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

By Peter Sellick - posted Thursday, 29 April 2004


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.

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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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