Obviously, I mean for the title of this entry to be provocative. To claim that Christian faith - the teachings of Jesus - might lead us to vote for one candidate over the other is a dicey proposition. Any attempt to equate the Kingdom of God with any earthly ideology, party or program is a perversion of the gospel. (Theological background on that point? Read The Barmen Declaration).
But on the other hand - is it not also a shirking of our responsibility as Christians if our faith somehow does not gain traction in our political thinking? If politics is simply "the art of living together", how could Christian teaching not have some bearing on our political decisions? Does Jesus have something to say about economics? Over 1/3 of his words were devoted to them. Does he have to say something about our caring for the poor? Personal responsibility? Abortion? You be the judge.
How does your faith relate to your politics...if it does at all? The title of this entry makes the assumption that Jesus would indeed be voting. There are some who assert that Christians - people who are called to be radically "other" - might see the rather radical choice of not voting at all as one that has integrity - especially if you see Jesus as a radical, apocalyptic prophet of the end-times, who was content to leave politics to Caesar, in order fry the bigger fish of the true Kingdom that he came to announce.
What do you think? Let's see if we can break our record of 4 responses!
Blessings,
Jeff V.
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8 comments:
I think Jesus would prefer the Labour party over the Likud party. The opportunity may be nearing, as the Guardian had this report yesterday: Israel came a step closer to early parliamentary elections on Friday when the ultra-orthodox Shas party announced it would not join a coalition led by Israeli premier-designate Tzipi Livni.
This is the election that you are talking about, right?
Have you seen this voter guide from Sojourners? I find this incredibly helpful for folks.
Peace, Beth
http://www.sojo.net/action/alerts/VOP_voter-guide.pdf
Thanks for the opportunity to vote on voting, Jeff!
Romans 13 says that "there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God." Therefore I think that voting itself is required of us not only as good citizens, but because we become God's agents for appointing the leaders he institutes.
And, as we bow the knee only to Christ, we ought not be captive to any party, but to Christ alone.
That truth, of course, brings us to your question, "How would Jesus vote?"
I suspect Jesus would never tell us, exactly! He certainly would never name a party, because he would never want us to bow a knee to a special interest group. We would immediately start to idolize a party or candidate. And it is instructive that the only time Jesus became truly political (unless you count feeding the pour as political or "just" - I count that as living under the command to love God and neighbor) was when he was inside the temple walls and took a stand against the temple leaders.
Christ, in other words, kept the "two kingdoms distinct." He cares more for the City of God than the City of Man, becuase the kingdom of this world will pass away.
So how would he vote? We should "look for able men among all the people, men who fear God, are trustworthy, and hate dishonest gain." (Ex.18:21) and like Samuel choose people of integrity, who are guided by the common good.
I think a bigger question - before, during or after the election - from Christ to us is, not "How are my people voting?" but what are my people doing to advance my kingdom in the world? Are they proclaiming me as the only hope for humanity?"
Hey - we're on our way to a record response. Fanstastic!
Mark...wow, you are more up on on Israeli politics than I. I suppose that WOULD be the election in which Jesus would be voting.
A tangent here...but nevertheless. Did you read of the remarkable statements that Ehud Olmert has made about how Israel MUST give back the West Bank to the Palestinians, in order to attain peace? Stunning. The man who inherited the mantle of Ariel Sharon, calling for such a concession toward peace. (See: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/30/world/middleeast/30olmert.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=ehud%20olmert&st=cse&oref=slogin). I find the whole thing astonishing - but even more astonishing that I've found so very little press about it.
If Jesus wouldn't vote for him after such a change of heart, I would be tempted, were I a citizen of that land....
Thanks for the response Beth about the Sojo voter guide. Very very cool - and helpful.
And...David! So great for you to join in the conversation! Well said and well reasoned. Your reflections reminded me of some of the things I've heard Shane Claiborne say: your vote is important, but what is really MOST important is how one lives one's life on the majority of days one is NOT voting. Our REAL vote is really the way we live.
I am so firmly in agreement with your assertion that we can never identify the agenda of Jesus (the Kingdom of God) with the agenda of any political party, leader or ideology. It seems so obvious to me that this is idolatry - but it seems so many people who seek to deploy their faith confuse this. Why is it so easy for people of faith (on both sides of the spectrum) to jump into bed with ideology and party?
I wanted to ask, after reading your reflection: how do you arrive at the assertion that God does not care about the earthly city as much, since it is passing away, in favor of the City of God? True, it is a rationale that we ought (ala Shane) not to expect that politicians will be our salvation--that our salvation is in party, ideology, or faith in "progress". But how do we not take that too far, as an escape from the world, or a denigration of the very real needs of the children of God still living in the city of man (and seeking to bear witness to the heavenly city in the way we live together)??
Thanks for the good conversation.
Jeff V.
Jeff-
I put that most indelicately by saying bluntly, "He cares more for the City of God than the City of Man," and you were right to call me on it. God clearly cared enough to send his own Son!
But now that he has, in which will we find hope? More importantly, to which is his son united? I think, then, that he does care about the city of men enough that he wants the church to use its means of grace – word and sacrament – to bring them (the world) *into* the church. God's plan is *not* to bring this world to perfection, but rather to bring his church to sanctification. So, we can be loving the world and working for utopia, but if these folks we're loving never enter the body of Christ, what have we accomplished? They are not where God has ordained that they receive his means of grace. And there will never be a just world if we work for justice only in the kingdom of man, because these folks will only undergo God's justice for sin without the grace of Christ which is found only in the church.
God does loves this world, in his "common grace," and we are to love this world too. And by common grace, unbelievers do some good and we should see God's hand in it and be thankful for common grace as it operates in every friendship, every act of kindness, every way in which it brings blessing to others. All of this—though the unbeliever does not know it—is ultimately from God and he deserves the glory for it.
But if we achieve better justice in the world, we may do it missing that even the most moral and kind of our neighbors still need the gospel of Jesus Christ or they will be condemned for eternity. They may appear outwardly to have no needs, but Scripture still says that unbelievers are "enemies" of God (Romans 5:10; cf. Colossians 1:21; James 4:4) and are "against" Christ (Matthew 12:30). They "live as enemies of the cross of Christ" and have their "minds set on earthly things" (Philippians 3:18-19) and are "by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind" (Ephesians 2:3). I say this only because my sense was that you were calling unbelievers in the city of men "children of God." I think it is a disaster if we feed and care for people but allow them to continue to go on living as if they are without sin. We are to not simply love our neighbor in the city of man as a sort of random act of kindness – but we are to love them *to* something – the church. Love them enough to fulfill the great commission and tell them of the new king and his kingdom the church.
Another way to say this about God's greater love for his kingdom is to say this: Christ's atonement is deepest act of love. "No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you." (John 15:13-14). It is, as we Calvinists say, a "definite atonement." It's for his bride, the church.
So what I meant, hopefully more nuanced here, is that we MUST work out and live out the gospel in our community, but it is the church that is the locus of God's love in the community. Therefore he does care more – now that we are in covenant with him through the sacrifice of his son – about what we, the church, do in loving the world, than he care about what the world is doing, because it is we who are membered to his body.
Hope that makes sense now, even if some don't agree!
On your point about escaping "from the world." My sense actually is that a pendulum has swung. In the 1980's people on the right wanted a soul-winning, bible-believing Christian in the White House to help make this a Christian nation. They tended to be pre-mil folks who felt like they should make all sorts of (often dreadful) alliances to help usher in the Kingdom. And they ended up bypassing the church and replacing it with American politics. And it went on for far too long because they were accountable only to groups of donors.
Now in this new century, Christians want to be so relevant that they have moved left politically (again, swinging with the culture) and have become post-mil, triumphalistic transformationalists who hope to bring in the kingdom by acting like Jesus. These folks want to take the mandates that are given to the *church* in Matthew 25 and James 1 and give it to the state. This is simply another dreadful alliance in new clothes, and they are typically not even accountable to scripture or confessions, let alone unnamed donors.
Good discussion, ya'll. David, I'm "outing" you here, but I trust you don't mind. If you hadn't figured it, dvd is a Pastor - and we could go on all day about theology (as we have at a lunch or two) - but I will take up some specific and more nuanced responses to your thought-provoking entry at another time.
What do others think about the danger of identifying the project of alleviating human suffering in "the city of Man", as David is referring to it (I prefer, "The Earthly City...but that's just me) - and thinking that that is all there is to Christian hope? The real question here is: where ultimately do we find real and true hope?
This whole business makes me think of my sojourn in Israel/Palestine two years ago. Journeying to that place, there seemed to me such a huge gulf of understanding among people (much of which is so well undergirded by human religion!)...there seemed to be such a vast sea of human hatred, owing to the historical circumstances that have thrown people together in that tiny, tiny place.
I began to despair about doing anything. What could I do? What could a few oddball Presbyterians from New Jersey do to make peace in among peoples who've experienced so much oppression, violence and hatred? Such a huge huge and vast problem. Why bother?
I found myself asking the question: what's worse? Trying to hold up a candle of hope in the darkness, or saying that the darkness is too powerful, and thus we do nothing.
I found myself letting go of the illusion that we were really there to "fix" anything or anybody - even though we welcome the possibility that our actions, however humble, might contribute toward some more peaceful outcome. But, I found myself saying to myself that our role is to *signify* something. To show forth the light of Christ there, not because we're so great and together - but because our calling, our job, is to hold up a candle in the darkness.
Who knows what difference that makes? It's not ours to accomplish - it's God's, working through and with our own human, fleshly, embodied, flawed human wills and bodies. Our job is just holding up that candle, whose light comes not from me, but from Christ.
Seems to me that that is *my* way in to the political arena. Our salvation is not in trying to fix the world - our place is to signify a counter-cultural way of living together. To be, as the church, "a sacrament of the world's possibilities" to quote Luke Timothy Johnson.
And, that's not to say that fixing the world is a lost cause, or that we shouldn't try to do it! We should - but we should get straight that our ultimate hope lies not in our ability to fix it - our ultimate hope is in the one who created the world, and in whose hands the destiny of the world lies.
Others...let's hear what you have to say...
Jeff V.
I admit - I'm pretty uncomfortable with the whole "city on a hill" view of Christianity. I believe that Jesus called us to be in the muck, working with sinners. We are the be in the community, not separate from it. To that end, "city of man" and "city of God" are the same thing for me. And I do believe that non-belivers are "God's Children" in the very Reformed sense that they are simply sinners who have not yet responded to grace with faith.
For me, it seems that we need to "fix" people's situations (not the people themselves) before they will be ready to accept Christ. It's all about Maslow's pyramid. In order to dwell in the spiritual realm, which I usually place in the Self-Actualization part of the pyramid, we have to have our safety and physiological needs attended to first. I would say that for most people spirituality requires security - time to stop worrying about the next meal and start wondering about God.
This is not meant to invalidate the very effectual ministries that lead people to God first. For some people God (and particularly belief in God) becomes the security in the Safety layer needed to make progress away from mere existence.
So for me, providing for the needs of others IS evangelism. Not in the advertising sense, but in the sense of preparing the unbeliever to receive Christ. You gotta be able to stop scraping just to get by to have time to think about the ethereal. Not only that, but providing that help is our own response to grace.
A more earthly example - before you paint wood, you sand it. The sanding prepares the surface of the wood to accept the paint - it lays a foundation for how the finished piece should look.
How does this relate to voting? (remember the original question?)
Faith for me provides moral principles. Those principles in turn provide a moral compass that I can use to evaluate any given idea in government (taxes, social aid, defense, etc.). I believe that Jesus was sufficiently involved in his community (nomadic existence aside) that He would vote. More than that, He would expect each of us to take what we've learned from the christian community that we call church and use that knowledge to make the best decision. If we lived in a perfect world where everyone's needs were attended to, then perhaps voting on theological grounds (or the religion of the candidate) might make sense. We're not there - we are in a world so broken that voting for the person who will get us closest to the Kingdom on Earth is the right candidate. And determining who that candidate may be is a very personal process.
Very practical application of theological (and psychological) principles. Well said!
JV
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