Witness to the State Is Not Constantinian: Against Hauerwasian Politics
James King
Young Scholars in the Baptist Academy
Georgetown College
Georgetown, Kentucky
July 2013
Introduction
It is the contention of this paper that Baptists are uniquely suited theologically to
provide a spoken witness to the state from a minority position. To argue this, I wish first to
encourage a reconsideration of what images control our understanding of our heritage as
Baptists in regard to interaction with the state, then to argue that, one, there should be no
strict precedence of the so-called lived witness of the church over its oral proclamation and,
two, that there is no legitimate reason that state politics should be exempted from Christian
witness. As will already be evident to some of you, this position runs against the grain of the
Hauerwasian stream of contemporary Christian ethics. In this paper, I will oppose three
assumptions that motivate the Hauerwas school; these are: 1) that involvement in state affairs
is necessarily corrupting, 2) that oral proclamation is somehow inferior or subsequent to an
embodied witness and 3) that the state only has the existence of a phantom.
Witnessing, Not Ruling
First, I think it is beneficial to reflect more widely on the experiences of power and
minority of Baptists. Firstly, Baptists were not part of the Peace of Augsburg's terms of cuius
regio, eius religio. Though the English Interregnum was a respite for English Baptists, they
did not then rise to power. Indeed, like the Christian church herself, the Baptist church was
tried by martyrdom in its early days.
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In the colonies, Baptists did not follow the pattern of establishing their own uniconfessional dominions, and we might read Roger Williams’ establishment of Rhode Island
as more a search for a safe haven than a playing at rulership. American Baptist work for
freedom for themselves and a general principle of religious tolerance was conducted from
below, whether it be Isaac Backus’ Baptist Grievance Committee in Congregationalist New
England, or the petitions and arguments in court of Virginia Baptists.1 Things become
complicated with the franchise, as typified by John Leland’s negotiations with James
Madison; were we to progress through American history, much more would need to be said
about Baptists in electoral politics, both as electors and candidates. I do believe it is worth
noting, though, that as much as Evangelicals have joined in the electoral process, this is in
contrast to our Fundamentalist forebears, who generally eschewed such direct politicking,
though they worked for cultural influence through, for example, radio broadcasts.
Now, this is certainly not an exhaustive or even a particularly inclusive history; Roger
Williams and the Fundamentalists are not the whole of the Baptist heritage. But I hope this
sketch to be beneficial in prompting certain memories from Baptist history and, more
importantly, reminding us of the fact that we are bound to find particular stories controlling
the narrative of our heritage. This particular string of memories hopefully suggests to us that
the political successes, failures, and shenanigans of the past forty years are not the whole
story. before we find ourselves burdened and disqualified from political engagement by our
rejection of Jerry Falwell or Richard Land, we ought to reckon whether we have another
tradition of direct witness to the state that we might draw upon and seek to continue.
In short, I present this story to challenge a certain guilt many Baptists feel when it
comes to our involvement in state affairs, and a hesitancy that results therefrom. Of course, a
1
The fact that Baptists demanded a theologically motivated tolerance demands our attention. Toleration and a
separation of magisterial and churchly authority (dare we say, a separation of church and state?) are perhaps less
of an accident of the Enlightenment and a secularizing Jeffersonian compromise, than something that we, as
Baptists, alongside the Peace Churches, have as our heritage.
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history of being ruled does not somehow earn us a shot at ruling. These historical data are
not themselves an ethical argument. However, I hope they serve as a warrant for a
counterclaim against one of three assumptions of the Hauerwasian mind-set that I wish to
challenge in this paper – that involvement in state affairs is necessarily corrupting.
More to the point in responding to Hauerwas’ critiques is the question of whether
these examples indicate a Constantinianism inherent in interaction with the state. From
Hauerwas, we find that the Constantinian error within Christian ethics may take the forms of
making the church into a chaplain for the state, a sort of theological rubber stamp; it may
mean developing a supposedly Christian ethic for the world, an ethic that actually
underwrites vocations already ethically determined by other sources; and it may finally be the
turning of the Kingdom of God in a ‘religion’.
Must interaction with the state result in Constantinian failures of these kinds, even
interaction ‘from below’? Certainly, the church and the discipline of theology can offer
themselves to the state to be its chaplain; this can be seen in the ‘Manifesto of the NinetyThree’ that so impacted Karl Barth, and in the similar ‘Land letter’ of 2002. As to the
second, I recently came across an article on an apologetics website discouraging the presence
of slot machines on military installations.2 The article concluded with a quotation from
George Washington on the danger of gambling to the military man; here we might say that
Christian language (the article was among a list of apologetical articles, and included a
passing reference to Proverbs) is used to highlight a danger within an arguably un-Christian
enterprise—Christian ethics is thought to be a guide to good soldiery, rather than a guide to
good discipleship itself. Finally, we might join Hauerwas in his skepticism of William
Bennett’s insistence on religion’s public benefit or George Will’s underwriting of the
Jeffersonian compromise whereby actions are restricted, but thoughts are free, with
David Miller, PhD., “Gambling, the Military, and Christian Ethics”, Apologetics Press, 2007,
http://www.apologeticspress.org/APContent.aspx?category=7&article=2354, accessed June 11, 2013.
2
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Christianity neatly fitted into the realm of thoughts. Eisenhower’s comment, that “our form
of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don't
care what it is,"3 certainly fails to inspire fervor. Apart from theological arguments regarding
particularity and uniqueness, or political ones about the domestication of religion by the
modern state, we might follow Kwame Anthony Appiah’s defense of ethical partiality: “You
don’t value your wife because you value wives generally, and this one happens to be yours.”4
Granting these cases are indeed instances of Constantinianism, I yet believe that a
careful discernment is necessary in applying each of the criteria. For, what direct appeal to
the state to act Christianly might not be also construed as chaplaincy? While providing a
false theological rationale for the state is certainly a possibility, earnest criticism might also
be taken as the veneer of criticism that insulates the establishment. (Indeed, the principled
refusal that Hauerwas suggests will limit the state might also be taken as such an
endorsement.) That criticism is addressed directly to the state is not sufficient proof that the
speaker is acting as a Constantinian chaplain.
Second, the concept of vocation is not alien to Christian ethics. The problem with the
example of the Christian ethicist seeking to rid of the military base of gambling is its
subsumption of the demands of Christian discipleship to the end of soldiery. To parrot
Hauerwas, we might say that a profession or sphere has been created, to which the Christian
ethicist is asked to speak (or in this case, volunteers to speak). But it is not the case that
Christian ethics is undifferentiated with respect to roles. While we may very well wish to
reject a perhaps modern cordoning of economic, political and other spheres, and while we
indeed must demand that all human activity come under the reign of Christ and may not
generate its own ethics, it does seem to be the case that Christian theology recognizes certain
3
Address at the Freedoms Foundation, Waldorf-Astoria, New York City, New York, 12/22/52, recorded at
‘Quotes’, Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, Museum, and Boyhood Home website,
http://www.eisenhower.archives.gov/all_about_ike/quotes.html, accessed June 11, 2013.
4
Appiah, The Ethics of Identity, (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005) 226.
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roles and is sensitive in its ethics. Christian children, wives and husbands, while one in
Christ, do yet act as children, wives and husbands. That they are subjects of a certain regime
results in obligations for Christians, though we should indeed be careful that these obligations
are controlled by Christian ethics and not taken wholesale from the state.
Finally, must direct address to the state inevitably reduce the Kingdom of God to a
religion? Here Hauerwas is at his most convincing, as modern states do seem to be rather
ham-fisted in their treatment of those phenomena that are categorized as “religions” or
“faiths”, the latter category being applied even to those traditions (to attempt another
categorization) that do not make much of faith itself. We might find problematic John
Leland’s cooperation with James Madison, whom Hauerwas reports as preferring a number
of warring factions as the best way to limit the potential for religious tyranny.5 However, it is
not clear that Christians may only come before the state, hat in hand, pigeon-holing
themselves as religious. What this designation would mean is not entirely clear, but one
imagines that it is most applicable when one seeks some sort of privilege due to one’s
religious status—a recent British example being the portrayal by some Druids of their
tradition as meeting the government’s definition of a “religion”—or when one submits to
certain state-established standards, perhaps because of these privileges—such as when a
pastor refrains from making specific political endorsements from the pulpit. Neither behavior
seems to be necessary, however, as has been demonstrated by Dr. King’s critical, public and
yet religious speech, and as has been theorized by those advocating some sort of ‘politics of
multiple communities’ like Nicholas Wolterstorff, Charles Taylor or Jeffrey Stout, and
neither behavior is likely for a church that has heeded the criticisms of the state cited by
Hauerwas (such as those of Stanley Fish, Anthony Giddens, Saba Mahmood or John
Milbank). It is hard to imagine that a church canny and courageous enough to follow
Stanley Hauerwas with Michael Broadway, “The Irony of Reinhold Niebuhr: The Ideological Character of
‘Christian Realism,’” in Wilderness Wanderings: Probing Twentieth-Century Theology and Philosophy
(Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997) 53
5
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Hauerwas into a principled non-engagement would not also be canny and courageous enough
to bear a verbal witness to the state without distilling itself into a religion.
But why address the state in the first place? It is quite possible having read Hauerwas
to imagine that the church is the only arena in which the Christian may seek to witness, and
that the outcome of this witness is the drawing of others from the world into the church.
While there is certainly no fault in building up the church, in witnessing thereby, and
certainly none in the drawing of others thereinto, the reader may ask Hauerwas whether or
not the state or broader society might also be venues for Christian witness. The problem is
that, as will be explored below, the state is something of a phantom for Hauerwas. With a
more robust theology of the what the New Testament refers to as 'powers and principalities',
however, the state becomes a legitimate entity and a likely arena for Christian witness.
This may be demonstrated by a rough parallel to Augustine's account of participation
and privation. In a certain sense for Hauerwas, there is nothing other than the church. This is
to say, there is nothing that fully exists, that participates in God, other than the Kingdom of
God. Thus, the state, which is not to be confused with the Kingdom, nor liberal society,
which fears death and loves glory in as unchristian a manner as Rome, fail to have any
creaturely integrity. What this fails to capture, however, is the sense in which Scripture
seems to speak of the enduring reality of creation, even those aspects of creation that are
fallen and yet still wait for redemption.
A privation account might best typify the demonic, which, following John Howard
Yoder, is that claims an existence independent of God. Though this has the appearance of
being (as with Paul's account of idols in 1 Cor 8:4), it is in really naught (as with Paul in 1
Cor 10:20). However, what of that which is to be redeemed? Is there anything, outside of
the human persons who might enter the church, that has fallen from its created fullness, yet is
not consigned to nothingness? Yoder, following Hendrikus Berkhof, speaks of the state as a
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power.6 In short, as a power, we mean that the state, or the ruling authority held by any
individual state, is created by God, is fallen, and is to be redeemed. On this account, a state is
liable to experience a modicum of reformation, though, with Barth, we might not expect
stately rule to experience its full redemption until the New Jerusalem.7 Thus, while
Hauerwas concerns about not imagining state as fulfilling any of the purposes of the church
are legitimate, as perhaps his disbelief in it experiencing redemption in the manner proposed
by Rauschenbusch,8 a theology of the powers enables us to understand the state as having a
legitimacy not typified by Hauerwas language thereof. Indeed, as much as we seek to extend
God's Kingdom to any part of creation outside of the church, so we might do the same in the
realm of state politics.
Now, this integrity ought to be carefully delimited in our theorizing. That the state’s,
or a state’s, existence is legitimate and not simply phantasmic does not mean that it prescribes
its own form. Indeed, states can be judged against the shape offered by Paul and Peter
(though this does not necessarily empower revolt against states thereby found illegitimate9).
We fall back into Constantinianism if we think that, because it is ordained by God, the state is
entitled to act in whatever way statesmen tell us it must; rather the state-as-creature is still
subject to God’s judgment.10
Distinguishing Lived and Proclaimed Witness?
In his essay “The Servant Community,” Hauerwas explains his much-repeated dictum
that ‘the church must be the church’ as a claim that it is the church’s very existence that is its
6
John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus: Vicit Agnus Noster (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2nd
edn., 1994) 141ff.
7
“Rechtfertigung und Recht,” Theologische Studien 104 (Zürich: EVZ-Verlag, 1970) 27.
8
“A Christian Critique of Christian America,” The Hauerwas Reader 465.
9
Yoder, The Christian Witness to the State (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 2002; first published 1964) 42-44.
10
It is worth considering how an analysis of the market as a power would affect our understanding of the
morality said to be given by it. For a move toward such an analysis, see Scott Prather, The Powers and the
Power of Mammon: Karl Barth and John Howard Yoder in Dialogue unpublished doctoral thesis, University of
Aberdeen, 2011.
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ethics and witness.11 The church is, rather has, an ethic for Hauerwas, a claim that is
underpinned theoretically by an understanding of ethics as virtue and the church as a virtuenurturing institution.12 To maintain their distinctiveness, Christians need Christian moral
sources, that is practices, not the ‘belief’ that is the vestige of religion in liberal societies. 13
Sacraments and the liturgies of baptism and Eucharist are requirements of the church, as are
prayer and preaching, and charity, truthfulness and correction.14
Regarding Evangelicals, Hauerwas has said in an interview that he tries “to help them
recover a sense of the church that they don't have because they think that the church is a
secondary reality to their immediate relationship with God.”15 Such an emphasizing of the
church, together with a conception of virtue as necessarily embodied and requiring
institutions, is certainly Hauerwas’ impetus for promoting attention to the church’s ritual and
sacrament. This liturgical emphasis does not result, however, in a skepticism about preaching
in the life of the church; indeed, Hauerwas’ Cross-Shattered Church is devoted to the
practice of preaching, and he has gone so far as to publish sermons as part of otherwise
typically ‘academic’ essays.16
Thus, while we ought not to suggest that Hauerwas’ emphasis on embodiment and
practices demands a shift from preaching within church life, I argue that this functions to
encourage a shift from oral proclamation outside the church; this is the second assumption of
Hauerwasian politics—that oral proclamation is somehow inferior or subsequent to an
Hauerwas, “The Servant Community: Christian Social Ethics,” in John Berkman and Michael Cartwright
(eds.), The Hauerwas Reader (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2001; first published in The Peaceable Kingdom: A
Primer in Christian Ethics, Notre Dame, IN: U of Notre Dame P, 1991) 374.
12
Ibid., 378.
13
“The Politics of Salvation: Why There Is No Salvation Outside the Church” in After Christendom? How the
Church Is to Behave If Freedom, Justice, and a Christian Nation Are Bad Ideas (Notre Dame, IN: University of
Notre Dame Press, 1991) 26.
14
“The Servant Community” 384-7.
15
Dan Morehead, “Hannah’s Child”, interview, Wunderkammer Magazine, 10 May 2010,
http://www.wunderkammermag.com/arts-and-culture/interview-stanley-hauerwas.
16
E.g., “The Church as God’s New Language” in Christian Existence Today (1987) and The Hauerwas Reader.
11
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embodied witness.17 Specifically, I find Hauerwas to be challenging oral proclamation as the
church's witness to the state (if we may even speak of a 'witness to the state' as present in
being Hauerwas; I will explain this below). This can be demonstrated by observing what
Hauerwas deems the church’s witness.
For Hauerwas, the above statements about the necessity for the church of liturgy and a
rigorously virtue-building ethical life (if we can parse these, rather than understanding the
sacramental life of the church to be identical with its ethical life18) are not simply directed to
those churchpeople seeking to identify the true church or to work for her upbuilding. Rather,
these ‘marks’ of the church are those which distinguish it for the watching world, as well.
This certainly has a beautiful consistency: the church’s message is itself, so that what the
church does is the same as what the church has to say, rather than ‘church’ being an activity
separate from the proclamation that first draws the individual into faith. But this
ecclesiological choice seems to have the effect of leaving proclamation out of Hauerwas’
description of the church. Thus, Hauerwas makes such statements as “that to which we
witness is unavailable apart from its exemplification in the lives of a community of people”19
and “the church must recognize that her first social task in any society is to be herself.”20
We might imagine further Hauerwasian reasons for a hesitancy about oral
proclamation, or justifications for its exclusion or diminution. First, the Hauerwasian find
proclamation to be disembodied. On this account, proclamation, by reducing Christian faith
and the reality of the Kingdom to what can be said, and most egregiously, to what can be said
and understood by the secular public,21 plays into the modern conceptualizing of Christianity
Cf., Hauerwas’ emphasis on “example then argument” as the church’s witness in the protracted American
debate over abortion. “Abortion: Why the Arguments Fail” in A Community of Character 229.
18
See the Hauerwas-co-edited Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics as an attempt to make good on this
premise.
19
“Can a Pacifist Think About War?” in Dispatches from the Front: Theological Engagements with the Secular
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994) 135.
20
“The Church and Liberal Democracy: The Moral Limits of a Secular Polity,” in A Community of Character:
Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981) 83-34.
21
Cf., Hauerwas’ rejection of principlizing in the work of Enda McDonagh in “The Servant Community” 388ff.
17
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as a religion. Christianity is here about doctrine, thought, Jeffersonian belief, rather than a
holistic devotion that comprises and can only be known in the narrative of a community’s
unique life.
Second, proclamation might appear to be authoritarian and non-dialogical. Here,
especially given the world’s tired familiarity with a tradition of conservative punditry, there is
a hesitance about what might be seen as simply pontificating. Apart from concerns about the
reception of this witness, there may also be worries in this vein about what it makes Christian
ethics. Here, the discipline is an exercise in casuistic judgments on certain acts, rather the
depiction of the sort of life that makes sense for the development of virtue in Christian
disciples.22 Further, that Christians are in a position to act as moral experts may be a sign of
a Constantinianism that construes Christian doctrine and ethics not as guides for Christian
discipleship, but as principles for developing an ethic for any sphere, even those unsuitable
for disciples.23
Third, Hauerwas’ emphasis on the necessity of the church’s holiness for its witness—
“the church is finally known by the character of the people who constitute it, and if we lack
that character, the world rightly draws the conclusion that the God we worship is in fact a
false God”24—cultivates a potentially useful worry about the church’s proclamation being
hypocritical; we ought to discipline ourselves, lest, when we have preached to others, we
should be castaways. The overall effect of Hauerwas’ oeuvre, and the tenor of many
individual pieces has an effect of more than cautious self-criticism, however. There is a
feeling in his critique of the American church that we have overstepped the mark to a striking
degree and are at a time for repentance, rather than continued speech. Moreover, the
embattlement of the church depicted in such works as After Christendom and A Better Hope,
Cf., “Abortion: Why the Arguments Fail” 216ff.
Cf., “A Christian Critique of Christian America,” The Hauerwas Reader 474-476. Cf., also, “The Servant
Community” 373.
24
“The Servant Community” 385.
22
23
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which present capitalism, the state, modernity and postmodernity alike as enemies of the
church, rather than realities of mixed blessing and challenge, recalls the stark picture that
concludes Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, that of the church battening down the hatches,
turning inward and expecting only rigorous community life to enable its continued survival.
So, do these three critiques effectively silence the church? Let us examine them in
turn. First, for Hauerwas, “Christians do not believe in an ‘eternal truth or truths’ that can be
known apart from the existence of the people of Israel and the church.”25 This seems to be a
fine general principle, but its limits must be recognized, and its implications carefully drawn
out. Hauerwas admits this statement may seem fearfully close to a crass relativism, but
insists that it is rather a statement about God’s self-revelation that is not conditioned by
modern presuppositions about the universal accessibility of truth. However, the statement
does not seem to me to have managed to avoid simple opposition to modern
foundationalism.26 First, Scripture seems to indicate something of a knowledge of God
present in the world outside of Israel and the church, an eternity set in their hearts, a clear
sight of God's invisible attributes, a worship of that which is yet unknown. We might further
complement this general revelation with the immediate revelation experienced by Paul and
countless others since Christ’s ascension, down to the present day.
Still, Hauerwas’ principle seems to me to be right in the main; Christianity insists on
what has been termed a ‘personal knowledge’ of God, a knowledge that involves the self
beyond simple cognition, and this knowledge-cum-faith demands an obedience which
necessarily includes the church, both for the enactment of ordinances and the fulfillment of
precepts about community, but also for the practicalities of the development of virtue that
Hauerwas demands we attend to. However, is it not possible for it to be oral proclamation
“Can a Pacifist Think About Just War?” 135.
Philosophical concern for holism seems consistent with the scriptural depiction of humanity and the church,
but should be recognized for what it is, a philosophical concern. It must be asked what theological warrant
Hauerwas has for refusing proclamation or even ‘propositional truth’? There is a narrativity to God’s salvation
work and to its scriptural record, yes. But how far can we drive this category of understanding?
25
26
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that points to exactly this truth? This certainly seems to be the example of Paul and indeed of
Jesus’ preaching of the Kingdom that we can point to as at least part of the establishment of
the church.
Further, it is not clear that the only thing Christians can point to as a witness to the
reality of God’s saving work is the church. Are the Scriptures only made real by their
application in the life of the church? I do in no way want to divorce these two, or spend time
building on hypothetical situations in which a Bible falls into the lap of someone unaware of
the church, but it seems that God’s self-revelation in Scripture may witness to the world
alongside or even in spite of the church's witness.
Finally, as to the possibility that oral proclamation simply reinforces the modern
world's classification of Christianity as a religion, or as a ‘faith’: it does not seem that
retreating from oral proclamation is the only remedy for this situation. Hauerwas’ demand of
a holistic church should be reflected in our preaching; we must not proclaim the Gospel as if
were simply a Jeffersonian religion of the mind and as if the church did not matter. But my
point is that this correct understanding can indeed be reflected in our proclamation; and even
if presented well and with regard for the limits of language in representing the reality of the
church, there is no guarantee that this message will be received and understood correctly by
the world. This misapprehension seems to be expected, yet it demands further engagement;
this exact process is demonstrated by Hauerwas’ essay “Remembering Martin Luther King
Remembering.”27 Here, Hauerwas demonstrates how King's explicitly Christian depiction of
the civil rights struggle in terms of sin and salvation has been turned into a story of the
progress of a liberal individualist nation, and he attempts to renew our understanding of the
particularism in King's thought. Even if our speech is not fully accessible or intelligible to
the world, as with King, it still demands to be spoken; and when the world, in its attempt to
27
In Wilderness Wanderings: Probing Twentieth-Century Theology and Philosophy (Boulder, CO: Westview
Press, 1997).
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comprehend our message, turns it into something else, we must be ready to correct this
misunderstanding with yet more conversation, as Hauerwas does in his essay.
Second, rather than reacting against proclamation as authoritarian or non-dialogical,
we may assert with Hauerwas the character of witness as a confrontation with truth. For
Hauerwas “the command to be a witness is based on the presupposition that we only come to
the truth through the process of being confronted by the truth.”28 While Hauerwas goes on to
point to the church's unity as its witness, it is not apparent that oral proclamation cannot
equally serve as a witness, as a confrontation with the truth; nor is it apparent that this
confrontation will remain either notional or violent,29 especially if we stipulate that
proclamation must always include reference to the church. And as with the above,
proclamation does not preclude conversation; indeed we may do well to think of
proclamation as the way in which Christians start conversations with the world.
Again, we encounter the problem of what the world will make of our proclamation.
That we might be perceived as simply moralists or as expert ethicists may be unavoidable and
should be remedied by further clarifying conversation, of the sort that the Hauerwas offers in
his continued insistence on ethics being concerned with embodied virtue. This potential
misapprehension is more pernicious when it is made by Christians themselves; that is, when
Christians make the Constantinian assumption that their ethics are applicable to all realms,
rather than as a coherent and irreducible guide to Christine discipleship alone. This does not
mean that there is no such thing as ethics, here taken as disciplined reflection on practice. As
Hauerwas demonstrates, ethics need not be the adjudication of professional dilemmas by
abstract principles. Rather, storytelling and the "training of imagination and perception" are
necessary ethical tasks, and this narration can take the form of public proclamation. Indeed,
“The Church in a Divided World: The Interpretative Power of the Christian Story,” in A Community of
Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press,
1981) 105
29
“The Church in a Divided World” 105.
28
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as Hauerwas says, we should not hide the substance of our convictions in the interest of our
political strategies, for “when that is done we abandon our society to its own limits.”30
Finally, ethics will not always be the articulation of what is already true of a
community's moral life. Often the ethical task is not simply to describe or teach the alreadypresent morality, but to demand a change therein. It is thus to be expected that there will be
some discontinuity between the ethical demands proclaimed by a community, or certain
individuals therewithin, and that community's ethical practice, a penitent church should be
the first to own this truth. When it comes to the proclamation of ethical demands, the
manifestation of truth in the church's lived morality must be joined to a perception of the
church as an earthen vessel that presents the power of God that is greater than itself.31
Apart from this theoretical explanation for the church's ethical lack, we might also
have a theological expectation of the same. Whether thinking in terms of the Lutheran
description of the redeemed as simul iustus et peccator while on earth, or in the broader
conception of a pilgrim church yet on its way to perfection, or distinguishing between the
visible and invisible church, Christians have only rarely tended to imagine the church as
perfect. This has not meant that Christians have sought to hide the church, however.
A Silent Church?
This is the suggestion, however, of a very interesting recent proposal by a young
scholar in the Catholic academy, Jonathan Malesic. If Hauerwas is concerned with the
inherence for many Christians of “good Christian” and “good American,” Malesic is worried
that many may actively or unconsciously use their Christianity to improve their status in
American life. However, whereas Hauerwas wishes to increase Christians’ identification
30
31
“Abortion: Why the Arguments Fail” 229.
2 Cor. 4:1-7.
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with their community and to present that community to the world as a rebuke, Malesic seeks
to renew Christians’ integrity through a recovery of interiority and secrecy.
In his Secret Faith in the Public Square: An Argument for the Concealment of
Christian Identity, Malesic seeks to show that “the exclusion of particularistic religious
language from public life cannot always be equated with liberalism, visibility is not a
normative ecclesiological category, and truthfulness about oneself does not necessarily
demand laying every aspect of one's identity out in the open.”32 Like his exemplar Dietrich
Bonhoeffer, Malesic is taken by Søren Kierkegaard's examination in Fear and Trembling of
Abraham's sacrifice, which is notable in its emphasis on Abraham's secrecy following the
revelation of the command to sacrifice Isaac. The particularity of revelation, especially this
revelation to Abraham, its uniqueness as opposed to universal ethical maxims issues in
secrecy. This secrecy is unacceptable to the ethicist, who cannot judge Abraham's intentions
by public moral canons, but Abraham is acquitted on the religious plane. He has faith and
obeys God, even when the command overrides public morality, and even when he cannot
discuss the ethicality of his intended actions with his fellows.
Malesic sees Kierkegaard's division of the ethical and religious realms confirmed by
Christ's instruction on giving, prayer and fasting in the Sermon on the Mount, that one do
these things in secret, so that the Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward (Matt.
6:1-18). This teaching explicitly rejects the attempt to justify oneself coram hominibus, to be
ethically upright (Matt. 6:1). Thus both in revealed monotheism generally and in Christian
discipleship specifically, there is a need for secrecy.
Malesic identifies two challenges to this ethic of secrecy in today's American church.
The first is the use of Christian identity for social advantage. Introducing his project, Malesic
mentions the use of Christian identity by businessmen and politicians as a mark of integrity, a
32
Jonathan Malesic, Secret Faith in the Public Square: An Argument for the Concealment of Christian Identity
(Grand Rapids, Mich.: Brazos Press, 2009), 229.
King 16
phenomenon previously noted by Max Weber and Emile Durkheim.33 More notable is the
recent surge of Evangelicals using their church communities as a network for professional
advancement.34 Such instrumental use of church life has led to a number of abuses diagnosed
by Malesic: the lack of a Christian critique of business or political practices, oxymoronic
“elastic orthodoxy” and an erosion of Christian peculiarity. These stresses on Christianity
occur because, as “the tradition is not shared by the general public, making it fully available
to the public can cheapen it.”35
But Malesic fails to distinguish here between the contexts of his models, Kierkegaard
and Bonhoeffer, and today’s Evangelicals. What was made “fully available to the public” in
the Christendom societies of 19th-century Denmark and early 20th-century German
Lutheranism was assurance of already belonging to Christ and his church. Evangelicals do
not offer this, but extend an offer to join Christ and his church. In other words, Malesic does
not distinguished between culture Protestantism and evangelism; whereas culture
Protestantism assumed that the general public owned the tradition, evangelism by definition
assumes that those who hear are outsiders. More subtly, however, the claim of many that
America is in some sense a ‘Christian nation’ does assert a common Christianity, though not
a Christianity with any shared church (or any church at all). While such rhetoric does little, I
imagine, to convince anyone that she or he is already a Christian, it is interesting to consider
Malesic’s proposals in this light; what dilution does our faith experience by this profaning?
And what danger is there to those who might take this claim seriously?36
33
Ibid., 13.
Ibid., 201-208 draws heavily from D. Michael Lindsay, Faith in the Halls of Power (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2007).
35
Malesic, Secret, 201.
36
NB, Jamie Bartlett and Mark Littler, “Inside the EDL: Populist Politics in a Digital Age” report, (Demos
2011) 24. Bartlett and Littler report that, while their reported personal commitment to Christianity is low, a
large proportion of members of the far-right English Defence League define themselves as Christians. The
group uses Christian symbols and claims to protect Britain’s Christian heritage from an encroaching Islam.
34
King 17
All this certainly does not mean that the very public use made by some Evangelical
elites of their identity is not detrimental to themselves, their identity and the public, and that
the practice of secrecy would not be an effective remedy. And it does not address the issue of
whether filling prominent positions with Christians is a good missions strategy. It does
suggest, however, that there is a difference between disclosing one’s identity for the purpose
of affirming one’s place in a Christian society and raising one’s voice to be vox clamantis in
deserto.
The second challenge to Malesic's ethic comes from theologians who surrender the
command to secrecy to the need for the church to present a visible witness to the world.
Malesic's bête noire is Hauerwas, whose demand that the church witness to the world through
its nonviolent life implies visibility; indeed, Hauerwas sees the invisibility of the church and
a strong sense of personal interiority to be Constantinian notions that militate against
discipleship.37 However, Malesic questions whether the world can make sense by its own
lights of the alternative life presented by the church. For, “[i]f the visible is all there is,
Abraham is not a disciple but a murderer.”38 The visible is all the world, without revelation,
can see. But the church does not simply operate in Kierkegaard's visible realm, which
operates according to the Enlightenment's ethics of disclosure or the virtue theorist's ethics of
embodied practice. The church, operating in Kierkegaard's religious realm, responds to the
revelation of the “still small voice” and lives not by universal ethical maxims, but by
responsibility-taking love. This certainly does not preclude the church's visibility, but
suggests that the church is both visible and invisible, analogous to Abraham who acts, but
also keeps God's command secret.
Better analogs than Abraham are the sacraments, which operate both visibly and
invisibly.
37
38
Ibid., 223n17.
Ibid., 228.
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If the church is considered to be a visible sign of the invisible reality of
God's grace active in history for the sake of the whole world, then we cannot
say that the church's reality is exhausted by its visibility. Sacraments
necessarily participate in a reality that is both visible and invisible. Absent
the invisible reality, sacraments become rituals like any other. If the church
itself is a sacrament, then the invisibility of the grace it conveys means that
the church can no more avoid being in some sense invisible than it can avoid
having a visible corporate life.39
Further, as the world cannot understand the sacrament without grace, neither can the
ungraced world cannot make sense of the life of the church; thus, the effectiveness and need
for the church to display its inner life to the world evaporates. Per Malesic, what the world
can understand, in truth, what we are told it will recognize, is the charity of Christians.40
Malesic sees two benefits accruing from a recovery of the practice of secrecy. First,
secrecy would serve as a form of the truth-telling Hauerwas finds in Bonhoeffer, that does not
simply divulge information, but attests to God’s reality. When disclosure of Christian
identity may yield “advantage and status and capital…[a] Christian who refuses to allow his
or her or another person’s Christian identity to be so exploited…live[s] in accordance with
and even helps to re-establish the truth of Christianity and of faith.”41
Second, Malesic believes “the actual church cannot claim to be virtuous,” and thus
cannot serve the prophetic role Hauerwas assigns to it.42 “A church with members who
concealed in public that they were part of the church would not encounter this problem,”
Malesic counters, “as such a church would make no public claims to holiness.”43 But at this
point, Malesic has made the same mistake as Hauerwas, whom he accused of emphasizing
only one aspect of the church, visibility; instead of emphasizing both the visibility and
invisibility of the church, Malesic has no place for the (public) visibility of a church that is
virtuous only in Kierkegaard’s religious realm.
39
Ibid., 228-9.
In speaking of Christian love, Malesic would do well to consider the critique of N.T. Wright as to whether the
love that distinguishes Christians is generosity toward outsiders, or the charity the Christian community
demonstrates in its newly ordered life.
41
Ibid., 232.
42
Ibid., 236.
43
Ibid.
40
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Both Hauerwas and Malesic are attempting to respond to the problem of the church’s
sinfulness, which makes it indistinct from the ungraced world. Hauerwas responds to this
problem by calling for the (visible) church to adopt virtuous practices. Malesic sees this as
hopelessly idealistic, but he too has advanced a moral program to improve the church.
Though he calls for the church to hide itself, he imagines its members newly strengthened by
God’s grace to make “a palpable difference in the world.”44 How individual Christians can
display holiness and love while their congregation cannot is left unexplained. In any case,
Malesic’s complaint about Hauerwas’ idealism is a critique that cuts both ways; Malesic, too,
imagines the church as holy, however, his church is holy only in secret and only in
individuals’ individual acts.
Then again, Malesic’s church is not wholly secretive; its neighbor love shines forth
attractively. However, if we are skeptical of other Christian practices being rightly
interpreted by the world,45 how can we assume that Christian love will be understood as
distinct? The answer to this conundrum is latent in Malesic’s argument, specifically in the
examples of Abraham and the sacraments. In worrying that the church not appear before the
world as unholy, Malesic commits the same mistake as Hauerwas, and ignores his own
assertion that the church is not an entirely visible body. He also is overly concerned with the
judgment of the world, with righteousness coram hominibus. However, the church operates
not simply in the ethical plane, but in the religious, as well. The believer may never be seen
to be righteous by the ethicist, but this does not mean that he is unfaithful; indeed, his
faithfulness itself may be the cause of his apparent unholiness. Of course, the believer may
be genuinely unholy before both man and God. But, if we believe that the church is invisible
44
Ibid., 237.
Malesic is unsure that even the distinctively Christian practice of confession, lauded by Hauerwas, has lost its
meaning: “But it is worth asking if, in a culture where prominent public officials and entertainers stage
professionally expedient confessions all the time, the world could even recognize confession as confession of
sin.” Ibid., 234.
45
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as well as visible, may it not be the case that the forgiveness and righteousness bestowed on
the church is invisible to the world?
Malesic’s chief contributions to our discussion are thus his reminder of the interiority
of the Christian life and the invisibility of the church. Perhaps ironically, interiority and
invisibility seem to require proclamation (even if secrecy is required in the mundane). This
may be demonstrated by asking two questions: first, is the church truly the object of the socalled ‘watching world’? Matthew 5:13-16 and 1 Peter 2:12 indicate it is. However, as
Malesic reminds us, the Christian also conceals his good deeds, hiding his fasting and not
letting her right hand know what her left is doing. If the world is to know what God’s
Kingdom is, must we not continue in proclamation, rather than expecting it to discover that
which we are hiding? The second question is: can the world understand what it sees?
Though perhaps uncomfortable with the term ‘religious realm,’ we may accept the general
point that the realities asserted by the Christian faith are not wholly apprehensible by natural
reason. Thus, it is reasonable to expect a misapprehension of the witness presented by the
Christian in her charity. It is in verbalizing their rationale that a rejection of nationalism is
understood not as disloyalty but as witness to a universal church, or that defying one’s
parents changes from dishonoring them to loving and following Jesus. For charity, secret or
otherwise, to be not simply a witness against the world but also an invitation to the Kingdom
seems to demand an explanation of what that Kingdom is.
Directing Our Witness to the State
In order for the church to witness to the state, I contend that oral proclamation is
uniquely necessary. For, while we may debate whether Hauerwas' proposals regarding
embodied rather than spoken witness is most effective in presenting the Gospel to the world,
there is a difference between this proclamation to individuals and that made to the state. The
King 21
church in its witness to the world is inviting individuals to join the church. Thus it is sensible
to expect that a lived presentation of the Gospel might entice or convince an individual to
repent and believe. However, the church in its witness to the state is not inviting the state to
become part of the church, and perhaps not even asking it to become more ‘churchly’. The
state's existence and function are distinct from those of the church in both reality and ideal.
It is obvious that here I am supposing an integrity to the state's existence, such that we
can speak theologically of its ideal form. This means that we are not treating the state as a
parody of the Kingdom, as does William Cavanaugh. In his “The City: Beyond Secular
Parodies,”46 the state is said to have an individualist anthropology that 'precludes any truly
social process', to create only a false unity through government, bureaucracy and contract,
and to increase violence rather than bringing peace. These are certainly charges worth
considering, and may indeed be accurate, though Cavanaugh's assessment relies perhaps too
much on the texti recepti of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau. However, that these claims, even
if true, would make the state a parody of the Kingdom of God, and necessitate a Christian
anarchism does not strictly follow. First, is it only the modern state that creates a false unity
and builds peace on violence? Certainly this was said of Rome by Augustine, but this empire
was also spoken of by Paul and Peter as God's minister, bringing peace. Second, it is unclear,
at least to me, whether and to what extent states promote a unified ideology. Were it the case
that modern states insisted on an anthropology in which individuals can only relate to the
state, does this mean that the states themselves are parodic, or that their ideologies are? And
would a false ideology require the elimination of the state along the lines of Cavanaugh's
proposed Christian anarchism? Third, does the state's unity being limited, or its peace being
incomplete require its rejection, or make it parodic? Indeed, what can, for Cavanaugh,
provide peace apart from the Kingdom itself; that is, is there anything in the world that, in
46
In Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology, John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and Graham Ward, eds.
(London: Routledge, 1998).
King 22
providing a good, or the appearance of a good, isn't simply a parody of Goodness? Are
mediate goods possible, or anything that might participate in God’s peace while not being
that peace in its fullness?
If we cannot treat the state as a very real, though parodic, institution, nor can we treat
the state as a phantom, which is the third assumption one may inherit from long acquaintance
with Hauerwas’ writings. For Hauerwas, talk of the state is always accompanied by a fear of
violence. For Yoder, as with Max Weber, most famously, violence is constitutive or
definitional of the state; put simply, the authority that uses violence and its threat to curb
illicit violence and maintain peace is, in the modern era, named as the state. For Yoder, the
authority of the state is a power, a creature of God, presently in rebellion, but ultimately
subject to Christ. This understanding is derived from a reading of Romans 13 and 1 Timothy
2, which speak of sword-bearing authorities promoting peace. Hauerwas provides no such
reading of Romans 13 or 1 Timothy 2. Rather, for Hauerwas, the violence of the state is not
precisely definitional, in the way it is for Yoder, but rather something of a sociological fact;
states are always violent, and though Hauerwas criticizes Yoder for founding political
community on a violent state, only in a single footnote does Hauerwas ever address even the
possibility of a nonviolent state.47
While politics is a basic function of communal human existence, and so must be
imagined as potentially peaceful,48 the state is not similarly basic for Hauerwas. Whereas
Yoder can speak of God’s work outside of the church through the created powers yet to be
redeemed, for Hauerwas, providence is placed in a soft opposition to the state, such that
“The Nonresistant Church: The Theological Ethics of John Howard Yoder” in Vision and Virtue: Essays in
Christian Ethical Reflection (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989), 218. The footnote reads,
in part: “For the pacifist is tempted to condemn the state to the necessity of war, but if we do so we but become
the other side of the just war position. Theologically we may not know how God can provide for the possibility
of a nonviolent state, but neither can we act as if such were not a possibility.” “Should War Be Eliminated?” in
Against the Nations: War and Survival in a Liberal Society (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press,
1992), 196n25.
48
“Can a Pacifist Think About War?” 131.
47
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Hauerwas speaks of the necessity of confidence in providence to overcome one’s confidence
in the state.49 While this ethical point is valid, it also suggests Hauerwas’ refusal or inability
(until his very late work) to suggest in concrete terms how God works in the world outside of
the church.
Against a demonisation of the state, Jüngel cites Karl Barth’s insight from that “a
demonisation of the state is impossible [as]…because even the heavenly Jerusalem is a state,
even the worst and most disarrayed earthly state has within it its everlasting purpose to
contribute to the magnificence of the heavenly Jerusalem or in some way to bring its tribute
there.”50 Thus we are thrown back onto the reality that, given its inescapably political
character (as Hauerwas claims with Yoder), human life includes the political and will
continue to do so in eternity, but, with Barth’s insistence on states’ heavenly purpose, Jüngel
demands that we see “the very fact that the state and the church are two different things, that
the human community exists in this duality of a political and a spiritual community, and,
therefore, that the church faces the state as something very special [is this not continuingly
evident in Hauerwas’ interaction with the idea of the state?] – that very fact is especially
indicative of the world which is indeed reconciled in Jesus Christ but which remains as yet
unredeemed.”51 While at the eschaton ‘Christian’ existence (Jüngel’s term) and political
existence will be one, in the present, church and state remain separate, such that, though
churchly existence is necessarily political, the political is not exhausted by the church, but the
state retains a necessary function as promised by Scripture.52
The distinction seen above between Yoder’s and Hauerwas’ theologies of the state is
grounded in Yoder’s continued insistence on the state as a power and Hauerwas’ refusal to
make the same theological move. To name the state as a power is to affirm that the state is a
“The Servant Community” 376-9; “The Politics of Salvation” 43.
“Rechtfertigung und Recht” 27.
51
Eberhard Jüngel, Christ, Justice and Peace: Toward a Theology of the State in Dialogue with the Barmen
Declaration, Alan Torrance and D. Bruce Hamilll (trans.), (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1992) 61.
52
Cf., ibid., p. 64.
49
50
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creature. This gives the state a certain integrity—creatures aren't parodies—and implies a
providential usefulness to the state. Of course, as a creaturely power, the state is fallen, and
this certainly opens up considerable ambiguity—how far and in what ways will we claim that
the modern state has, in any particular instance, fallen from its original good?—yet
describing the state requires that we no longer consider the state to be simply evil and
opposed to God and his church, but that we imagine its restoration. For as a power, the fallen
state in its wickedness has been conquered. That it is ascribed a positive role by Paul and
Peter suggests a providential use, even if we believe the state will ultimately fall away at the
end of the age, rather than experience complete redemption.
If we are not interested in or willing to describe the state as a power, we do well at
very least to follow the Pauline and Petrine affirmations about the state. (Again, I am
assuming a basic equivalence between the governments of the New Testament era and
modern states.) In Romans 13:1-7, Paul refers to authorities’ establishment by God and their
claims their service is a ministry of God.53 Their work yields a modicum of the tranquility
and quiet.54 With Paul, Peter requires Christians submit themselves to authorities.55 The
martyrdom of these two at the hands of the Roman Empire surely puts disqualifies any
suggestion of an easy conservatism on their part. As Yoder points out, the government
referred to by the New Testament was pagan.56 But, of course, so was the Assyria of Isaiah
10 and the Persia of Isaiah 45, and both of these were God’s instruments. If we are
dissatisfied with an understanding of the state as a power, perhaps we must at least allow its
providential usefulness and its establishment by God. What is not consistent with the
scriptural witness is to stanch consideration of the state by deeming it simply a distracting
phantom.
53
Romans 13:1-7.
1 Timothy 2:1-4.
55
1 Peter 2:13-17.
56
Discipleship as Political Responsibility 62.
54
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In an exposition of the Barmen Declaration, Eberhard Jüngel state, “Whoever, by
thought, word, or deed, denies that the state, by carrying out its responsibilities (whether it
knows it or not), operates according to a benevolent arrangement of God, dispenses those
ruling and those ruled of their responsibility before God.”57 In this light, witness specifically
to state, calling the state to its responsibility before God, becomes incumbent upon the
church. For Hauerwas, “Our task is not to make these nations the church, but rather to
remind them that they are but nations.” Insisting that the church’s future is not bound with
nation-states, he maintains that “the idolatry most convenient to us all remains the presumed
primacy of the nation-state.”58 What must be said alongside this warning is that one may
speak to the state and claim that it has a divine purpose without this constituting an idolatry
that makes the state equivalent to the church.
For Yoder, Christians must speak to the state for three main reasons: first, with
Jüngel, the conviction that Christ is Lord of the state, second, concern for the statesperson
herself, and third, concern for the wellbeing of their neighbors. First, because the ordering
that is the state is a power, it is to be understood that the state as a power is a creature of God,
though it is a fallen creature.59 God makes use of the state to preserve order and peace, as
stated above, and though this work is not the redemption God works through the church, that
this work of conservation is yet God’s work renders the state theologically intelligible and
unmasks its pretensions to be existent outside of God’s reign and the Christian’s critique.
The fallen creature that is the state will be more or less submissive to God’s purposes for its
ordering—and more or less submissive to its stated principles of ensuring justice and order—
and the Christian may demand that it do so.
57
Christ, Justice and Peace 64.
“The Church in a Divided World” 110.
59
For this paragraph, see John Howard Yoder, “The Theological Basis of the Christian Witness to the State,” in
On Earth Peace: Discussions on War/Peace Issues Between Friends, Mennonites, Brethren, and European
Churches, 1935-75, ed. Donald F. Durnbaugh (Elgin, Ill.: Brethren Press, 1978), 140-141.
58
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Second, the ordering of the state, though a ‘power,’ is yet “certain people doing
certain things.”60 These people are, in the church’s eyes, humans for whom Christ has died.
That salvation that his death has made available to them is, in part, a life of agape and
nonresistance.61 Whether or not this life is compatible with the particular office of a
statesperson is unknowable in advance; however,
No man can be in harmony with God or even with himself who chooses to
cause others to suffer. His bondage to violence and lust for power may be
brutal and frank, clouded by doubts, or cloaked in self-righteousness; it is
bondage all the same… He needs, like any man, to be respected, to be
esteemed worthy of personal concern, to be invited to discover…a way more
excellent, more human, both for his subject and for himself. 62
Thirdly, insofar as the modern state is not simply the policing authority wielding the
sword, but, unlike the Roman Empire in the time of the early church, a means of providing
for the general welfare, the Christian is to be concerned with the justice of the state’s
arrangements therefor.63 Per Yoder, those elements of the church—various denominations
and charities—most conversant with a certain issue ought to be the ones to critique it. But
this is to be done not in the manner of an (self-)interest(ed) group, but as an expression of
Christian conscience.64 And again, the Christian’s awareness of the state’s eagerness to
overstep its bounds will prompt her to examine its welfare programs carefully for the
creeping influence of the sword, knowing that “the things that are socially beneficial become
jeopardized to the extent that they are bound up with the violence carried out by the state.”65
Hauerwas, Jüngel and Yoder all point to the temptation of the state to imagine itself as
the Kingdom. For Hauerwas, this is seen in the claim to the citizen's ultimate allegiance that
is made when the state asks one to kill in the name of the state. Jüngel suggests the Nazi
60
Ibid., 142, quoting Jean Lasserre.
Yoder, “The Theological Basis of the Christian Witness to the State,” 142.
62
Yoder, The Christian Witness to the State 14-15.
63
Ibid., 14.
64
Ibid., 22.
65
Yoder, Discipleship as Political Responsibility 41. Yoder continues, “The welfare program can, especially in
times of war, be forced to support the population policy of a totalitarian state; the school system can become a
propaganda machine, and the registry office can become a means of persecuting Jews.”
61
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state's claim to be an eternal or ‘thousand-year’ Reich to be evidence of a similar
divinization.66 For Yoder, that a state would attempt to achieve an ideal order is already an
overreaching of its basic purpose. “The state exists for the purpose of keeping order. The
more a state aspires to a higher mission, a semi-religious role or one designed to control
world history, whether in the west or in the east, the more the Christian will become
suspicious with respect to the state.”67
“Justice gains its intelligibility from the worship of God,” Hauerwas claims in
Christianity, Democracy and the Radical Ordinary.68 Indeed, the fact of the matter is that
“whatever we mean by politics, justice, or democracy will be determined by how we have
learned to celebrate, that is, to worship.”69 This Hauerwasian axiom makes it so striking
then, that Hauerwas goes on to claim that a “people who seek justice rather than glory, a
justice that is not driven by the fear of death, are not restricted to the church.”70 Such people
are discovered in politics, likely local politics, as politics names for Hauerwas “the practices
required for the formation of a people in the virtues necessary for conversations and conflicts
to take place if goods in common are to be discovered.”71 Whereas in the past, Hauerwas has
defined politics in terms of the polis, such that the church, the community gathered by Christ
as Kingdom, was a polis, indeed the only true polis,72 now politics is moved back a step, such
that it is not the life of a polis in itself, but the gathering of this community. Thus the
possibility of finding common cause with those outside the church, or to return to another
aspect of Augustine, the task of maintaining an earthly city during the saeculum.
66
Jüngel, Christ, Justice and Peace 62.
Yoder, Discipleship as Political Responsibility 45.
68
“Letter of April 16, 2007,” in Stanley Hauerwas and Romand Coles, Christianity, Democracy and the Radical
Ordinary: Conversations Between a Radical Democrat and a Christian (Cambridge: The Lutterworth Press,
2008) p. 106.
69
Ibid., p. 105.
70
“A Haunting Possibility: Christianity and Radical Democracy,” in Hauerwas and Coles, Christianity,
Democracy and the Radical Ordinary 27.
71
“Letter of April 16, 2007,” p. 112.
72
“The Reality of the Church,” p. 130.
67
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As our purpose is to address witness to the state, and not rule through it,73 we may
sidestep the issue dividing those following the Magisterial Reformation from those following
the Radical, that is, whether Christians may participate in the state’s bearing of the sword, or
other activities implicated therewith. What is interesting for our purposes is that, in his
opening of the possibility of Christians making common cause with those who don’t
acknowledge God, at least in no way we recognize, Hauerwas has taken the first step toward
Christian participation in state politics. For, if the local community hailed by radical
democrats is indeed a political community that specifies an ordering of society, and if we
admit that Christians are part of this society, while at the same time participating in the
ordered, political life of the church, we may also imagine Christians understanding
themselves to be part of a community on the scale of the state, given that we do not
understand that stand to be a parody or a phantom, but a legitimate governing authority, the
sword-wielding magistrate of our era.
The witness of Baptist history is that we do have a witness to make to the state, as
well as claims to make of it. For not only do Christians have the duty to warn the state
against its creep toward violence and self-glorification, but, as suggested with Yoder above,
we will also seek the good of our neighbour in the just ordering of our society. This will
include the state restraining from hindering the free preaching of the Gospel, that which was
sought by Backus, Leland, Williams and others.
Conclusion
If, with the conference proposal, we anticipate a diminished place for the church and
the Christian religion in the near future, the marginal origins of Baptists, and indeed our place
This argument need not simply be the groundwork for a future justification of participation in the state’s rule.
For Yoder, given that the God-ordained state of Romans 13 was the pagan Rome means that we ought to have
no moral qualm with ‘abandoning’ the rule of our societies to non-Christians, though this does not similarly
excuse us from witness thereto. Yoder, Discipleship as Political Responsibility, 29-32.
73
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at the margins for much of our history, often on conviction (believing the tragically few of
the called are also chosen74), should provide us with certain memories that might control our
self-understanding more helpfully than those of recent political forays and foibles. And as
our profile diminishes, in what some might typify as an occasion of the refining of a remnant,
then it may be that our voice, speaking not our words but the Gospel spoken also to us, will
necessarily be our primary witness. Understanding the state as a power, fallen, yet still a
creature, will mean that we include it among that to which we witness, anticipating its
redemption, if only in part, and hoping as well for justice and the redemption of those who
people the state. In sum, while Hauerwasian political theology is helpful in its chastening of
political ambitions, Baptist political engagement is able to integrate a minority presence with
a strong oral witness to the state, and thus should be sustainable in a future world of
diminished Christian presence.
74
Mt 22:14.