| Christian testimony and
the state of the state
The Word of meaning and truth in the beginning with God is the source of intelligence for every human being. This same Word became flesh and calls into existence a unique community of testimony in the midst of cultures. In Christian perspective, God as triune is present to every human culture, while also always challenging and addressing the limits inherent in every expression of desire and quest for truth and goodness. The Word of creation is always present to the world, even in the state, whatever the state of the state in the perennial quest to ameliorate human dysfunction. Subsequently, in every age and culture, the triune Word is the source of a continual impetus toward equilibrium through human responsibility within societies, even amid momentous upheaval and gradual restoration. The activities of law, protection, education, wisdom, aesthetics and community are perennial in renewing and sustaining human dignity, providing conditions for livelihood and the nurture of each new generation. v Humans have a very keen sense of equity. Children express an immediate awareness of equity, especially when divvying out a treat. Herein is the capacity of the state, more often than not, approximately, to get many things right concerning law, given the limits of human finitude in terms of wisdom, perspective, will and application. Many conventions that produce conditions of relative stability in the daily commerce of life remain largely invisible and unnoticed. The ideal of democratic governance is resourced by an innate sense of equality, which continues to reassert itself against perennial abuse. This may occur over several generations and never adequately to the ideal; this does not diminish an implicit impetus for equilibrium through the innate human desire for equality and equity. Yet the state has always been regarded with ambivalence—as at once a sentinel preventing perpetual revolution and a blind beast with an insatiable appetite, generating atrocious lapses of judgment in every generation. The difficult experiences of humans caught in the reality of perennial abuse by the state, because here and not there, in this time and not another, is precisely the wretchedness of human life, sin and the enigma of evil to which biblical tradition gives pervasive and unrelenting testimony, as also writers and poets have lamented over many centuries. Neglect of this testimony diminishes awareness of resources beyond immediate and competing claims to some form of equity. Our newspaper opinion pages contain ample expression of the latter. The world has little awareness of the unique redemptive truth of triune love that is able to transform people’s lives amid the constant diminution of human life and dignity. Redemptive perspective goes beyond tribal appeals to equity in the form of competing demands. Such appeals ultimately disqualify each other in generating enmity, whether self-congratulatory or violent. Christological values, which are heard as a word otherwise than our own, call into question our attempts at equalising human demands, which are never free from either myopic perspective or implicit self-interest. The appetite for equity is never sated. However much people have, there is always a perceived deficit in relation to others, while the desire for more is an attempt to stave off anxiety concerning my place under the sun. The quest for justice without grace will always give expression to tribal partisanship. Recognition of grace can lead to redemptive perspective and acts that go beyond the assumed locale of justice in equity to awaken in human experience, genuine expressions of grace—the only righteousness that does justice to human dignity as creaturely dignity before God. Paul reminds us that evil is real and entangled with good intentions in seeking the social good. Human institutions and communities, including the state, will always be implicated in radical compromise, such as having to choose the lesser of two evils. This will occur even when communities are religiously and presumably altruistically motivated. This certainly occurs when communities are neglectful through lack of initiative, effort or awareness. Humans end up acquiescing in Paul’s observation of human nature and the quest for righteousness according to codification—the good I would do, I do not do and the evil I would not do, I do. v The impetus of incarnation is inseparable from redemptive perspective. Within Christian theology, God is the ultimate source of the world’s destiny in its freedom for God from whom, through whom and to whom are all things, even as the Word from the beginning continually renews a semblance of right-order and dignity out of the actual or potential chaos of perennial depletion of the good. This occurs through jurists, civic administrators and educators, whatever their creed or absence of faith. Christians are duly chastened if they venture half-baked into law, economics or public policy without appropriate training and competence in these fields of social responsibility. The principle of incarnation means taking disciplines of law, economics, education or any other public discipline into our bodies as a passion of study, formation, practice and self-sacrifice. Information is not enough. To assume it is adequate to possess a plethora of information about the world’s condition is like assuming that because we have website access to unlimited sources, the accomplishment of applied research has occurred. Whatever the scope of information, it only remains a series of binary numbers until sifted and applied in some tangible way. This can only be done on a limited basis—this need and this community in this time and place. We delude ourselves and create illusions in others if we assume that the mere dissemination of information accomplishes social expressions of justice. The specifically Christian testimony to the self-giving love of God in Christ is relevant here—patient, hopeful and sacrificial engagement with human life within areas of gift and skill. Such formation is not conjured by incendiary rhetoric. Its possibility is only glimpsed in empathic laceration that is rarely sought but laid upon us in the inescapable reality of affliction in our fellow humans. The latter cuts through card-board delineation—rhetoric of either “the left” or “the right” and their incendiary tone—and grounds any privileged recognition of good and evil in grace. v As people in Christ, participating in a radically new and different trajectory in humanity, Christians are ultimately foreigners and exiles from the realm of state citizenship. We belong to a new creation in Christ. Our human troubles are not resolved with the resources of society. The possibilities for human life are finally not dependent on the state of the state, which is always changing its relative values. If Christian faith articulates the same thing as the state or contests one form of state for another in-waiting, it may or may not be doing as well as political innovators without the perceived “religious baggage.” If Christian faith represents transformative possibilities otherwise than those conceived within the state, it is folly merely to imitate the same concerns as the state in the name of Christ. Being in Christ represents a citizenship otherwise than any state and this must be articulated with courage, even as this exilic identity can give effect to the good in any state, beyond its horizon of power or imagination. Within the limits of time and region, humans attempt to nail down perspective, socially and therefore politically, even as they are exposed to the flux of time and the changing shape of relationships between people. Christ the Word calls into question every attempt to secure as definitive a finite perspective, while through faith, also being the source of the true and the good in human life as a demonstrative word of humility not hubris before humanity’s source of existence and light of life.
Selected sources: Barth Against the Stream; Community, State and the Church; Bonhoeffer Sanctorum Communio; Kasper The God of Jesus Christ; Kristeva Strangers to Ourselves; Niebuhr Moral Man and Immoral Society; Plato Republic; von Balthasar Love Alone is Credible; Weil The Need for Roots; Oppression and Liberty. |
