joy and privilege it has been to work with Henry on various projects, and I appreciate his patience with me as I attempt to balance more responsibilities than one human being should be allowed to have.
I also express my gratitude to my co-editor for the Areopagus Series, Dave Black. Prior to my time with Energion, I only knew Dave by name. It is a gift to now know him personally, and it is a pleasure to work with him as a colleague.
Of course, I cannot begin to state in words the love and support of my family. My wife Carol continues to encourage me as a pastor and a professor, a short-term missionary, a (former) police chaplain, and a writer. She probably wonders at times what is coming next, but I have never had to wonder about her love for me. Such love is a wonderful gift that I receive daily.
Then there are our four children: Alyssa, Courtney, Joshua, and Jason. It is not possible to imagine life without them. Children are indeed a gift from God and we have been blessed four-fold. I think they are somewhat impressed that I am a writer, but what I want them to see in me more than anything else is a Dad whose life is greatly blessed by their presence.
Finally, I wish to thank all my discussion partners on this subject, whether they come in written form or over discussion and coffee. I want to make special mention of James Hunter whose work I draw on rather heavily in chapters five and six. I was thinking about these issues long before Hunter published his recent book, To Change the World, but I know of no one who has articulated the subject matter better than he has.
I do not know how I would think about these all-important subjects without such fellow travelers along the intellectual way. They sustain me as one who probably thinks too hard about too many things.
Epiphany 2011
Preface
The Zigzags of a Journey
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I – I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.-- Robert Frost
The subject of this book is of extreme importance to me. Of course, any subject on which an author writes should be significant to him or her. But this particular subject—the politics of witness— is one that has totally reoriented my outlook and perspective on the Christian life, on Christian discipleship.
The position I put forward in this small book is not a view I have always embraced. I grew up in a typical devout Christian household—a household that never questioned that we were mired in Christendom. Indeed, we never thought about Christendom since we did not know there were other options. Throughout my close to half a century journey in this life, I have been a Republican, I have been a Democrat, I have been a political activist (in both Sojourners and Focus on the Family-like fashion), and at one point I was sure the Amish had it right in complete withdrawal from the larger happenings in the world. But the more I read Scripture and the more I read such thinkers as John Howard Yoder, Stanley Hauerwas, Jacques Ellul, William Stringfellow, and others, the more I began to see the decisive inadequacies of the aformentioned political possibilities. I came to the point in my life where I could no longer embrace Christendom as a viable option for Christians. So for the next few years, I thought it would be possible to reform it. But I soon discovered that those who attempt to reform Christendom end up getting reformed by it. Indeed, I would even use the word “converted.” It was only after a long journey of zigzagging through “this position” and “that perspective” that I came to the realization that the only possible response of the Christian toward Christendom was its rejection (as articulated very well by Carter, Rethinking Christ and Culture, pp. 77-93). This book is about the rejection of Christendom. Until Christendom is abandoned by Christians, the church’s mission and witness in the world will be seriously undermined.
There are two major flaws in this book. I know that is hardly a way to entice a reader into going further, but in actuality I think these two flaws are the book’s greatest strengths. By the time you, the reader, finish with the last page, I hope you will agree.
The first flaw is that I have I have tried to deal with too much material in too little space. The subjects of chapters two through seven need more detail and explication. There is no doubt that those who critique this work will raise questions as to the matters I failed to deal with sufficiently as well as the issues I completely ignored. But that is precisely a strength, for each chapter contains indispensable material for the subject of the politics of witness. This little book is the beginning of a dialogue on an extremely important matter—the character of the church in the world. It is a discussion that has been taking place for two thousand years to be sure. So in one obvious sense this book is not a beginning. But what I believe is new or at least newly emphasized is the way I consistently frame the matters of concern. While the subject of the church’s witness has hardly been ignored, I have overtly tied the church’s witness to politics and politics to ecclesiology. In this book I ask the church to consider the recovery of a robust political ecclesiology that sees the very life and witness of the ecclesia as its politics, and that the primary and central political posture of the church toward the nations is not one of influence in the political chambers of Washington D.C., but by embodying in its collective life what God expects of the nations.
As reviewers critique my work, it is my hope that they will raise questions, not only for further discussion, but for further revision of this work. It is my hope and desire, at some point, to expand upon each chapter eventually publishing a larger and fuller treatment. That larger work cannot be written without the affirmation and critique of the ecclesial community. I look forward to that discussion.
The second flaw is that it is not completely clear whether the following chapters constitute something connected with one another as should be the case with a monograph, or whether each chapter is more of an essay in a small anthology. I will say only this: While the connections between chapters may not be as tight as one would expect in a monograph, they nevertheless come to focus on a single theme—that the church can only reclaim its mission and prophetic witness in the world by embracing the politics of witness.
I need to make one important comment of clarification: This manuscript was finished and went into production before the publication of Peter Leithart's fine book, Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom. Thus I was not able to consult the work. I have however, read it since. What I can say in response to Leithart's critique of John Howard Yoder's critique of Constantine is that while Leithart's argument that Yoder misunderstood Constantine the man is largely correct, Yoder still gets Constantinianism and its deleterious effects by and large correct. Thus Yoder remains one of the most significant individuals for understanding that period of church history and its implications for today.
I freely admit that the road I have taken in this book is not the road taken by the majority of Christians. Some will no doubt conclude that such minority status already demonstrates that I and those few who are like-minded are wrong. I will only say in response that not only is the majority not always right, but stagnant group-think is more often the product of many people than of only a few. In this book I seek a way out of a status quo ecclesiology and a completely uninteresting understanding of nation state politics. In any case, I hope those who work through these pages will do so with an open mind willing to consider that perhaps God is looking for a remnant to faithfully embody the politics of witness to the nations.
A statement you will find in several places throughout this book is a favorite quote of mine from Stanley Hauerwas: “It is God and not the nations who rules the world.” That is the claim I wish to assert throughout because I believe that while most Christians believe the truth of that claim, they do so only in the abstract. Functionally, by the church’s political engagements and by aligning themselves with the left and the right, Democrats and Republicans, Christians in actuality betray the unacknowledged belief that it is the nations that are indeed running the show. I wish to challenge that unacknowledged
