Whenever Christians Use a Construction like "Christianity and Politics" They Open the Door to Every Devil
Karl Barth, Mary's Nard, and the Difference Christ Makes
In the Gospel of John, Jesus praises Mary’s lavish anointing of him because Mary understands that Jesus makes a different politics possible. To put a finer point on it, Mary understands that she-and-her-nard constitutes the different politics which God has made possible in the world in Jesus. Put differently, Mary intuits that Jesus is the difference God has made in the world.
Karl Barth, the theologian on whom I cut my teeth and who remains my north star, wrote:
“Whenever Christians use a construction like Christianity and Politics they open the door to every devil.”
Barth liked to point out how when the devil temps Christ in the wilderness by offering him the governments of this world the implication is that the governments of this world are the devil’s to give. They belong to him.
Barth, who was one of the only German Christians to stand up against Hitler’s Nazi regime, was not being hyperbolic.
“Whenever Christians use a construction like Christianity—and—Politics they open the door to every devil.”
It’s the and there that’s problematic.
Just as soon as the church begins to ponder how its Christianity can inform politics, Barth argued, you can be sure the church has lost the plot.
Such a church might be a church of great sincerity and zeal. Such a church might be a church of fervent devotion and good works of charity. Nonetheless, such a church will be a church that’s failed to understand that it is the way God has chosen to love and redeem the world. Whenever we talk about Christianity and Politics, we risk forgetting that the way God has chosen to heal his creation is through his particular People— that’s a promise that goes all the way back to Abraham.
The way God has chosen to heal his creation his through the witness of his People.
Not the House or the Senate.
Not POTUS or SCOTUS.
Not with bills or billboards or hashtags.
Not through political policy.
But his People.
The Church.
The Body of Christ, sent by the Spirit, is God’s virtue signal; that is to say, the Church doesn’t have a politics the Church is a politics. The church is not sent to make the world different so much as it is called to live the difference Christ makes.
I’m sure right about now that some of you (if not all of you) are thinking Well, gee Jason, that sounds nice but what in the hell do you mean“The Church doesn’t have a politics. The Church is a politics?”
I’m glad you asked.
Yesterday afternoon we celebrated a Service of Death and Resurrection for a man in the community, Gordon.
Gordon was a Vietnam vet. The cancer that killed him likely came from Agent Orange that killed others. A couple of days before he died, he called me to his bedside. In addition to wanting to profess that Jesus is Lord and give to Christ what remained of his life, Gordon also wanted to confess his sins.
“I want to confess,” he told me staring at the ceiling, “what I had to do in the war— it was necessary, but it was still sin.”
Think about it—
He was dying. He didn’t know how quick. Time was a precious, valueable commodity to him. Time was a gift, and Gordon wanted to give it, to lavish it— some would say waste it— by giving his confession to Christ.
In a culture that ships our soldiers off to do what is necessary and then, when they return home, we insist that they not tell us about what we’ve asked them to do, Gordon’s confession— what the Church calls the care of souls— that’s a politics.
It’s how God has chosen to care for the world.
During the funeral service, Gordon’s son spoke candidly about his often difficult sometimes estranged relationship with his father.
In a culture of sentimentality and pretense, the sort of truth-telling that this sanctuary makes possible— make no mistake, that’s a politics.
A while ago, I read a story in the paper about the California Prison Hospice Program. The unintended consequence of stiff prison sentences doled out in the ‘80’s and ‘90’s is that now many penitentieries must double as nursing homes. Already underfunded, many prison systems have recruited and trained convicts to serve as hospice workers to care for and accompany aging inmates as they die of cancer and other causes. It might not surprise you to hear most of the prisoners who volunteer to care for the dying are Christians.
“It’s what God’s given us the opportunity to do, to pour out our love on them” one prisoner— guilty of a gang bang in his youth— told the New York Times.
It might not surprise you to hear that most of the hospice workers are Christians, but it might surprise you to hear that of the hundreds of prisoners who’ve worked caring for the dying and later been released not one of them has returned to prison. They have a recidivism rate of 0%. In a culture where even Democrats and Republicans can agree our criminal justice system is broken, a simple unimpressive act, Christian care for the dying...zero percent— that’s a politics.
At the end, the Times article unintentionally echoes St. Paul:
“Within the walls of the prison hospice, all the invisible boundaries of the world have fallen down. Black men give meal trays to [dying] white men with swastikas tattooed on their faces, Crips play cards with Bloods, and a terminal Latino with cirrhosis gets his hair cut by an Asian with whom he previously wouldn’t have peaceably shared a cellblock.”
The way God has chosen to heal the world is the church— that’s what we forget whenever we argue about the Church and Politics. We’re the nard that God has purchased at great cost to himself to lavish Christ upon the dying world. It’s not that grace— what God has done for us in Jesus Christ— makes what we do as Christians incidental or unimportant. It’s that what we do as Christians should be unintelligible— an expensive waste, even— if God has not raised Jesus Christ from the dead.
Well said and much wisdom in these words.
It does. But the work of the Body takes place through the vocations of the members. And we can't ignore the parallel overarching conversation in our current culture which seeks to silence people and drive them away from civic engagement because it is such a "nasty business" or to frighten then from the new heresy of "Christian nationalism." At a time when more people should feel encouraged to engage in civic life they hear (and perhaps mishear) that this is not how God is working in the world today. But he most certainly is. Wherever we are trying and failing to create truth, beauty, healing, and safety - and failing - God's left handed power is evident.