I would like to describe the ubiquitous spirit of our times by invoking the famous words of Charles Dickens in his novel, “The Tale of Two Cities”, when he started his historical novel by saying: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.” It is such a time in which we live.
In the space of religious vocation, pastoral leadership, and graduate theological education that I inhabit, the question of the role of the church and the follower of Jesus during this unprecedented election season that is before us in the US, is an urgent question for the church, and one that is unavoidable for the authenticity of its own self-understanding.
What do we do? What should we do? How can we, as followers of Jesus, live prophetically in the current political climate? These essential questions beg us to construct a sound biblical Christian theology of politics. I will try to do that here by way of sharing a few stories in my personal journey that have helped shape my own theological understanding of politics.
I am a 4th generation Filipino Baptist, having received my Baptist faith from my ancestors who were converted to the Baptist faith by American Baptist missionaries to the Philippines. My maternal grandfather was one of the first graduates of the theological school founded by the missionaries. When WWII broke out, and the Japanese Imperial Army invaded and colonized the Philippines, they arrested all Americans that they found, and many ABC missionaries were sent to POW camps. But 11 missionaries decided to flee up to the hills of a province on Panay Island where my grandfather had founded a church. When the missionaries arrived there, my grandfather helped them find a hiding place at the bottom of a lush ravine. They called their hiding place, “Hopevale.” They hid there for almost two years until their location was discovered by a Japanese Imperial Army platoon. The Japanese Army was in retreat at that time from Gen. McArthur, and there were orders not to take any American prisoners alive. After a time of prayer that was granted to them, they came to their executioners, holding hands and singing a hymn, and their leader said, “We Are Ready!” They did not fear physical death. In Kierkegaard’s words, they were not in “despair” because they believed that their lives were aligned with God’s plan for them.
This next story was when I was a senior in high school at the Central Philippine University when Ferdinand Marcos declared Martial Law in 1972, and ushered a period of repressive dictatorship and one-man rule. in 1978 my father was called to be pastor of perhaps the most prominent protestant church in the country. Its prominent members included the president of the opposition party in the Philippine Senate on the one hand, and the Chief of Staff of the Philippine Armed Forces of Ferdinand Marcos on the other. Early on, my father had to come to terms with his pastoral identity. He courageously preached the gospel of Jesus, developed a ministry to the political detainees, and organized free legal services for them. Every Wednesday evening, a diverse group of people from all walks of life came to church to study the Bible and struggle with its meaning in light of the oppressive regime we all were living under. I would see every Sunday a new face in the pew, and invariably a bulge around their waist that obviously was shaped like a firearm. The sermons of my father were being monitored. My father left the country in 1982, to serve as the associate executive minister at the American Baptist Churches of Metro New York. When he arrived here, a close family friend and newspaper editor living in exile in Chicago, told him that through his contacts he had learned that my father was already on the list of people scheduled to be arrested by the regime. My father’s commitment to be true to his pastoral identity could have cost him his freedom.
This next vignette that I would like to tell, is about the time I left North Shore Baptist Church in Chicago where I had served on the pastoral staff for 9 years. I was called to serve at the American Bible Society in New York in 1990. It was during the years of serving there that I discovered a profound, yet largely unknown, history of our English Bible. The English Bible that we now so enjoy in our hands is soaked in the blood of martyrs. Three names stand out: William Tyndale, John Wycliffe, and John Lambert. John Wycliffe was an English scholar who was the first to translate the Vulgate into English in 1382. His followers were called the Lollards, considered the precursor of the Reformation beginning in the 16th century.
He was followed by another English scholar, William Tyndale, who was the first to translate the Bible into English directly from the original Hebrew and Greek of the sacred texts in 1529-30, and the first to take advantage of the printing press. The spread of the Tyndale Bible resulted in the death sentence for possession of the English Bible, which was considered a direct challenge to the hegemony of the medieval Catholic Church, and its unholy alliance with the monarchy and the laws of England. William Tyndale was arrested in 1535, tried and convicted for heresy in 1536, and executed that same year by strangulation and burning. His last words were: “Lord, open the King of England’s eyes!”
John Lambert, another English scholar and theologian, was a contemporary of William Tyndale, and together with the other scholars who translated the Bible into English and discovered its liberating message when it came to them in the language of their hearts, was convicted of heresy in 1538 by the Duke of Norfolk, who ordered Lambert to be executed by burning at the stake. Henry VIII etched his doctrine against liberality in Lambert’s own blood. As John Lambert was being burned at the stake, and as the flames were rising from his feet engulfing his body, he kept on shouting “None but Christ, none but Christ” until he spoke no more.
I share these stories because the exercise of our faith does have political implications – in many instances momentous and transformative ones. Charles Peguy, the French philosopher and theologian, once said “All religion begins in mysticism, and ends in politics.” History teaches us that the Christian faith has been at its most transformative and powerful self when it stood against the principalities and powers of the world, and not in collaboration with them.
If we are to construct a biblically sound Christian theology of politics, or any theology for that matter, we need to start with the grand perspective of the biblical story of God’s redemptive act in history which begins in Genesis, where God creates life and pronounces it as good. Then humanity wanted to be like God and distorted this relationship, and now possessed the proclivity to mess up everything it touched. Then our grand story moves through Moses and the freeing of the Hebrew slaves, through the Judges and the Kings of Israel, the wise counsel of the Wisdom writers, and then the Prophets. Then we enter the NT, where we meet the greatest mystery of our faith – that God lovingly “became flesh and dwelt among us” in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, whose suffering and death on the cross completes God’s loving intention to reconcile the world unto the divine life.
And so God’s self-disclosure into history was grandiosely political, liberating a slave people from bondage and commissioning them to be a separate people. And then God enters our humanity through Jesus, who proclaims his ministry in unequivocal and concrete political terms in Luke 4. But what kind of politics? This brings us to the issue at hand.
Secular, earthly partisan politics is a contest for power, position, and hegemony. Because it is that, it is innately antithetical to the gospel and the teachings of Jesus. But the cause of Jesus is not a private matter either, as it has become in modern religion. In fact, the cause of Jesus is provocatively a public one. The ministry of Jesus took place within and during the reign of emperor Caesar, who was deified and divinized as godlike. Jesus’ ministry and message of God’s kingdom, however, became a disruptive and dislocating presence to the hegemonic rule of Caesar. Hence, Jesus was executed as a seditionist.
Arguably, the first “democratic” elections recorded in the Bible was held in the wilderness of Sinai, when the freed slaves of Egypt led by Moses became impatient over the long time it took for him to come down from Mt. Sinai. That extended absence of their leader generated a deep-seated sense of the unknown. In their anxiety and fear, they “elected” the golden calf. Idolatry is the most mentioned sin in the Bible. God is a jealous God, hence the first commandment. Matthew 22: 15-21 became a pivotal and decisive hermeneutic in how the politics of Jesus subordinates earthly partisan politics as an extension of the audacious claim in Psalm 24:1, that “The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it.” God’s reign on earth is political because the consequence of the redemptive power of the Holy Spirit in the world dislocates and transforms all human relations and all human structures, including earthly partisan politics.
To “give unto Caesar…” means that as followers of Jesus we are in the world but not of the world, which is to say, that while we are citizens of heaven, we still live in the land of Pharaoh and Caesar. And so partisan elections for me have clearly been nothing but the choosing of the professional who is best capable to do the job. It is no different from how I go about selecting, say, my gastroenterologist. For example, I ask myself the question, how many colonoscopies has this doctor performed? And as I do my research on the credentials of that gastroenterologist, I want to ascertain and validate his demonstrable board certification, his membership in a fellowship/guild of surgeons of his field, etc – all of which would have required him to have performed a prescribed number of procedures successfully before they are certified. I do not look at this doctor as an indispensable agent to my concerns over eternity whatsoever.
We can’t be modern day Pharisees and Herodians, collaborators of the empire. Jesus strictly prohibited that because subsuming our faith to worldly power is blasphemous. In this election year we are called to make a choice as to who we believe is best capable to lead in the governance of our nation and its complex role in the global arena, the one who best can protect its provenance and its bedrock values. Our act of responsible citizenship by voting during the election is in the end no more than giving to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s. And while our choices in this moral universe have consequences, they are just that – an earthly choice for an earthly political leader whose moral agency in the vicissitudes of our nation’s fate is still subjugated to the free and inscrutable sovereignty of God. As followers of Jesus we must keep our prophetic distance from earthly dominions, so that we can exercise our responsibility to speak truth even to power. We can’t do this if we have sublimated our prophetic role to the dominion of Caesar and Pharaoh.
And so the Apostle Paul’s words are instructive: “But just as we have the same spirit of faith as he had who wrote, ‘I believed, and so I spoke’ – we too believe, and so we speak (2 Cor. 4:13).”
Elmo Familiaran 