The Challenge of Political Discipleship (Part Two)
On October 11th and 12th we’re holding our National Gathering in Birmingham on the theme of political discipleship. Find out more and get your tickets here.
In the first part, we sketched out the problem: very few Christian young adults in the UK are embedded in the sort of deep disciplining communities necessary to equip them to engage holistically, fruitfully, or sustainably in politics (local or national) for the long-haul.
So what does is look like to cultivate followers of Jesus for a holistic, fruitful, and sustainable engagement in politics? What should we actually be aiming for?
People write books on this sort of thing, it’s complex and contested. So, this is a thousand miles away from being the last word. But here are some very basic starting points, sketching the terrain of what it looks like to faithfully follow Jesus in the world of politics.
These are largely adapted from Michael Rhodes’ brilliant book, Just Discipleship. [1]
1) Justice (especially for the poor) is a primary political virtue and a primary metric for evaluating any political institution.
Whether it’s a local church or a nation-state, we are in line with the biblical tradition when a primary way that we measure the health of any political institution is the cultivation of justice, especially for the most vulnerable in society. Cornel West captures well the heart of biblical justice by describing it as ‘what love looks like in public… fire in the bones to promote the well being of all.’
Whether it’s the call of Abraham to be a covenant people marked by the practice of justice (Gen 18.19), the royal psalms like Psalm 72 that centre on justice as the markers of good kingship or the prophetic rebukes of political failure to uphold justice like Jeremiah 22.15-16, a white-hot passion for ‘love in public’ is a consistent barometer of political health throughout the story of scripture.
2) Wisdom, not rules
Just as Daniel discerned when to serve the Babylonian regime and when to resist, political discipleship is a matter of wisdom, not one-size-fits-all rules. There is not a playbook to follow, instead, we must cultivate the intimacy with Jesus, embedding ourselves in the biblical story and deep community, that allows us to discern what it looks like to be faithful in a particular cultural moment. Not all regimes are equally problematic. Achieving anything meaningful in a pluralistic society is always going to require a level of compromise. What’s needed is the ability to discern when collaboration and compromise ultimately serve the common good, and when we have no option but to resist.
3) Criticising the hell (literally) out of our own team and ourselves
Because justice is central to biblical political mandate and because every political power in a fallen world tends towards idolatry and injustice, Christians must, on occasion, practice prophetic confrontation with political powers. But that mustn’t make us self-righteous zealots. Instead, that confrontation has to start with ourselves – with our own assumptions and biases, and with whichever political parties or movements we belong to.
Of course, we need to discern healthy ways of doing this, and we do it humbly, starting with the planks in our own eye. The corporate prayer of repentance in Daniel 9 is a good example. But if we ever find ourselves uncritically comfortable with the totality of any secular ideology or party manifesto, we are in trouble. Conversely, we best serve the parties, movements and societies we belong to by refusing conformity and groupthink even when that costs us.
4) Congruence between ends and means
Too often, we allow ends to justify means. Provided we have a noble goal, we think we can use whatever means necessary to achieve it. We justify violence in the pursuit of peace. We justify dishonesty in the pursuit of the truth. But following the one who is the way, the truth, and the life requires us to take seriously the way that we do politics, not simply the legislative goals that we pursue.
When Paul calls the Philippian church citizens of heaven, he is not bestowing on them some escapist or other-worldly agenda. Philippi was a Roman colony – they understood that Roman citizenship meant being an outpost for the life and culture of Rome. So, the task of citizens of heaven was to be an outpost for the life and culture of heaven – to point to and build for God’s coming kingdom – where heaven and earth will be united. We cannot join in with God’s kingdom mission and play by the rules of the enemy. The way of Jesus demands congruence between what we are aiming for and the way we get there: kingdom ends and kingdom means.
5) A requirement to embrace suffering love in our political lives
What does it look like for our politics to be centred on the cross? At the very least, it means a willingness to follow our Messiah into depths of brokenness and pain, in solidarity with all who grieve and suffer. We don’t seek suffering out, but loving our neighbours and showing up to the reality of injustice in our world will inevitably confront us with terrible suffering. The politics of Jesus invite us to enter in, not to rush too fast to activity, but to join the groaning of creation in lament and longing for the kingdom to come.
Esau McCaulley puts it like this, ‘Mourning is intuition that things are not right – that more is possible. To think that more is possible is an act of political resistance in a world that wants us to believe that consumption is all there is … Hungering and thirsting for justice is nothing less than the continued longing for God to come and set things right… it is to hope that the things that cause us to mourn will not get the last word.’ [2]
So, here’s a challenge, especially for those of us enjoying the privilege of a relatively stable and functional liberal democracy: where does our political practice require us to enter into suffering for the sake of faithfulness to God and justice to our neighbours?
6) Hopeful realism
We live in the now and not yet – between the resurrection of Jesus and the renewal of all creation. That gives us a peculiar form of hope. Neither naïve optimism, nor cynical nihilism. On the one hand, there is resurrection possibility in the realm of politics. Things really can change. Even Nebuchadnezzar can change. Dictators can fall. Broken systems can be renewed.
On the other hand, we mustn’t buy into the progressive myth that history is always up and to the right. The enemy is defeated, but he remains an enemy. Sin, chaos and evil will oppose and corrupt all that is good and true. That means that any political progress this side of new creation will be provisional at best. Of course, it still matters. Of course, it’s still worth fighting for. But if our hope is that we can save the world ourselves, we are taking on a burden that was never ours to carry, and we are going to end up jaded and disillusioned. We need a hopeful realism.
7) If our politics doesn’t make us weird, we’re probably not doing it right
Here’s a question I’ve been asking myself: if I didn’t believe in the resurrection of Jesus, would my politics be much different? It’s quite a hard question, but I think it gets to the very heart of what it means to cultivate a holistic, fruitful and sustainable political discipleship. Put another way, does my politics make me weird?
This doesn’t give us licence to do stupid or offensive things or to withdraw from society. I’m not talking about an ego-driven desire to stand out or a snobbish suspicion of anything ‘mainstream.’ But we follow a resurrected king, whose means of putting the world to rights – through an excruciating, dehumanising public execution – defies any existing political categories, whether in the first century or the twenty first century. And our hope is for the resurrection of our bodies, the lordship of Christ and the renewal of all creation. We are resident aliens – both at home in the world created and redeemed by God, and simultaneously pilgrims – whose allegiance is not, ultimately, to any ruler or nation state – but to the Lord. [3]
That will cause our politics to be peculiar. It won’t fit neatly into existing categories. But the greatest gift we bring to secular, pluralist societies is not quietist conformity, coercive power-plays or aloof withdrawal – it’s the faithful, creative, costly commitment to the common good that flows from our resurrection faith.
References
1. Michael J. Rhodes, Just Discipleship: Biblical Justice in an Unjust World (Downers Grove: IVP, 2023), 268-272
2. Esau McCaulley, Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope (Downers Grove: IVP, 2020), 65-66
3. Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony (Nashville: Abingdon, 1989)
