Seeking First the Christendom?

August 26, 2020

In this edited extract from 'Here Are Your Gods!', Chris Wright challenges disciples as to whether we are seeking first the Kingdom, or attempting to build Christendom afresh...

When we declare that Jesus is Lord and not Caesar, we are acknowledging that we are called to follow the Jesus of the cross, not the Jesus of Constantine.

European Christendom ended with the exhaustion of religious wars and the secularizing acids of the Enlightenment.

But Christendom ways of thinking are still around.

There is still a curious imagination, flying in the face of the Bible’s insistence that there is only one Savior and Lord on the throne of the universe, that the best way for Christians to save the world would be for Christians to rule the world, or at least, that part of the world we might have some realistic hope of ruling over by having Christians in the seats of government. There is still a curious expectation, flying in the face of all that the Old Testament teaches us about the tendency of all political power to go rogue and produce a downward spiral of combined idolatry and injustice, that having a Christian as president or prime minister will somehow purge and rectify the whole systemic fallenness of political structures whose ideals have been corroded by centuries of self-interest, tribal allegiance, and privilege.

This is not to say that Christians should stay out of the political arena. The way of complete withdrawal is not a valid biblical option. As we shall see, there is a valid and honorable vocation for Christians in the political sphere—engaged but distinctive, as salt and light. I give thanks to God for many Christian members of Parliament in the United Kingdom. What I am questioning is not Christian involvement in politics but the idea that Christians should seek supremacy in the political arena, in the belief that such legislative, judicial, or coercive power would enable them to advance the gospel or build the kingdom of God by political means—especially if, in order to gain such power, we sacrifice our integrity to whatever false gods happen to dominate the political arena of the day.

This Christendom mentality imagines that the kingdom of God can be advanced by getting “our man in the White House” — the precise words that a dear American friend said to me when I landed in the United States a few days after a previous presidential election. “He holds a prayer meeting in the Oval Office!” she went on, with obvious delight. I could not help but recall the prophet Amos (though I was too polite to do so out loud). Perhaps King Jeroboam II was holding prayer meetings in his palace too. Certainly religious worship was thriving all over the country. But, said Amos, God was not interested in religious profession by the government or anybody else but in public morality. God’s eyes were not on the temple or palace but on what was happening in wider society. According to Amos, God’s righteous eyes saw the corruption in the courts under the power of wealth and patronage, the gross social inequality, the offensive extravagances of the rich, the dehumanizing evil of crushing debt and poverty, the suffering of the poor and dispossessed, the manipulation of economic systems for personal gain, the war on truth and integrity.

In today’s world, has God shifted his gaze?

What matters to God, Amos would say, is not what a president says in his prayers but what his government does in practice and whether that aligns in any degree at all with the standards of justice and compassion that God’s Word makes very clear are the responsibilities of those entrusted with political power. I could also illustrate the point, for the sake of fair balance, by noting a similar dissonance in the United Kingdom. A recent former prime minister was well known to be the daughter of a pastor and faithful in regular attendance at the local Anglican church. But in her previous post as home secretary, she instituted a policy of creating a “hostile environment” (her own words) toward illegal immigrants, in the ferment of anti-immigrant popular opinion that so infected (indeed, was a major trigger for) the Brexit referendum and its outcome. Unfortunately, the policy became a hostile net that caught up many hundreds of people, mainly from the Caribbean, who had come to the United Kingdom perfectly legally as children with their parents, at the invitation of the British government to address the country’s severe labor shortage in the years after the Second World War. Suddenly, having lived and worked in the United Kingdom all their lives, they were deemed illegal unless they could provide multiple forms of documentary evidence proving otherwise. As home secretary, she was responsible for a departmental policy that led to many from this community being wrongfully detained, denied legal rights, denied their entitlement to hospital treatment for serious illness, losing their jobs and homes, falling into destitution, and in some cases being wrongfully deported. Many of these were elderly and vulnerable people, and their suffering was (and in many cases remains) immense and scandalous— and entirely caused by the hostile power of a state that had initially welcomed them when it needed their labor.

So again, it has to be asked, In the light of the biblical standards of the kingdom of God, what value can be accorded to a politician’s Christian profession and churchgoing if their politics in actual practice are inflicting humiliating suffering on those whose lives were already blighted by the historic racism of British culture?

What about us who are simply citizens, most of us not destined for political office, but all of us (in democratic countries at least) vested with the political power of our votes?

We need to reexamine our loyalties and ask whether we have submitted our political views, choices, and support to the criteria of God’s kingdom as revealed in the Old Testament and the teaching of Jesus and the apostles, or whether we are giving colluding praise and approval to corrupt and immoral political power in the hope that it might somehow benefit the cause of Christ.

So when Jesus announced the arrival of God’s reign, the shock to his contemporaries was not in the term itself but in both his insistence that it was here and present now among them and in the fact that it had invaded but not yet eliminated the kingdoms of this world, the old order of sin, oppression, poverty, violence, suffering, and death. So his parables likened it to things that start small but, in hidden and inexplicable ways, grow irresistibly larger; to something hidden but infinitely precious and worth selling all you have to obtain; to a process that will sift and divide humanity until a final reckoning by God himself; to something that you have to enter not by power and wealth and achievement but by childlike humility and servanthood.

The kingdom of God will turn the world (and the kingdoms of this world) radically upside down—or, rather, the right way up.

Chris Wright's new book 'Here Are Your Gods!' publishes at the end of September. You can preorder your copy now - or if you can't wait till then, take a look at the resources below.