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The Christian community’s order as a model of Western civil order

By Peter Sellick - posted Thursday, 29 April 2004


As I have been thinking about my last article on On Line Opinion I have come to the conclusion that its sins of omission were great indeed, especially as I have continued my reading of John Howard Yoder. What was omitted was any suggestion that the Christian community would be ordered in a particular way and that this ordering is the proper ordering of society. Such an ordering is not confined to those who believe but stands as a truth for all humanity. For if the ordering of the Christian community is grounded in the truth about human life, that truth should also be applicable to society as a whole, even if the majority does not own the Christian confession. After all, truth is truth whether it is believed or not.

The Christian community finds its ordering in the person and work of Jesus who gathered together disciples to participate in that ordering. While latent in Judaism, this was an ordering that was radically different from that of the Greek and Roman worlds in that it was not based on power or hierarchy or any kind of coercion. Neither was it “thought” into being from some concern for the common good or the perfectibility of society or from the forces of economics. Rather, it was lived into being and is thus a truly incarnate reality. This ordering is celebrated in public worship. Yoder gives five civil imperatives that are found “within the vision of the first Christians”:

  1. egalitarianism as implied by baptism into one body.
  2. socialism as implied in the Eucharist,
  3. forgiveness,
  4. the open meeting,
  5. the universality of giftedness. (For the Nations, p33)
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A brief summary of these imperatives will highlight how they are lived and expressed by the Christian community.

When a child is baptised he or she becomes a full member of a community of equals, all have died in Christ and are deemed to have received the Spirit. There can be no hierarchy in the Christian community apart from a hierarchy of service. This is enacted in baptism and also in the foot washing liturgy of Maundy Thursday.

The entire baptised are fed at the Eucharistic table, they all drink of the one cup and eat of the one loaf. The egalitarianism of the baptised is further enacted around the table. This is a shared meal that indicates a wider sharing in the bounty of the world.

Forgiveness is enacted in the prayers of confession and absolution and also in the words of the Lord’s Prayer. Again we need to be reminded of the radical nature of this when compared to many communities for which revenge is an integral part of the social structure. The increasing insistence on accountability in our own society threatens to erase forgiveness from public life. If things go wrong, heads have to roll even if it is shown that those heads were not in a position to prevent those wrongs happening.

The Christian community is grounded on revelation, the revealing of things previously hidden. Civil processes that are guarded by secrecy are therefore anathema. We are promised that in Jesus “the thoughts of many will be revealed”. The open meeting in which all may speak is the model for democracy indeed a better model than that of the Greek or even that proposed by Jefferson in the American Declaration of Independence, both of which were very narrow charters.

The Christian community recognises that each individual is endowed with gifts that are at the service of that community (1Corintians 12). Paul argues for an inversion of the values of the world when he tells us that the weaker parts of the body are to be accorded greater honor. This leveling of society gives as much honor to the blue-collar worker as is due to the highest-paid CEO. All work is honorable if it is used to build up the body. This is a model of socialism that does not countenance slackers; all have their part to play.

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Yoder tells us that this ordering only comes about through the faith and hope engendered by the Christian community. Our expectation that it can be imposed on unbelievers is a mistake left over from the Constantinian church in which all were believers by decree. We cannot expect unbelievers to be able to produce this ordering either in their own lives or in society because they do not have the advantages of being trained in the discipleship of Christ. The danger of imposition, of coercion, is that the incarnate becomes ideological; it is abstracted into a principle and detached from its proper context, the worshipping Christian community. Thus, grace easily becomes political correctness. This is what happens when the Christian virtues are untethered from their context. “Love” becomes something that we assume that all can just do without instruction about what love is. When the Beetles sing “all you need is love” they sing a lie because love is abstracted from the One who taught us that love is hard won. Love requires the death of the self because we are called to love the unlovable, even our enemy.

When Christian virtue is abstracted from the community of faith it makes the transition between an ordering of life that is based on service and patience and an ordering that is based on power and coercion. It becomes instrumental and loses its proper depth in the human consciousness. We find Christians talking about empowerment as though the antidote to repression and poverty is power. This is not a Christian solution for: “God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are… “(1 Cor 1:28 NRSV). The ethics of the Christian community cannot, therefore, be generalised into a universal ethics, to attempt to do so is to transfer their ethos into the power structures of the world and destroy them. This is not to say that there is no vigorous conversation between the church and society but it does mean that the church does not sell its wares in a way that cuts the roots of their nurture.

It is tempting to look at Yoder’s five points and come to the conclusion that liberal democracy is their fulfillment. To give due credit, liberal democracy would not exist without the Christian faith and we can point to the fact that our civil institutions, at their best, strive to accommodate the five points. This is a happy thing. But it does not make us a Christian nation. While we have been formed by the teachings of the church and, while this is to be applauded, it does not mean that liberal democracy and the dawning of the kingdom of heaven may be equated. The difference is to be found in what happens when the virtues of the Christian community, which are nurtured in worship and discipline, make the transition to secular society and become law. We find that we must have a myriad of laws and commissions to ensure that our principles are enforced. This is because such an ordering is not imprinted in our hearts and must therefore be coerced.

The imperatives for the ordering of the church amount to a substantive outline of justice, a term that has been overtaken by the silly language of human rights. Whereas human rights have their origin in Elisa Doolittle” “Wouldn’t it be loverly”, and is limited to the demands of the individual, justice defines a complete world of human relationships and realities as revealed in the life and work of Jesus and lived out in the church. As such it constitutes a unification of human life from personal to public. Any splitting off of the private from the public, threatens the unity of life. That is why our private lives cannot be lived as though they have nothing to do with our public lives. The lack of faith, hope, love and humility in private is inevitably played out in public despite all our attempts at spin. We are rightly alarmed by what Bill and Monica got up to in the oval office.

We do not find the springs of this justice in law or duty or even responsibility, even though these are upheld, but in the transformation of the human heart and the subsequent development of particular virtues which flow into civil polity. Grace is more powerful than law in the discipline of the self and the ordering of society because Grace transforms the inner person whereas the law can only leave resentment. Such a working out in the lives of individuals and thence into the greater society is the kingdom of God/heaven proclaimed by Jesus in the gospels.

There is an understanding in the church that we have lost our position in society. It is rather that we have assumed our proper position, that of the minority. Our society was never Christian and we do not therefore live in a post Christian era. We have to get over the Constantinian church and understand that the church consists of those small groups of worshippers that march to a different drum. These groups will survive the church growth movement, will refuse to change their worship to accommodate the man in the street and will lean towards a promised future that has nothing to do with society's understanding of progress.

When we realise that the gospel cannot be turned into good intentions and that its fruits are only produced in the hope and faith that is engendered in the worshipping community, then we can realistically narrow our expectations of what the world is capable of. This does not mean that the church withdraws from the world into quietism, it still works towards ordering its own life aright as well as that of society, but it does so like the yeast in the dough, silently and invisibly and without the triumphalism of the state church. This is the yeast that works away undermining the ideologies of the day that can only be described as myth. We do not believe that the establishment of democracy will cure all social ills or that new technologies give us true hope or that history can be made to turn out according to our own design or that freedom is an end in itself. The ruins of these ideologies lie all around us. Such abstractions may be useful in the winning of elections or to persuade the people that our leaders are righteous, but the church, with its understanding of the vagaries of the human heart, will expose them for what they are.

In my last article on the subject I alluded to the necessary conversation between the church and the state. How may this conversation be carried out? We are used to church leaders making pronouncements on public morality and to synods passing high-sounding resolutions that support some cause or other. The church becomes just another pressure group. Yoder observes that the Christian community communicates to unbelievers by its witness to Christ and by the life that comes from that witness: “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” (John 13:35). This should not be clericalised. The five imperatives listed above are lived out each Sunday in public worship and are the primary Christian witness and hence the primary means of conversation with the world. Public pronouncements and resolutions of synod are easily drawn into the way power is used in the world, ensuring that the essence of Christian witness is lost. The church must resist the notion that its effectiveness may be measured or that it must change to fit the needs of society and it must have faith that when the Word is preached and the sacraments celebrated, then God is at work in the world.

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About the Author

Peter Sellick an Anglican deacon working in Perth with a background in the biological sciences.

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