God and Politics
By James Dunn, Wake Forest School of Divinity
Note: This address was delivered at the September 16-17, 2008, conference on “Red Letter Christians” at Truett Seminary in Waco, Texas, sponsored by Christian Ethics Today.
What a topic! What a challenge! On our good days we know better than to go there. (We know what Barth meant when he said “to define God is to deny God.”) We are not going to be saying: “God told us to go to war here or the Divine instructed us to drill for oil there.” These are absurdities and it’s still true that “those who believe absurdities will commit atrocities.” Yet, try as we will we cannot keep “God and politics” out of the same sentence.
George W. Truett, for whom this school is named, set out in righteous rhetoric and theological ground rule: The right to private judgment is the crown jewel of humanity and for any person or institution to dare to come between the soul and God is a blasphemous impertinence and a defamation of the crown rights of the Son of God.
And so, mindful of those maxims from Barth, Voltaire, and Truett, of blessed memory, we consider gingerly the assignment: God and Politics, being careful to avoid impertinences and defamations.
Baptist insights shared by other dissenters who have been blessed or burdened or both by bapistification can illumine any discussion of God and politics. Theological thinking may crack open some political nuts.
Take soul freedom: Rooted in the belief that all persons are made in God’s image, that human worth and dignity is a derived value. The IMAGO DEI passage, Genesis 1:26-27, means at least that we can all respond to God, that all human beings are response able, responsible—see how we get that word. And, if responsible, free. No matter how thin the coin of creation is sliced, it still has both sides, freedom and responsibility. They go together indissolubly.
That belief in soul freedom has led free churchers to believe that everyone and anyone can come to God directly, personally, without filter or formula.
No priest, or church or creed or politically correctness is needed. Our confession, “Jesus Christ is Lord” is enough.
We are, in that sense, at least red letter Christians.
We, therefore, cannot conceive of coerced Conversion, forced faith, or required religion.
One comes to God freely or not really. That’s not simply some weird Baptist doctrine. St. Bernard in his 1128 Treatise Concerning Grace and Free Will wrote “Take away free will and there remaineth nothing to be saved . . . Salvation is given by God alone, and it is given only to the free will; even as it can not be wrought without the consent of the receiver, it can not be wrought without the grace of the giver.” When we transplant that theological thought to the turf of politics, it helps us to understand why it is hard for us as a nation to force democracy on an occupied people—unwilling and unready to accept an ideology, indeed a theology, not their own.
Forcing religion on a people only makes hypocrites. Roger Williams got us started off right in that modality.
A demanded democracy may not be authentic, serve well or last long.
So then soul freedom describes a faith that is vital because it is voluntary.
Bill Moyers calls it a “grown-up faith.” Martin Marty’s term baptistification “zeros in on the key issue that modernity posed for religion: choice.” It’s clear that this sort of theological thinking impacts politics.
Then, there’s hope: I’ve been reflecting seriously on a common criticism of many of these best Baptists who have gone before. There’s a complaint about many who have made the biggest difference, many who have meant most to me. They have been, it is said, too optimistic. Their theological optimism has skewed their message. Maybe so. I tend to think that they have brought a deep, abiding hope to politics.
John Leland, Walter Rauschenbusch, E.Y. Mullins, J.M. Dawson, T.B.
Maston, Jimmy Carter—all mocked, made fun of, looked down upon by a set of “serious” scholars as possessing a hopelessly optimistic theology—ironically because they were hope mongers.
Leland exercised great good humor—remember the big cheese Rauschenbush was totally invested in the Kingdom of God, present and future.
Mullins was a forwards looking thinker.
Maston seasoned his southern fried social gospel with a heavy dose of Christian realism. Remember one of his favorite phrases: “abidingly relevant.” M.L. King had a dream. He sang “We shall overcome.” Jimmy Carter still believes in human struggle and conquest. Andrew Bacevich reminds us that if we had heeded Carter’s advice we wouldn’t be in the mess we are in now.
It’s popular never to refer to any of this sort of thinker without reminding hearers/readers how wrong they were in their optimism. They were creatures of their time. “Who isn’t?” They have all found some usefulness, some redemptive glimmer, some opportunity to shoehorn the gospel into the political chaos of their own times.
They have done so not in blind partisanship but in post-partisan idealism.
Dr. Dawson, on whom I wrote my doctoral dissertation, said, “having tained my majority by the turn of the century, I was infatuated with the optimism of the day and seriously considered Christian Socialism.
Then came the Revolution, that ended that sort of talk. Dr. Truett and I considered ourselves Christian Humanists.” Dr. Maston and I had many talks about the relative merits of being an independent rather than a party member. He just could not identify with a party. Might have done more good if he had.
The message of HOPE, abstract, biblical, theological, Heaven-sent is clearly not the same as political optimism treated so snidely by the hopeless wretches who know everything but do little.
Gotta have hope. That’s about all I have to say about God and politics.
