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How can the church speak the truth to power?

How can the church speak the truth to power?

Last updated on: September 18, 2009 at 6:00 am by Gene Veith

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How can the church speak the truth to power? 2009-09-18T06:00:41-04:00 Gene Veith

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Ian Adams, the communications director of the Lutheran Church in Canada, alerted me to this blog post from Allan Bevere, On Why the Church in America Cannot Speak Truth to Power:

There are many political catch-phrases that have become useless in modern politics– phrases like “the politics of fear,” “the politicizing of whatever,” “the culture of corruption.” But perhaps the most useless political phrase of all is the high-sounding but irrelevant phraseology of “speaking truth to power.”

Many years ago, philosopher Alasdair McIntyre wrote the wonderful book, Whose Justice, Which Rationality, in which he argued that all conceptions of justice and rationality presuppose a tradition that give them definition. Likewise, the notions of “truth” and “power” are not universal terms which everyone understands; rather they too presuppose a tradition, a context, a narrative, that make them intelligible.

So, why is it that the church in America today cannot speak truth to power? The reasons are two-fold: First, the vast majority of Christians in America have accepted the Constantinian notion that the primary political task of the church is to rule, to be in charge. What that means at the very least is that Christians are to play a prophetic role in the political court of Washington DC. Second, it means that most Christians have accepted the modern dichotomies of left/right, liberal/conservative, Democrat/Republican.

In accepting these two “truths” the problem becomes clear. As Christians, instead of identifying ourselves as primarily kingdom citizens, we see ourselves first and foremost as Democrats or Republicans, conservatives or liberals. The Sermon on the Mount gets eclipsed by the political platforms of the DNC and the RNC. We like to say that we transcend such earthly contrived political conventions, but we can point to very little evidence to show that this is indeed the case. James Dobson is clearly a conservative Republican and Jim Wallis is obviously a liberal Democrat. The only truth they speak to power is their own Republican or Democratic truth to the power of the other party. The criticism of their own is basically absent or woefully inadequate as best. It appears that both men desire to play the role of Nathan in David’s court, but they find they only have influence in that court when “David” is part of their own party; and then their prophetic denunciations are reserved only for the opposition outside the court and not those who are in power. They have very little of a prophetic nature to say to the king from their own party whom they serve. In other words, the church cannot speak truth to power because the church itself is up to its armpits in power and, therefore, has a stake in such power.

In cosying up to the principalities and powers, Christians on the left and the right have chosen the politics of power over the politics of witness; indeed, they cannot even imagine, in spite of what they say, what the politics of the Kingdom of God might look like apart from the politics of left and right. Take the recent health care debate as an example– Christians on the left argue that health care is a right and Christians on the right proffer that health care is a commodity– and neither side bothers to consider the possibility that both “rights” and “commodities” are notions not found in Scripture and that both concepts are theologically problematic.

In accepting the above named two-fold presuppositions, Christians speak the same language as everyone else thus making it far from clear why Christianity even matters in the public sphere. . . .

And therein is the heart of the problem. That most Christians in America believe that the church’s primary role is to affect policy in Washington DC betrays the mistaken belief that the primary political action in this world is to be found in the White House and on Capitol Hill, when the New Testament clearly indicates that the primary agency of politics is located in nothing less than the community of faith known as the church. In order for the church to speak truth to power it must recover its unique polity apart from the earthly polity known as the nation state; for it is God and not the nations who rules the world.

My great concern is that when Christians in America want to play the role of prophet in Pharaoh’s court, they end up looking, not like the wise sage, but the court jester that gets used by the king for his or her own comical and unsavory purposes.

We Lutherans would not accept the “Constantinian notion” that the church is to rule. I suspect most readers of this blog, of whatever tradition, would not think that the “church’s primary role” is to influence Washington.

Ian asks how the doctrine of the Two Kingdoms would relate to this argument. I would think it would mean, among other things, that even the local church, as such, should not be all about affecting politics. This does NOT mean, however, that individual Christians, in their vocation as citizens, should shrink away from politics.

While many Christians go from one extreme of trying to rule the world politically to the other extreme of not having anything to do with politics, the Two Kingdom answer would be to affirm secular action in the secular realm. Which means that Christians are free to fall into the regular political categories of Left and Right, and to be involved in the normal work of political parties. Some of those parties may violate the secular moral order that is implicit in the Kingdom of the Left, such as advocating the abortion of unborn children, which violates not our religion but the secular obligation of justice in protecting human life. At any rate, under the Two Kingdoms, we don’t have to baptize our politics, and we must be careful not to confuse our politics with our faith. Christians should use secular politics to fight the evil of abortion, even as the church extends Christ’s forgiveness to those who have had abortions. Furthermore, Christians of EVERY political persuasion–liberals, conservatives, libertarians, Republicans, Democrats–should ALL fight abortion.

What do you think about this?

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