And so, what should good Christian people who oppose these trends and want to reverse them do? They should—by public and political action—get their hands on the political levers and then use those same levers to impose a Christian agenda: to ban or at least regulate abortion; to restore prayer and the promotion of Christian values in the schools; to adopt social and taxation policies that support and strengthen the traditional family; to constrain rather than feed economic and sexual appetites; to restore traditional spiritual beliefs and practices based on the Christian Scriptures to their rightful place in government, the marketplace, and society.
What a laudable and appealing proposition from the standpoint of the Christian community! Seize the levers of political power and authority in your society, and use those to promote and establish the kingdom of heaven on earth. What a noble temptation!
It is of course a very old temptation—one as old as Christendom itself, one to which many Christians and Christian leaders have succumbed—and we should learn from their experience.
During the first three centuries after Jesus’ earthly sojourn ended, the Christian community was a minority in the Roman Empire—at first a tiny minority—bitterly persecuted by both the political and the religious establishments. But with the passage of time it grew in numbers and influence.
Then, in the words of the Grand Inquisitor as he recounted this history to the Christ,
Just eight centuries ago, we took from him, the wise and mighty spirit in the wilderness, what Thou didst reject with scorn, the last gift he offered Thee, showing Thee all the kingdoms of the earth. We took from him Rome and the sword of Caesar, and proclaimed ourselves sole rulers of the earth … But Thou mightest have taken even then the sword of Caesar. Why didst Thou reject that last gift? Had Thou accepted that last offer of the mighty spirit, Thou wouldst have accomplished all that man seeks on earth—that is, someone to worship, someone to keep his conscience, and some means of uniting all in one unanimous and harmonious ant heap, because the craving for universal unity is the third and last anguish of men … Hadst Thou taken the world and Caesar’s purple, Thou wouldst have founded the universal state and have given universal peace. For who can rule men if not he who holds their conscience and their bread in his hands.47
Yet Jesus, to the bitter disappointment of the Grand Inquisitor, rejected it all!
The Roman Empire declined and eventually disappeared, to be followed centuries later by the Holy Roman Empire, a marriage of professedly Christian institutions and a Christian agenda to the political instruments of the evolving state, a marriage that begot the Crusades and eventually produced the Spanish Inquisition—an institution characterized by a fusion of the powers of the state with those of the professing Christian church so absolute that the powers of the state were used to burn at the stake those whom the church deemed to be heretics and a danger to the purity and the practice of the faith.
Western statesmen today profess to be alarmed at the fusion of religion and government preached and practised by Islamic fundamentalists, and they should be. But in communicating our concerns, let us do so with the frank acknowledgement that for over 800 years Christendom attempted very much the same thing, with results even more disastrous for religion than for politics.
In my own political experience, the biggest single public fear of electing strongly professing Christians to public office is the public’s fear that we will use the persuasive and legislative powers of elected office to impose our Christian values and beliefs on those who do not share them. And the biggest single criticism from the Christian community of me as a professedly Christian legislator in office was that I did not use the persuasive and legislative powers of my office to do precisely that.
The irony in all this is that if the general public actually knew what Jesus of Nazareth himself taught on this subject, if they knew of his own personal and categorical rejection of that option when it was presented to him at the outset of his own ministry, they would see him and genuine Christianity as the great guardians against the very thing that they fear. The further irony—a tragic irony—is that when well-meaning Christians advocate the use of the coercive power of the state to bring in the kingdom of heaven they are actually taking not Jesus’ side but the side of Satan when he advocated precisely that position in the wilderness temptation.
But what true believer, zealous for the cause of right and desirous of seeing the kingdom of heaven on earth, can resist the temptation to grasp the power and the authority of the state if it appears within reach?
Well, we know one who did resist—Jesus himself, the author and finisher of our faith. He called the one who offered him that power by his name: “Away from me, Satan!”48 He then quoted the Scripture that says, if a believer is going to bow down to authority or receive authority, there is only one authority to whom that believer should ultimately surrender himself or herself and only one purpose for that surrender. “Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only.”49
Does this mean that Christian believers should not be involved in secular governments or the politics of the world or seek to advance the values and truths that proceed from the word of God in the secular, humanistic, and materialistic political and cultural arenas of our times? Not at all! But let us recognize that the Jesus way of advancing those values and truths—of advancing the kingdom of God, of securing public support for a spiritual agenda—is fundamentally different from the way urged upon him by Satan in the wilderness. More on this Jesus way in subsequent chapters.
44 Matthew 4:8–9. Luke also quotes Satan as saying “I will give you all their authority and splendor; it has been given to me, and I can give it to anyone I want to. If you worship me, it will all be yours” (Luke 4:6–7).
45 John 12:31; 14:30; 16:11.
46 Matthew 4:10.
47 Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 250–251.
48 Matthew 4:10, emphasis added.
49 Matthew 4:10, emphasis added.
1.5 TRAINING: ETHICS
Introduction
Prior to my entry into federal politics in Canada I spent 20 years as a management consultant, mainly focused on long-range strategic, communication, and community relations planning for clients in the energy industry. In that context I tried to keep up on the various techniques and strategies published every year in a variety of journals and books on the subject of effective management, especially the management of people. Some of these were quite helpful and would eventually be of use to me in managing the executive and organization of a political party, including a parliamentary caucus. But of all the management texts I have read and studied, perhaps the most insightful and helpful from my perspective has been a book by a 19th century Scottish clergyman and theologian, A. B. Bruce, entitled The Training of the Twelve.50
The language of his book will strike the modern reader as quaint and out of another era, which it is. And Bruce occasionally digressed into giving his side of various theological disputes that were apparently important at the time but
