Go with us, gentle readers, on a trek through two indispensable articles.
The first is from Philip Jenkins, Professor of History and Religious Studies at Penn State and a leading thinker on the past and present of Christianity and speculator about its future. In a short piece at OpinionJournal.com, he notes that a small group called Christian Exodus has announced plans to move their members to a region in upstate South Carolina, where they will live in sufficiently concentrated numbers to take over local and eventually state offices, thereby Christianizing the state and leading it to secede from the union and form a Christian republic.
Jenkins, noting separatistic tendencies throughout Christian history, insists that the project is doomed to failure, if history means anything.
The second is in this month's Atlantic: a piece by senior editor Joshua Green on Judge Roy Moore's Ten Commandments crusade (a subscription to the magazine, well worth the price, is necessary to view the article and can be arranged on the web site for those eager to start reading). Moore, gentle readers will recall, is the former Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice who placed a granite monument depicting the Ten Commandments in the state Supreme Court building's lobby and refused to remove it when ordered by various federal courts, finally being himself removed from the bench as a result. Moore is now touring the country with the giant rock (which he had paid for and given as a gift to the State of Alabama, but with the clever contractual stipulation that it would become his property if ever removed from the Alabama Supreme Court Building), speaking to Christian audiences and urging essentially the Christianizing of American government.
Readers of Green's piece in the Atlantic should first remember Jenkins's reassurances. Moore's efforts have no more likelihood of succeeding than does the Christian Exodus program, but both will get attention from those who will use them to incite fear for purposes of raising funds for their own, anti-religious political work.
But I object to Roy Moore's crusade and to Christian Exodus's crusade not just because they will fail in practical terms. I object to them because the attempt to Christianize government, as these frame it, will fail in theological terms as well. Pursuing a here-and-now political embodiment of Christianity is a classic species of what in the theological trade we call "over-realized eschatology," that is, the fundamental neglect of the tension between the "already" and the "not yet." Moore and Christian Exodus pretend that the kingdom of God can be brought in its fullness through human effort apart from the return of Jesus. They assume that human nature is such that if enough thoroughly committed Christian people can take over the major political and social institutions, the will of God can be realized on earth, or at least South Carolina, as it is in heaven. They act as if the parables of the sower and of the wheat and the weeds have been repealed.
Is SWNID against Christians seeking righteousness and justice in government? Of course not. But such an effort is very different from what Moore or Christian Exodus propose. Theirs is not the effort to get a biblically informed view of justice and morality more sharply in focus in the laws and institutions of the land, or even to protect religious liberty under threat from the secularization of American public space and discourse. Those are valid things for Christians to seek.
But they are much less than a Christian republic. There's really no such thing as a Christian republic, not because government must or should be secular but because--per Jesus, Paul and all our other Jewish religious heroes--the full will of God will not be realized by institutions of this present age. Only the church, with all of its openly self-acknowledged shortcomings, is a genuinely Christian institution. In its faithful life it manifests the coming of the kingdom; in its failures, the ongoing presence of evil.
The Great Commission and Great Commandment mandate that Christians strive to do the will of God on earth as it is in heaven. That includes working to improve the present legal, political and social situation. But knowing that Satan and evil, though defeated, continue for now to thrive in the world, Christians can't expect to take over and make a heaven on earth.
Remember that, gentle readers, as you slog through all this blogged drivel on issues political and cultural. Here we blog the margins. Find the center when Christians gather to worship, and as they scatter to serve.
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