Politics is intoxicating, especially in election season, and especially in a time of such high drama in this particular presidential campaign. In future weeks, I will undoubtedly be writing about the elections of 2008.
But in this first offering of what will now be weekly columns on this site, I want to begin with a focus on the church.
The themes are connected in this way: I believe that declining confidence in the church as the center of God's redemptive activity in the world correlates directly with an exaggerated emphasis on worldly politics. The less we believe that the church really makes a difference in this broken world, the more we look to McCain or Obama, Hillary or Huckabee, to save us.
This is not a problem confined to any particular political ideology. Both liberal and conservative Christians do it. Both Republican and Democratic Christians do it. Without really knowing what is happening, we shift our ultimate hopes from the church to the state.
Of course, there are very good reasons for why this happens.
Baptists especially do not need to be reminded of how disillusioning church life can actually be. It is easy to lose hope in the redemptive significance of churches embroiled in petty conflicts, visibly lacking in spiritual vitality, making no real difference in people's lives, and just seeming to go through the motions Sunday after Sunday. It is hard to believe that Jesus Christ is alive and well in and through such churches. It is hard to believe that a God who really cares about this suffering world can't come up with a better strategy than the church. No wonder so many shift their hope elsewhere, or give up hope altogether.
Yet Christians have no choice but to believe that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, and that the focus of this reconciliation is the church. In the church, Jesus Christ continues to take form in the world. In the church, the Holy Spirit brings sinners to repentance, empowers faithful proclamation, and nurtures nascent believers toward lives of mature discipleship. In the church, hurting bodies and souls are helped and healed, the ache of loneliness is overcome, and love prevails over hatred, prejudice and indifference. In the church, a new kind of human community is established that at least gives glimpses of God's intent for the entire human family. In and through the church, human beings are given reason to believe that the resurrection of Jesus Christ actually happened—and, therefore, in the end and despite it all, God wins, life wins, goodness wins, and we win.
Churches which look like this do exist. Of course, churches are organisms with their own mysterious inner life. Their vitality sometimes waxes and sometimes wanes, and for reasons not always easy to identify. But where Christians experience church life that looks something like the kind of community I have just outlined, they need not misplace their hopes on some other salvation. They know that Jesus saves, not Giuliani, and they know that their primary community in life is the congregation, not the nation.
I am trying these days to think through—and to help Baptists and evangelicals develop—what might be called an ecclesiologically robust cultural/political vision. It begins right here, I think, with a recovery of a theology and practice of vital and transformative congregational life. This is certainly the kind of vision that animated the earliest Christians, who located the action of God in the world in the body of Christ (i.e., the church) and not in the world's centers of power.
Reading through the book of Acts again these days, it is easy to see that the early church had plenty of evidence for the belief that God was changing the world through apostolic preaching, teaching and healing and in the transformed kind of human community that was emerging in the church. It would have been laughable to Peter and John to think that Rome was where the really “important” action could be found in this world. Rome itself might think so, but that was an illusion.
Some follow this line of reasoning to the conclusion that secular politics is unimportant or that the church should withdraw from the world altogether. Instead, a healthy church characterized by resurrection power will engage the world. It will do so through the moral witness of its own community life above all. And sometimes, yes, it will use words. It will speak to Obama and Hillary, to CNN and Fox. But it will do so with great care to protect the identity of the church, integrity of its mission, and independence of its message—and its messengers.
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— David Gushee is distinguished university professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University. His latest book, The Future of Faith in American Politics: The Public Witness of the Evangelical Center, debuts Feb. 15. www.davidpgushee.com