Separation of God and politics

Politics may not be polarised between Christian and non-Christian as though only Christians know what is right. In the Bible the arrogance of Israel and the church is time and time again shamed by examples of the alien who acts with true justice and faith, the book of Jonah being the most celebrated. Atheist politicians may do the will of God unknowingly and those who call themselves Christian may not. Indeed “Christian” is now used as a promotional label for all kinds of things. We have Christian radio and Christian schools and Christian business directories as well as Christian political parties. These bodies are not the church. They promote themselves as though they know what “Christian” means. But what “Christian” means is yet to appear to us, it is a work in progress, as is the Kingdom of God. Christians are like Abraham, called to an unknown future. All Christians can really do is to follow in the way of their Lord in the hope that they will become like Him. To define what that is like in terms of values is to substitute the living Christ for so-called Christian ethics.

Christians are the community that live out the Christian “story” as it is rehearsed each year in the liturgical calendar of the church. This is the only story that it hears. It does not listen to the stories of endless progress or embellished lifestyle or nationalism or even of the family. This is why they are called aliens in a strange land. While they contribute to society and obey its laws, their lives are governed by a different Lord. Contrary to popular belief, their focus is not getting to heaven after they die, but to live in expectation of the rule of justice and righteousness of which they are the first fruits, the Kingdom of God. 

Oliver O’Donovan, in his book The Desire of the Nations describes the relationship between church and society with deadly accuracy:

There is only one society which is incorporated into the Kingdom of God and which recapitulates the narrative of the Christ-event, and that is the church. Even in deep Christendom civil society was not identical with the church, but, at most, merged with it on the surface in a  prosodic union. Society shaped by the presence of the church forms a kind of penumbra to the church, a radiation of it rather than a participation in it. Society in this form has constantly been challenged and invited by the proclamation of the church; it has been heedful, but not wholly obedient; it has been claimed for the Kingdom, but not sacramentally made part of it. It has respect for the community of Christ, even a profound sense of identification with it, to the point where it can lose the sense of the difference and conceives itself as being the church. Yet it is not the church. Pending the final disclosure of the Kingdom of God, the church and society are in a dialectical relation, distant from each other as well as identified. Though many members of a society have decided for the Gospel, society has not yet decided. It stands on the threshold, not within the door. It has before it the possibility of deciding either way, for the Kingdom or against it.