanct and unchangeable. Instead, we must accept the contingency and frailty of our judgments (however righteous the cause) as the price of admitting we are temporal, not eternal. To be faithful, political judgments must be held lightly (thereby resisting making this age a final home), even as they are made with the intention to live now in the light of eternity.

However strong the temptation, the political, social, and economic order of the day should not be equated with God’s oikonomia, that is, God’s cultivation of the cosmos. The church often forgets this injunction, with terrible consequences, but prophetic figures and movements are raised up by the Spirit to help the church remember it. From the martyrs’ refusal to bow the knee to the Roman emperor as Lord, through to modern confessions such as Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), David Walker’s Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World (1829), the Barmen Declaration (1934) against the Nazis, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (1963), it is a foundational (if often ignored) political insight of Christianity that there is a need to deconstruct and offer an alternative to any attempt to sanctify a political order or to say it is immutable. At the same time, pursuit of the kingdom of God is inseparable from pursuit of penultimate goods in common. Down the centuries, political theologies have at times coordinated pursuit of the kingdom of God and pursuit of penultimate goods and at other times conflated them.

Political Theology as Political Philosophy

What I have outlined so far is a Christian conception of political theology. But the term has a history both before and outside of Christian usage. As a term, it can refer to how pre-Christian Stoic philosophy envisaged the beliefs and practices associated with state cults that divinized and personified the political order through divine figures such as Athena or Jupiter. The “political theology” of a polity was contrasted with “natural theology,” said to transcend any given political order and be universal. More recently, the term has been associated with a stream of thinkers who raid the Christian archive to furnish themselves with categories and concepts for reflection on modern politics. They utilize the Christian archive out of recognition that, at least in the West, much of the language and conceptual grammar of political life has roots in theological beliefs and practices. Nevertheless, this is nonconfessional, “postsecular” political theology. At the same time, it is entwined with and contributes to explicitly confessional forms of political theology.

A synonym for political theology could be Christian political philosophy. However, as already noted, this does not quite capture the ways non-Christians have taken up the theological archive for reflection on politics. And feeding into contemporary political theology is the complex intellectual history of the relationship between political philosophy and theology in the West, so that figures such as Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin, Thomas Hobbes, G. W. F. Hegel, Jane Addams, and Martin Luther King Jr. are part of both the canon of political theology and the canon of “secular” political thought. Conversely, avowed non-Christian thinkers such as Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Hannah Arendt deploy theological terms and can be vital interlocutors in explicitly Christian political theology. Poli...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. What Is Political Theology? What Is Politics?
• Part One: Case Studies in Political Theology
• Part Two: Sustaining a Common Life
• Part Three: Forming a Common Life
• Acknowledgments
• Bibliography
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects