The Early Christians, in Spite of Persecutions, Were Not Hermits Waiting in the Corner

The early Christians, in spite of persecutions, were not hermits waiting in the corner to be caught away. In his Dialogue With Trypho the Jew, Justin carefully explained Christianity, trying to clear it of false impressions and charges. Instead of listing the Jewish persecutions of Christians (i.e., getting locked into a "culture war"), Justin has an eye to winning Trypho. To this effort at persuasion, Trypho replied,

This is what amazes me. Moreover, I know that your teachings, written down in the so-called Gospel, are so wonderful and so great that in my opinion no man can keep them; for I have read them with interest. But this is what we cannot grasp at all: That you want to fear God and that you believe yourselves favored above the people around you, yet you do not withdraw from them in any way or separate yourselves from the pagans; that you observe neither festivals [pagan] or sabbaths [Jewish]; that you do not circumcise; and further, that you set your hopes on a man who was crucified, and believe you will receive good things from God in spite of the fact that you do not obey his commandments (10.1.2).

If the average person on the street today were asked, "What do you think Christianity is all about?", would he or she be as clear and, might I add, doctrinal, as Trypho the Jew? Have we made a compelling case? Are the pagans even aware of what it is they are rejecting? What separates evangelicals from the culture today very often is not doctrine (since many evangelicals adhere to the same basic notions as the unchurched), but style, extrabiblical codes of behavior, lingo, and in-house spirituality. Yet, Tertullian backed up Trypho's impressions of the early church's non-separatist attitude:

Christians cannot be distinguished from the rest of mankind by country, speech, or customs. They do not live in cities of their own; they do not speak a special language; they do not follow a peculiar manner of life...They take part in everything as citizens and endure everything as aliens...They have a common table, but not a common bed...They obey the established laws, but through their way of life they surpass these laws...We are a united body. We are bound together by a common religious conviction, by one and the same divine discipline and by the bond of common hope...We pray for the postponement of the end. We gather to bring to mind the contents of Holy Scripture as often as the world situation gives us a warning or reminder..." (Second Apology, 10).

Augustine offered this definition of his classic thesis:

I classify the human race into two branches: the one consists of those who live by human standards, the other of those who live according to God's will...By two cities I mean two societies of human beings, one of which is predestined to reign with God from all eternity, the other doomed to undergo eternal punishment with the devil. (Book XV, Chapter 1)

The Reformation
Despite much of the popular descriptions, Calvin was not a despot. In fact, even though he was trained in civil law and the best trained legal scholar in the region, he had less civil power than any of the other reformers, certainly less than Luther or Zwingli. Although he was, because of his background, employed by the city to create sanitation legislation, Calvin could never get his frequent celebration of the Lord's table through city hall his entire ministry. Calvin's greatest concern was for the spiritual integrity of the church. With Augustine, he insisted that there were "many wolves within and many sheep without," and that the church is always a mixed company of elect and non-elect. Nevertheless, if the advance of the kingdom of God is in any way dependent on the secular arm, Calvin believed, there would be no way for those whom God had especially called and those who had been trained to preach, teach, and defend the faith against error to preserve the church from heresy and schism. He had no respect for the "contrived empire" of the medieval world known as "Christendom," although he saw the two kingdoms as mutually supportive of each other. No, the state must support the true religion, but the two kingdoms must be kept in their proper bounds, as each serves God through its distinct goals and means:

First, we must realize that we are under a two-fold government, so that we do not (as commonly happens) unwisely mingle these two, which have a completely different nature. But whoever knows how to distinguish between body and soul, between this present fleeting life and that future eternal life, will without difficulty know that Christ's spiritual kingdom and the civil jurisdiction are things completely distinct. Yet this distinction does not lead us to consider the whole nature of government a thing polluted, which has nothing to do with Christian men. That is what, indeed, certain fanatics who delight in unbridled license shout and boast. But as we have just now pointed out that this kind of government is distinct from that spiritual and inward Kingdom of Christ, so we must know that they are not at variance (Institutes 4.20.1-2).

In fact, like Augustine, Calvin had a very high view of the cultural capabilities of pagans. No single form of government is necessarily sanctioned by God, although Calvin himself prefers "an aristocracy bordering on democracy"a rather liberal view to hold in his day, and probably the reason why eminent historians such as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., note that Calvinism, with John Locke's Enlightenment twist on it, "laid the philosophical basis for the American experiment in democracy." In many non-Christian societies, magistrates look out for the poor, restrain the wickedness of those who would steal, kill, or vandalize, so it is not necessary to have a "Christian" nation in order to have justice, peace, and civil morality:

I would have preferred to pass over this matter in utter silence," writes Calvin, "if I were not aware that here many dangerously go astray. For there are some who deny that a commonwealth is duly framed which neglects the political system of Moses, and is ruled by the common laws of nations. Let other men consider how perilous and seditious this notion is; it will be enough for me to have proved it false and foolish (4.10.14).

After all,

It is a fact that the law of God which we call the moral law is nothing else than a testimony of natural law and of that conscience which God has engraved upon the minds of men...Hence, this equity alone must be the goal and rule and limit of all laws. Whatever laws shall be framed to that rule, directed to that goal, bound by that limit, there is no reason why we should disapprove of them, howsoever they may differ from the Jewish law, or among ourselves (4.20.16).

Calvin emphasizes how essential it is that Christians, whether rulers or the ruled, distinguish between the two kingdoms and the limits of each, for the safety of both.

Hallowing God's Name In The Public Square
There is no need to remind the reader of all of the crusades that have been launched by self-confident humanity in an effort to champion a cause which, in retrospect, we can see to have been actually contrary to God's written, expressed will. Who among us today would argue that the Crusades in the middle ages, in which "Christendom" slaughtered Moslems and Jews in the name of God, was not a misuse of that name? Would not even the most radically political Christian today recognize the error in confusing the Holy Roman Empire with the kingdom of God? And yet, it is more difficult for us, living in the middle of our own time and place, to see how we have confused America and the kingdom of God and have used that confusion to casually invoke God's name for everything from the Strategic Defense Initiative (S.D.I.) to specific domestic policies. One could even detect among many Christian groups a mentality in the Gulf War that had more to do with Saddam Hussein being the Antichrist, and a "holy war" against Babylon, than with strategic or human rights violations. This, however, should come as no surprise, since the pundits of end-times prophecy have been selecting nations and antichrists according to their relationship to America for some time. In fact, John Walvoord, whose book, Arabs, Oil, and the Middle East, sold nearly a million copies during the Gulf War crisis, had identified Vietnam as a key player in the rise of "Babylon" (China) in the 1970s, and a number of best-selling books targeting Saddam and "Babylon" (Iraq) have since lost much of their steam. How many times must God's name be blasphemed among the Gentiles because of our folly?

But does this mean that we can never appeal to God's name for support of particular positions in the political sphere? Not at all.

In the last century, contrary to a long-standing position in the Dutch Reformed Church (the majority church in South Africa), white leaders began to argue that God was on the side of the Afrikaner (the white South African), as the victories over the British (who had placed Afrikaners in concentration camps) as well as over various African tribes, appeared to them to confirm. Much as the English had thought of themselves as Israel (the Protestants) at war with Babylon (the Catholics) in the defeat of the Spanish Armada, and just as the American colonists trusted in their "most favored nation" status with God against England, so white South Africans began to create their own myths, drawing upon biblical history and placing themselves in the position of Israel, the kingdom of God.

Although there are as many black or colored (mixed) Calvinists in South Africa as white, the Dutch Reformed decision-making body declared in 1857 that it was acceptable for churches to be built on racial lines. As John de Gruchy has argued, this was chiefly a pragmatic missionary strategy, much like today's church growth idea of "homogeneous" churches, since, as church growth architect Donald McGavran stated, "People like to become Christians without having to cross cultural, linguistic, or racial barriers." What began as a pragmatic idea in the churches was used by the politicians to create apartheid and the oppression of the blacks by the whites received official sanction from the churches across denominational lines, much as evangelicals in America at the same time remained silent during the civil rights movement here. That is why, when the church finally condemned apartheid, it did not condemn it as "racial injustice", or "misguided public policy", nor "a violation of civil rights", although it was all of those things; the church called it what only the church could call it: heresy. Since the political system was justified by Scripture-twisting, the system could only be dismantled by naming the heresy.

One wonders how many set-backs to the progress of the Gospel and the kingdom of God have been due to the church's willingness to allow the two kingdoms to become merged in the interest of power and control. Are we Christians first or Americans first? Christians first or Afrikaners first? Of course, the same confusions with nationalism can be found in a variety of cultures. Karl Barth, Martin Niemoller, and other leaders of the Confessing Church (so-called because they believed that the church's greatest power against Hitler was not political, but a recovery of loyalty to the Gospel as expressed in the Reformation confessions) remind us again and again of the dangers of what the former cynically called the "healthy evangelical national piety" which lent its support to Hitler's nationalistic crusade.

One can see the same confusion of the name of God and the names of things ("isms") among many African-American Christians in America, where God is identified with every policy put forward by the NAACP. Instead of being one body with one message and one voice, we have become white evangelicals, black evangelicals, Hispanic evangelicals, evangelical feminists and anti-feminists. We are a collection of competing special interest groups, not a church united in its proclamation of the kingdom of God and in its witness to the possibility of hope in the name of God and the new society he is building as a contradiction to the world's societies.

It's a very serious business, this name of God. People were executed in the Old Testament, by divine command, for misusing it, and while God has not given the church in the New Testament the physical sword, He does promise that there will be many condemned by Him on judgment day who really thought they were doing the Lord's work in the Lord's name. At this point, therefore, it is necessary to distinguish the legitimate use of God's name in politics.

Once we have settled that God's name cannot be attached to the names of things ("isms"), we are ready to build a positive notion of political involvement. After all, the church does have a responsibility to call the nations of the world and their leaders to account, not only as individuals before God needing redemption, but as public servants of God who are meant to carry out justice. The following are some rules one might put forward to assist in determining whether we are properly using God's name in the political sphere. Remember, we may pursue all sorts of goals in a democratic society as individuals, but neither individuals nor the church can speak on their own authority in the name of God. We do not need to observe the following rules except in the specific cases in which we claim divine sanction for our position.

Make Sure It Is Theological, Not Political
I use those terms in their most etymological sense. In other words, what we offer is a critique of particular political situations based on biblical revelation concerning God, humanity, sin and redemption, the meaning of history, and so on. While individual Christians may be called to the noble task of forming particular public policies, this is not the church's calling as an institution. For instance, the church must speak out in defense of the sacred character of life. Human life derives its dignity, not from the importance attached to it by law or by judges, but from the significance God attaches to it, since human beings were created in his image. What does this mean for abortion? Surely that Christians and indeed the churches must speak out and each believer must be convinced in his or her own mind how precisely to tackle the problem; but it does not mean that the Christian faith demands one particular public policy position or another, except in very unusual circumstances. We may all seek to end abortion-on-demand in God's name, because we have His will concerning human life on record in Scripture and even radical pro-choice proponents will concede that the life in the womb is indeed human. Nevertheless, we are left to our own wisdom (which, we hope, will be illumined by God through prayer) in specific strategies and policies. For the latter we must not claim God's expressed blessing or commandment and Christian liberty must not be denied to those with widely divergent views as to how justice is to be done, so long as those views do not contradict God's revealed will.

If we are thinking theologically as a church, we realize that violence against the unborn is surely no more heinous than violence against civilians in such war-ravaged areas as Bosnia. And yet, in spite of regular reports in which we see children lining the streets in pools of blood, a genocide in the name of "ethnic cleansing", the churches seem to be silent. Where are the protests? Where are the impassioned defenses of human life for these children after they are born? Similar questions ought to be asked about children in our own country, since more than 20 percent of the nation's children live in poverty.

Francis Schaeffer, who got the church moving on the abortion question, thought theologically. He was calling evangelicals to rediscover the doctrines of creation, the fall, redemption, stewardship of earthly resources, and a variety of other issues. The same man who spoke out against abortion in Whatever Happened To The Human Race? wrote Pollution And the Death of Man. Schaeffer also had some fairly stern things to say about the attitudes of white evangelicals to their non-white brothers and sisters.

But this is characteristic of our history as evangelicals, if not of our contemporary approach. B. B. Warfield, a Southerner and the staunch defender of orthodoxy at turn-of-the-century Princeton, not only defended the inerrancy of Scripture; he also wrote impassioned pleas for the civil rights of the former slaves. It is impossible for historians to separate the struggle against slavery, child labor, and other injustices in the modern industrial era from the history of evangelicalism. And yet, aside from the abortion issue, if the evangelical movement were committed to defending the oppressed today, without capitulating to typical left-wing or right-wing solutions, the secular press would be at a loss for words. If we thought theologically, we would more readily see the connections between these issues, but we think politically. It is particular public policies, devised in the laboratory of the secular conservatives or secular liberals, not particular doctrinal convictions, that guide our concerns and involvement. Our involvement is, therefore, predictable and unbelievers eventually become quite cynical about our casual invocation of the name of God for policies that always happen to coincide with the particular position of our political party.