(Pentecostal) Political Theology: The Church Part V

A week after the most dramatic midterms in recent memory seems an appropriate time to reflect on political theology. (Or maybe the worst of all possible times, depending on how you look at it.)

There are any number of Scriptures from which one might launch a foray into political theology. One of the verses I go to most frequently is Ephesians 3:10, which says it is through the church that God plans to reveal His manifold wisdom to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms. If this is the case for heavenly rulers and authorities, how much more so does it apply to earthly rulers and authorities? From this verse alone, our hopes in national politics ought to be cut down to size in light of the stunning vocation Scripture ascribes to the church.

This relates closely to another good starting point. After the resurrection, the Jesus’ disciples ask Him whether His astonishing return from the grave means that He is about to restore the kingdom to Israel—meaning: Is Israel going to witness a miraculous overthrow of the military superpower of its day, much like it had seen in days of old—as with Egypt (Ex. 1-15), the collective hordes of the Ammonites, Moabites, and Edomites (2 Chron. 20), the Assyrians (2 Kings 19), or, more recently, the Seleucids (141 BC)? Jesus’ answer to their question was an instruction to wait in Jerusalem for the promised baptism in the Spirit, which would empower them to go as His witnesses outward from there to all Judea, and then beyond to Samaria and to the ends of the earth (Acts 1:8). Our tendency to spiritualize Scripture we don’t fully know how to contextualize ought not lead us into the mistake of assuming that Jesus was answering the disciples’ political question with something other than a political answer. Taken together with making disciples, which resulted in the establishment of worshiping communities (churches), being a witness to Jesus’ manner of life, teaching, death, and His resurrection has to be at least one of our starting points on the page as we sketch out a biblical political theology.

For Stanley Hauerwas, the church doesn’t have a politics, but rather is a politics.∆ It is a political society within the larger society whose character and corporate life radically contrast with and prophetically critique the dominant order. Adapting Barth’s theological methodology offers another (complementary) way forward: if we want to develop a faithful political theology, our starting point—and our point of reference every step of the way—must be the character of God as revealed in Jesus Christ of Nazareth. Paul says He is the visible image of the invisible God (Col. 1:15); the author of Hebrews calls Him the radiance of God’s own glory and the exact representation of His being (1:3). The application of this that needs to be heard in the American context (and this will be about as popular now as it was in the first century) is that when Jesus, as God in person, confronted the political powers of His day (behind whom were the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places of Ephesians 3:10), the way that He defeated them—disarming them, humiliating them publicly, and triumphing over them—was through the cross (Col. 2:15). In my view, a political theology that proposes any other means of triumph cannot claim to be biblically faithful. God made the world. No one knows better than Him how the world works. If God in His infinite wisdom knew that the way to break the stranglehold of darkness that characterizes this present age was sacrificial, self-giving, servant-shaped love, then the church falls prey to a disastrous deception if it thinks it can overcome, that it can further God’s righteousness or redemptive purposes in any other way.

Until the return of the King, the cross determines the shape of the politics that the church is. In the cross, Jesus shows what it looks like to be a peacemaker, to be merciful, to turn the other cheek, to pray for those who persecute you, to forgive your brother who sins against you, to lay down your life for your friends, to refrain from using the enemy’s weapons to defend yourself, and—the ultimate litmus test of Christianity—to love your enemies. This is how Jesus overcame. Preempting, here, a line of argument I’ve heard many times: Imagine objecting to Jesus, while He hung on the cross on the way to defeating Satan, sin, death, and the grave, that it doesn’t work that way ‘in the real world’.

But don’t take my word for it. As N.T. Wright puts it, ‘if Jesus himself is the ultimate Servant, the personal embodiment of the larger call of Israel itself, then, by the holy spirit, the followers of Jesus are called themselves to be the Servant-people for the sake of the world.† Or, in the words of Richard B. Hays: ‘those whose lives are reshaped in Christ must deal with enemies in the same way that God in Christ dealt with enemies.’• And in case two witnesses aren’t enough, Michael J. Gorman argues that “faith is cruciform because it expresses itself in cruciform love, just as Christ’s faith toward God issued in his loving act of self-giving for humanity on the cross.”‡ I could stack up many dozens of such quotes from biblical scholars and theologians. These quotes represent not just footnotes or matters of marginal status for Christian discipleship, but chapters and entire books from some of our most brilliant Bible expositors on the paradigmatic authority of Jesus’ manner of life for our own lives. ‘Our lives must be cruciform if they are to count for anything at all.’°

Whatever else we might want to say about a Christian political theology, it cannot be, at its core and in its essence, any less than this. As such, I think it should be clear that there is no political party on earth that can claim legitimacy from the perspective of Christian faithfulness. No nation can be Christian. Every power, ruler, throne, and authority was made through and for Christ, but is currently in rebellion against Him. This will still be true irrespective of how many Christian officials occupy the seats in government. The church is (theoretically, anyway) one hundred percent Christian in its membership, inhabited by the Holy Spirit with Christ Himself at its head, and even it is tragically imperfect, broken, and sometimes reflective of some of the world’s worst evils. How could we ever claim that a party, government, or nation is Christian when God’s own church can barely make that claim?

I will offer no specific correctives for either side of the political spectrum in the U.S. I’ll simply say that until a party can claim to embody all the attributes of God’s character as revealed in Christ—holiness, purity, truth, justice, righteousness, mercy, compassion, humility, self-sacrificial and servant-shaped love (even for enemies)—it has been weighed and found wanting, and its eventual judgment is certain. ‘Christian’ is not a buffet from which we can pick and choose ingredients. It is a lived, individual and corporate social witness, a prophetic political reality, a contrast culture and counter kingdom to every earthly kingdom. If it is not lived in its entirety, it cannot appropriately be termed ‘Christian.’ And if any Christian equates any party that falls short of this standard with God’s righteousness, then that person has committed the twin evils of sixth century Judah: forsaking the cistern of living water, and digging cracked cisterns that hold no water (Jer. 2:13). In case the reference is too oblique: this is the sin of idolatry, and in the contemporary church, it is rampant on both sides of the political spectrum.

With this all-God’s-character-or-it’s-not-Christian perspective in mind, I’ll begin to draw to a close. If any part of the church views any election as a win (or a loss) for the Kingdom, it has ceded its far superior authority to an inferior political entity. As mentioned above, the church is the only social body with Christ as its Ruler and the only assembly that is indwelled by the Spirit of the Living God. Christians are the only people whom God has addressed with a divine commission to invite people to become citizens of a different and eternal Kingdom. If society does not look (or vote) the way we would like it to, we have no one to blame but ourselves. It means that we have not offered, in our own lives and worshiping communities, a more attractive and compelling way of life—we have not modeled a truly Christian politics. A political engagement that is satisfied with legislating certain aspects of Christian morality while leaving hearts unchanged is an unworthy goal for the church and an abdication of its vocation.

This proposed foundation for political theology will no doubt be a stretch for many Christians, especially for those who are accustomed to equating their partisan politics with ‘the Christian option’, even if only in a ‘lesser of two evils’ way. But I think there is very little herein that is objectionable on strictly biblical grounds. I make no attempt to solve the dilemma, ‘How, then, shall we vote?’ My more limited goal is to challenge the assumption that the word ‘Christian’ is a fitting descriptor for any available political option on the contemporary U.S. political scene—other than the church, that is. Whether you allow your views to be challenged by these ideas is in part a function of whether it is more important to you to have true beliefs or to be right about what you already believe. If truth is your goal, then I trust you won’t be bothered by a little exercise in questioning.

So where should we begin? Well, for starters, I think if we truly loved our enemies, we would have far fewer of them. It’s worth remembering over and over that if Jesus hadn’t loved His enemies to the point of death, none of us would be among His friends today. For Pentecostals, the fact that Spirit baptism is arguably Jesus’ prescription for the political situation in which His disciples found themselves should be conversation-generating on multiple fronts. One such conversation could begin with the suggestion that the dwelling of the Holy Spirit in God’s foretaste-of-heaven temple institutes a politics of the Spirit—for us, it is a genuine possibility to live out our faith in public as citizens of another Kingdom, to embody a New Creation politics, characterized by resurrection life and an on-earth-as-it-is-in-heaven existence. Under the authoritative sign of the cross, this may look like God setting a table before us in the presence of those who consider us enemies. And, like the Crucified, our politics might just result in some very unlikely people coming to join us at our table, to enjoy the provision of the gracious God whose character shows forth through our posture of a servant that we adopt toward the world. ‘For even the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve…’ (Mark 10:45).

∆ The actual quote is, “The church doesn’t have a social ethics; the church is a social ethic,” [The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), 99], but I think the statement fits just as well with Hauerwas’s political theory.

† N. T. Wright, Into the Heart of Isaiah: The Meaning of and Message of Isaiah 40-55 (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Academic, 2026), 117. Kindle Edition.

• Richard B. Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1996), 300.

‡ Michael J. Gorman, Cruciformity: Paul’s Narrative Spirituality of the Cross. Twentieth-Anniversary Edition (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2021), 142. Kindle Edition.

° Gordon D. Fee, Paul’s Letter to the Philippians. New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1995), 337. Kindle Edition.