“From one man he
made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked
out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands.” – Acts
17:26
“Does the ax
raise itself above the person who swings it,
or
the saw boast against the one who uses it?
As if a rod were to wield the person
who lifts it up,
or
a club brandish the one who is not wood!” – Isaiah 10:15
*******
An appeal to,
what Michael L. Budde calls “ecclesial solidarity” seems like much more than a
good idea in today’s socio-political landscape wherein people, in one way or
another, vote on a daily basis for various businesses and people, projects and
ideologies. More than a “good idea,” a
consideration of ecclesial solidarity is a requirement,
for in the words of Shane Claiborn and Chris Haw: “We vote every day with our feet, our hands,
our lips, and our wallets.”[1] Budde defines ecclesial solidarity as “the
conviction that ‘being a Christian’ is one’s primary and formative loyalty, the
one that contextualizes and defines the legitimacy of other claimants on
allegiance and conscience.”[2] Our primary and formative convictions,
whether our hearts lie with the nation-state, the welfare-state, the “free”
market, the church, or any other claimant on our allegiance, affect the way we
live in more ways than we possibly can imagine.
For this reason, an examination of the claimants on our allegiance
demands a careful consideration on our part, on the Christian’s part, regarding
the identity of these would-be claimants and whether they have any truly
legitimate prerogative to demand of Christians the highest measure of loyalty
and devotion.
*******
In the sea of
loyalty-seeking entities, American exceptionalism—on the one hand with roots in
the Judeo-Christian narrative, and on the other hand with roots in the
Enlightenment—has had a powerful effect on the way that Americans, Christian or
otherwise, have contextualized their loyalty.
Of these two roots of American exceptionalism, William T. Cavanaugh
notes:
The first [the Judeo-Christian narrative] explicitly appeals to Christian theological concepts such as the election of Israel and God’s providence. The second appeals to Enlightenment language concerning the universal applicability of the American value of freedom. The two would appear to be at odds: the one appeals to a nation under the Christian God, the other to the freedom to have one God, none, or many.[3]
Despite the
apparent contradiction between the Judeo-Christian and Enlightenment roots of
American exceptionalism, Cavanaugh asserts that these differences in starting
point and language lead to the same destination: the divination of the state, which results
from “a direct, unmediated relationship” between the state and one of the two “transcendent
realities”—the one being God; the other being “freedom.”[4]
Cavanaugh
suggests, well enough in his own words, regarding theological exceptionalism,
that:
In its original form, American exceptionalism is an explicitly theological notion, based in the doctrine of election. Just as God chose the Israelites to accomplish God’s special purposes on earth, so God has chosen the United States. The promise to make Abraham a “great nation” includes the promise of a new land (Gen. 12:1-2). The doctrine of election is based in the notion of God’s choice of a particular people at a particular moment in history, but it also contains a strong element of universalism. Abraham is promised blessings not only for his own people; his people would, in turn, become a blessing for the whole earth (Gen. 12:3). There is a strongly universalizing missionary impulse at the heart of the doctrine of election. Salvation is not just for the Jews, but through the Jews, for the sake of the whole world.[5]
Cavanaugh goes
on to argue that the doctrine of election gave Christians impetus to see the
church as a fulfillment of God’s promise.
Thus, in the minds of New Testament exegetists, the church had assumed
the role of Israel. This notion was
maintained until, in the mid part of the last millennium, nation-states, in the
modern sense, began to emerge from the patchwork allegiances of medieval
feudalism. In the new age of modernity
that emerged from medievalism, England, then the Puritan colonists of America,
followed ultimately by the United States, each in turn, assumed—or at least
presumed to assume—the role of God’s elected people who lived in Abrahamic
covenant with God.[6]
In both the
English and the Puritan perspective, God’s elect were to be ruled by some
variety of theocracy. State and church
were to be closely knit. However, the
First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution put an end to any notion of
theocracy. According to Cavanaugh:
[W]ith the shift from Puritan theocracy to the disestablishment of the church in the First Amendment, the theme of the new Israel became an important one in nascent American nationalism. The relationship between God and America was increasingly direct. The church came to mediate, not between God and America [as it had mediated between God and the civil authorities in Puritan theocracy], but between the individual and God and between the individual and America. The new Israel was identified not with any church or churches in their manifold diversity, but with America as such.[7]
Of little surprise
is the fact that this understanding of America—that it was the new Israel—led
to, among many beliefs regarding American exceptionalism, the development of
Manifest Destiny. As stated Herman
Melville, with borderline religious intensity about the exceptional nature of
the United States’ Manifest Destiny in world history:
Long enough have we been skeptics with regard to ourselves, and doubted whether, indeed, the political Messiah had come. But he has come in us, if we would but give utterance to his promptings. And let us always remember that with ourselves, almost for the first time in the history of the earth, national selfishness is unbounded philanthropy; for we cannot do a good to America, but we give alms to the world.[8]
Cavanaugh keenly
observes, with regard to Melville’s words, that “Here we see a shift from a
nation under God to a nation as God’s incarnation on earth, the nation as
Messiah.” Such an understanding allowed
for the justification of “wed[ing] biblical notions of providence to the
progress of the world toward American-style democracy and free-market
capitalism.”[9]
*******
In today’s
America, we have effectively divinized the state. The state and government authority serve as
the primary means whereby any and all acts of justice and power lie. The state god, which is the state itself, has
established itself in place of Christ on the proverbial “alter” of public
worship. Nevertheless, many American Christians
go along with the act as if nothing is out of place. The unique distinction that our society makes
between “private” and “public” spheres of influence has served to domesticate
Christian loyalties by getting it within our minds that one, despite Jesus’
claims to the contrary, can indeed serve God and mammon. Though in public one must ally with Caesar,
in private one may ally with Christ.
But, as Christ says:
No servant can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth (Luke 16:13).
Nor can you
serve God and Caesar, for the loyalty demanded from Christ is all subsuming:
If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple. And whoever does not carry their cross and follow me cannot be my disciple (Luke 14:26-27).
Does it make
sense to assert that the act of forsaking family does not include also
forsaking government authority, or, for that matter, any other authority but
Christ? No. Any allegiance outside of allegiance to
Christ pales comparatively.
But what then of
Jesus’ response to the Pharisees regarding the imperial tax to Caesar?
Later they sent some of the Pharisees and Herodians to Jesus to catch him in his words. They came to him and said, “Teacher, we know that you are a man of integrity. You aren’t swayed by others, because you pay no attention to who they are; but you teach the way of God in accordance with the truth. Is it right to pay the imperial tax to Caesar or not? Should we pay or shouldn’t we?”
But
Jesus knew their hypocrisy. “Why are you
trying to trap me?” he asked. “Bring me
a denarius and let me look at it.” They
brought the coin, and he asked them, “Whose image is this? And whose inscription?”
“Caesar’s,”
they replied.
Then
Jesus said to them, “Give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is
God’s.”
And
they were amazed at him (Matthew 12:13-17).
Though many find
in this pericope validation for state authority, they fail to take note of the
fact that there is nothing of Caesar’s that God does not have greater claim
to. This is what is so amazing about
Jesus’ response. Though His answer does
not straightaway subvert government authority, it concurrently and profoundly
critiques government authority. Does
government truly have claim to our money where God does not? Does government truly have claim to our
allegiance where God does not? These are
the unspoken questions uttered by Jesus in the presence of the Pharisees and
Herodians.
*******
The question of
whom or what is owed our loyalty as Christians should have a straightforward
answer: Christ. Nevertheless, many Christians seem to
struggle reconciling giving unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and giving to God what
is God’s. As it is, many end up giving
Caesar everything, or at least most everything, while they, at the same time,
give God only some spare moments of private devotion. Clairborne and Haw offer a clearer depth to
the state of the diagnosis:
We are seeing more and more that the church has fallen in love with the state and that this love affair is killing the church’s imagination. The powerful benefits and temptations of running the world’s largest superpower have bent the church’s identity. Having power at its fingertips, the church often finds “guiding the course of history” a more alluring goal than following the crucified Christ. Too often the patriotic values of pride and strength triumph over the spiritual values of humility, gentleness, and sacrificial love.[10]
With regard to
allegiances, voting in local, state, and federal elections should not go
unnoticed for its formative effects on our imagination as well. As Ted Lewis notes:
Voting for political leaders, whether we think about it not, establishes bonds between people and governments in similar ways that religion establishes bonds between peoples and deities…[S]uch bonds of allegiance do not fit within the new vision of community set forth in the New Testament. On the positive side, this new vision suggests that our choosing, binding, promising, pledging, and vowing energies are to be expressed for the sake of the ekklesia, the “called-out” community, and are not to be expressed for the upbuilding of a state, nation, or empire.[11]
*******
As Christians,
we should always take heed of our political surroundings. Who seeks our vote? Who demands our allegiance? Who wants our money? From the perspective of the Christian
narrative, God is owed all loyalty, all service, and all wealth, and the body
politic of God is the Heavenly Kingdom on Earth, the church, the Body of
Christ. Though the church has been engrafted into the inheritance of Abraham, though
the church is in covenant with God,
the state is not. So, when we consider the state, we should not
mistake it for the New Israel, as so many Americans (Christian and otherwise)
seem so want to do. The church is God’s chosen people, his
people who have been called out from the nations in order to form a new nation,
a new people, a new ethnicity, a new family wherein every member is a relative,
a neighbor, and a friend. Meanwhile, the
U.S. may be likened to Assyria in Isaiah 10, which is the “axe,” the “saw”, the
“rod,” and “club” of God’s justice and will in the world. And though we presume that the enactors of
God’s will are not simultaneously being prepared for His wrath, America, like
all nations, rulers, and principalities established by God, and like Assyria in
Isaiah 10, is a tool of God’s will that, because of its haughtiness and pride, God
is simultaneously preparing for judgment.
Christians are
not to see themselves in terms of nationalistic citizenship. God has called us out of the world into His
eternal Kingdom. Upon our baptism, we
become citizens anew, by birth, of the Kingdom of God, and this kingdom does
not allow for dual citizenship. When you
become a Christian you become a “resident alien” of the nation in which you
find yourself. As is noted in the Letter to Diognetus:
For the Christians are distinguished from other men neither by country, nor language, nor the customs which they observe. For they neither inhabit cities of their own, nor employ a peculiar form of speech, nor lead a life which is marked out by any singularity. The course of conduct which they follow has not been devised by any speculation or deliberation of inquisitive men; nor do they, like some, proclaim themselves the advocates of any merely human doctrines. But, inhabiting Greek as well as barbarian cities, according as the lot of each of them has determined, and following the customs of the natives in respect to clothing, food, and the rest of their ordinary conduct, they display to us their wonderful and confessedly striking method of life. They dwell in their own countries, but simply as sojourners. As citizens, they share in all things with others, and yet endure all things as if foreigners. Every foreign land is to them as their native country, and every land of their birth as a land of strangers. They marry, as do all [others]; they beget children; but they do not destroy their offspring. They have a common table, but not a common bed. They are in the flesh, but they do not live after the flesh. They pass their days on earth, but they are citizens of heaven. They obey the prescribed laws, and at the same time surpass the laws by their lives. They love all men, and are persecuted by all. They are unknown and condemned; they are put to death, and restored to life. They are poor, yet make many rich; they are in lack of all things, and yet abound in all; they are dishonoured, and yet in their very dishonour are glorified. They are evil spoken of, and yet are justified; they are reviled, and bless; they are insulted, and repay the insult with honour; they do good, yet are punished as evil-doers. When punished, they rejoice as if quickened into life; they are assailed by the Jews as foreigners, and are persecuted by the Greeks; yet those who hate them are unable to assign any reason for their hatred.[12]Let us live as Christians, then, and not as this world would have us live. Let us view our world through the lens of ecclesial solidarity and so put all other claimants of our allegiance in their proper place
[1] Claiborn and Haw. Jesus
for President. 334.
[2] Budde.
The Borders of Baptism. 3.
[3] Cavanaugh, William T. Migrations
of the Holy: God, State, and the
Political Meaning of the Church. 89.
[4] Ibid.
89.
[5] Ibid.
89.
[6] Ibid.
89-91.
[7] Ibid.
91.
[8] Melville, Herman. White
Jacket, or, the World in a Man-of-War. 150-151.
[9] Cavanaugh, William T. Migrations
of the Holy. 92.
[10] Clairborne and Haw. Jesus for President. 17.
[11] Lewis.
Electing Not to Vote. 101.
[12] Letter
to Diognetus. Chapter 5.
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