Recent decisions at my alma mater have really challenged and disheartened me. For those of you who know me, you know that I am suspicious of the wedding of the American government and bipartisan politics to the Christian community. Politically, I hover on the left side of the aisle. I say hover intentionally, because, though I am often a gadfly toward the right and engage in bipartisan political banter, I have chosen to refrain from voting as a personal confessional and theological decision. (Still, I love a good political discussion and am thankful to my poli-sci friends for their willingness to let this amateur engage in the discussion.)
For several weeks, I have tried to establish the framework that what we believe makes a difference in how we live. Christianity is not the intellectual assent to a set of doctrinal beliefs, but a way of allowing our (orthodox?) theology to propel orthopraxy (right living) or ethics. To believe in the cross makes a difference in how you live, but what you believe about the cross makes a difference in how you embody or incarnate that belief in your daily life.
I submit for discussion here, this article by Michael Gorman: The Healthy Church: Embodying the Cross in Perilous Times. (The title for this post flows from the title of his book Cruciformity: Paul's Narrative Spirituality of the Cross.) In this article Gorman attempts to address the struggle of the marriage of churches in
Monday, August 22, 2005
Cruciformity: The Cross and the Empire
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4 comments:
In quick response, with more to follow, I reference again the two posts I wrote below - now in the archives - on this page. "The Separation of Kingdom and State," parts I & II. Part one is in the April archive.
Thanks for initiating this discussion again.
Soory, I'm confused. Wrong page: www.paxfellaship.blogspot.com
Here it is:
The questions you ask here and that we've discussed elsewhere turn on a question of citizenship. We have dual, but not contradictory, goals as citizens of the Heaven and as citizens and political participants in our earthly nation-state. The roles easily can be confused.
As I hoped to express in "The Separation of Kingdom and State, Part I" (our April Archive), the higher calling and duty is to Heaven, and our citizenship and political participation here requires us to act that way. Kile said elsewhere that the downfall of the USA would not affect the calling of the Kingdom; our responsibility to glorify God, to love and serve our neighbors, would remain.
The Kingdom is called to join the Lord's ministry of reconciliation, and we cannot do that in isolation. We must engage our neighbors and our government, guided by the principles I cited in Part II.
Our republican democracy affords us many tools to the ends of the kingdom, the Rule of Law first among them. The use of our constitutional government can bring peace and provision to the poor, to protect and promote justice for the weak and poor as to the affluent and powerful. Many Kingdom visions are realized in our system, because of our cultural assumption that the law rules us, not men.
Even so, power corrupts, distorts, distracts. The rich will have a difficult time making it through the needle's eye, and we indeed are rich and powerful. Thus, to contradict our contemporary imperialistic tendency at abusive crusade, I pose the question I posed to my poli-sci students: would we rather have a Christian Nation or a nation of Christians? A "Christian Nation" cannot exist, in the first part because our Lord never made use himself of political systems to effect his goals of salvation and reconciliation. He engaged the people themselves. Rather, a republican democracy will reflect the values and demands of its governed, so if its governed are interested primarily in peacemaking, service to the poor and reconciliation, the system will reflect it.
Therefore our burden as the chuch is not to dominate the government and wrest control from heathen politicians to recognize some theocractic legal dream. Our burden is to draw the people to the Father one by one, to reconcile the Church to its neighbors, to model the virtues of Jesus, to seek the deliverance of individuals whom we love and are given to love. This is a much bigger job, far more difficult than overthrowing Rome, but it is the mission Christ gave to us. If we live and love like he has shown us, realizing the mission of the Kingdom, the government will respond.
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