Nigel Oakley

Commendations and some extracts from ‘Engaging Politics?’.

Commendations

“It is never a question of whether or not Christians will be engaged in politics, but rather the question is always how? For Christianity is the most political of faiths because we worship a Savior who is unmistakably a threat to the powers. So it is a happy occasion to comment on this book by Nigel Oakley who draws on Augustine to provide a framework for developing a contemporary political theology to offer a constructive Christian position for the more difficult challenges facing us in our world today.”
Stanley Hauerwas, Professor of Theological Ethics, Duke Divinity School, North Carolina

“This book will be an important tool for individuals and churches who are prepared to open their eyes to God’s reality, their minds to his multifaceted but integrated truth, and their hearts to his compassion for a world greatly beloved but greatly afflicted.”
N.T. Wright, Bishop of Durham

“Nigel Oakley binds the wisdom and practice of the past to the issues and dilemmas of the present in a most creative and stimulating way. This hugely informative book (spanning centuries and continents) will rescue Christians from simplistic or monochrome answers to the biblical, theological and ethical complexity of wrestling with political realities. Readers will discover some of the historical and contemporary riches of Christian reflection, with its dissonances as well as its common core commitments, and will be challenged and helped in equal measure to live up to the recognition that, for the Christian, ‘non-involvement is a non-option’.”
Christopher J.H. Wright, International Director, Langham Partnership International

“Engaging Politics demonstrates that, far from being incompatible, Christianity, social justice and political engagement are inseparable. A thought-provoking, stimulating and action-inducing read.”
Steve Chalke MBE, Founder of Oasis Global and Faithworks

Extracts from ‘Engaging Politics?’

Introduction

This book sets out to show that non-involvement is a non-option for Christians. The Christian political retreat was, and remains, sub-Christian at best; at worst it was a deliberate denial of the gospel. Christ was political – “Christ” as a title was seen as a political, kingly title. He was put to death for sedition, treason. He was not put to death for mouthing some religio-philosophical platitudes for people to live by in their private lives. No, his was a public ministry that publicly upset the apple cart, the accommodation that the Jewish leaders made with the family of Herod and the Roman occupiers. That is why the crowds were brought together to shout for his crucifixion. Yes his message was “religious;” but religious does not mean private, or even personal. It means that we all have to repent; we all have to live in a way that the Nazareth manifesto becomes reality. The poor have good news: they will be oppressed no more. The captives will be free: justice is about restoration, not punishment for the sake of it. The blind will see, and the oppressed go free. If the oppressed go free, the oppressors have to change their ways, their lives, and accept their guilt before God. All too often we in the West – the USA, the UK, Europe – are the oppressors simply because we are “top dogs.” We dictate to others: do it our way or else. Is our way so perfect…?

Obviously, not everyone can be involved in everything, on every issue, and there is more to involvement than “manning the barricades,” but to confine one’s Christian interest to Sunday services and Christian meetings is not what Christianity is about. None of the four theologians that I study advocates non-involvement, and none of them expect that involvement to be without cost. It is those who want comfortable Christianity who will be most disappointed by this book. The rest of you, read on…

Augustine

One of the major difficulties for the pilgrim members of the city of God is that “the order of their love” is so radically different from the members of the earthly city (who will always be in the majority).9 As far as Augustine is concerned, either one’s love is orientated toward God, or it is orientated toward self. However, if people are to live peaceably together, there has to be some sort of agreement over what is to be the basis of their society – what is to be “the common good.” The difficulty is that Augustine believes that there can be no common good between the two cities, just as there is – and never has been – a truly just state which based its conception of justice upon a sincere allegiance to God.

Nevertheless, if we read Augustine as a whole, it is safe to conclude that he held out no hope for a perfect society in this world. But, even while he was aware of how imperfect the world is (and how it will never be perfect); he never abandoned the hope that guides us toward the peace and love of God. The more we try to imitate God’s love, the more we are able to live decent lives in our societies. The best we can say is that society can be “Christianized” – in that society may be composed of Christian soldiers, judges, kings and so on – and that Augustine saw that this sort
of “Christianized” society would be better than other societies. This does not mean that Augustine saw the (earthly) possibility of a societas perfecta (a perfect society). But, although there can never be a societas perfecta on this earth, there is an intermediate peace which all can strive to maintain. It is at this level of striving that Augustine expects his judge to sit, and the Christian king is expected to rule – even while those judges and kings are all too aware of the lack of true peace and justice in the world.

This is not to say a Christian leader would have an easy time as he tried to balance the conflicting interests of the earthly and the heavenly cities. Not only does a Christian leader have “the alarming task of discerning the point at which what he is defending has ceased to be defensible,” but also there is the tension of knowing, more generally, that wise leaders will be sensitive to the dichotomy that Augustine points to in The City of God. This dichotomy is based on the fact that, on the one hand, ignorance is unavoidable – as we cannot see into each other’s hearts – and, on the other, judgment is unavoidable because human society compels it. This inevitably leads to tensions, and to the realization that the only certainty is that mistakes will be made. Hence Augustine’s praise of Theodosius, whose penitence (very much against the norm for Roman emperors) over the massacre of the Thessalonians is commended in The City of God, V. 26.

Gustavo Gutierrez, ‘the father of Liberation Theology’

Liberation theology has, therefore, been criticized for reducing salvation to the political. Certainly in its base communities and in its conscientization of the poor, it can be said to be providing a pre-political (if not a directly political) education for the poor. It is the ordinary person who, according to this theology, needs to be made aware of his or her situation in order to be able to overcome it. It must also be said, as we shall see, that liberation theology does not view itself as a political theology in this reductionist fashion, but opposes “apolitical” theology on the ground that this is self-deception – if the church does nothing, it is simply giving covert support to the status quo.

While, realistically, those involved in setting up the BECs [Base Ecclesial Communities] do not seem to expect to create a new man or woman (unlike in the earlier liberationist writings), BECs “can represent the starting point for a politics in which commitment and practice seek to serve the common good and social justice.” Leonardo Boff, another liberation theologian, is anxious that,

Faith is not set aside. Instead it acquires its true dimensions as a spiritual mystique, a source of inspiration, and a signpost pointing toward liberation. That liberation transcends history, but it can be seen and anticipated in history through a process of liberation that generates less inequitable forms of social coexistence within society.

The transcendent element is brought back in with a clarity that is sometimes missing from other writings: the kingdom is both now and not yet. This view of the BEC allows, even insists, that political action is taken to create a more just, more humane society; but equally it does not exercise any sort of naïve belief that this new society would be perfect. The BEC “learns to discover God in its own life, struggles, and happenings,” and approaches life with “a new kind of holiness” not confined to the ascetic. It is the holiness of the militant.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

For Bonhoeffer, the curse and promise associated with the world applies everywhere. Retreat from the world is not a valid option. Jesus’ call is to the world, but that call, for all disciples, leads to the cross. As Bonhoeffer puts it in Discipleship:

Things cannot go any other way than that the world unleashes its fury in word, violence, and defamation at those meek strangers . . . In their poverty and suffering, this group of Jesus’ followers gives too strong a witness to the injustice of the world. That is fatal. While Jesus calls, “blessed, blessed,” the world shrieks, “Away with them!” Yes, away! But where will they go? Into the kingdom of heaven. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven.

Bonhoeffer notes that these people while worthy of heaven, are (and here he uses Nazi terminology) “obviously at the same time . . . unworthy of living.” These same people are to be salt and light – they are to be a visible community that preserves the earth.

In Ethics Bonhoeffer has nothing similar to the Lutheran idea of the separation of the two kingdoms; here the interrelation (but not interdependence) of the two kingdoms is shown. The question for us is what action should we take in the world in preparation for the ultimate?

The hungry man (sic) needs bread and the homeless man needs a roof; the undisciplined need order and the slave needs freedom. To allow the hungry man to remain hungry would be blasphemy against God and one’s neighbour, for what is nearest God is precisely the need of one’s neighbour . . . If the hungry man does not attain to faith, then the guilt falls on those who refused him bread. To provide the hungry man with bread is to prepare the way for the coming of grace.

Bonhoeffer is careful to say that these actions are not the same as the coming of grace, but for those who do these things “for the sake of the ultimate.”

Stanley Hauerwas

For Hauerwas, it is obvious that Christians will end up rocking the boat because, following Yoder, he proclaims that “[t]he gospel cannot be at home in the world, because the church that is called into existence through the work of the Spirit exists to witness to the God found in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ.” In other words:

A genuine political theology must attend to the ways in which Christian truth takes form as a power in its own right. A genuine political theology must identify and explicate the exousia of Jesus Christ that gives density and force to the life of discipleship.

We hereby return to the point made earlier: which is that Hauerwas wants Christians politically involved as Christians first and foremost. It is as disciples of Christ, not as good citizens, that they are to make their mark. However, Christians do not set out to rock the boat, but it is inevitable that the world will react against them because the Christians’ agenda is so distinct from the world’s. But what is it that defines a good Christian disciple as distinct from a good citizen? What is the power that shapes our Christian lives and molds us as disciples?

The Case Studies

Make Poverty History

“We can take the calls.” These words from the mouth of Condoleezza Rice summed up the recalcitrant White House view of early 2005 to the Make Poverty History movement. This – possibly apocryphal – story was cited as one of the reasons for the Live 8 concerts. Apparently the George W. Bush White House had better things to do than worry about what a few pop stars were going on about, and the threat by Bono to get all his fans to ring the White House and demand action was met with a shrug: if necessary they could employ a few extra telephonists, but people were not really bothered about countries far away. But then the Live 8 concerts were announced and the rest, as they say, is history. Except that, in 2005, we didn’t make poverty history. The statistics in January were not much changed by December: according to the United Nations, it still took only three seconds for another child to die of some poverty related illness. But then, what do you need to be rich these days? It depends where you start. Steve Henry, in his book, Change the World 9 to 5, action 098, notes this:

• Something on the floor other than dirt puts you in the top 50 percent of the world’s wealthiest people.
• A home with a roof, a door, windows and more than one room puts you in the top 20 percent.
• A fridge and/or freezer in the home puts you in the top 5 percent.
• If you or your family has a car, a microwave, a video[/DVD] player, a computer and you have a door on your bathroom – then you are in the top 1 percent of the wealthiest people in the whole world.

In other words, most people are poorer than us.

Slavery

Stolen Smiles, a report from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, paints a disturbing picture of the reality of trafficking:

I was locked in the basement with my friend. We were only free to work, and when the boss was drunk he would rape me.
They told me they would cut me into pieces and send me back like that. Every single day I heard the threat ‘I’ll kill you bitch.’

Ninety-five percent of the women (12 percent of whom were adolescents aged between fifteen and seventeen), experienced some form of physical or sexual violence while being trafficked. Apart from their physical symptoms, it is unsurprising that these women also exhibit psychological trauma. This includes depression, anxiety attacks and “significantly impaired cognitive functioning.” Unsurprising, but it seems that the authorities need to be made aware of this as the women try to seek assistance from them, including asylum. Also, an astonishing one in five of the women reported “that a relative knew their trafficker.” Also “36% of the women reported threats to children and other close relatives.” This fact alone would make it unsafe for the women to be transported back home, but Amnesty International reports that “the law often treats these women as simply illegal immigrants”482 to be deported as quickly as possible, without the help and support they need after such a traumatic experience.
The “ought,” of course, is that no one is trafficked, that if they are trafficked, they are rescued and cared for properly, and only returned to their country of origin (or their home – trafficking occurs within countries, not just between them) if they so wish, and if it is safe for them there: that they will receive the care and protection they will need.
However, in order to get from the “is” to the “ought” there is a painful road.

Love, Marriage and the Church

This wholehearted response to the demands of serving God is not, however, to be seen as a lonely quest. A careful reading of the Pauline epistles will show that Paul did not work alone (see Col. 4:10–12), and when he was alone he felt lonely and wanted his companions to be with him (see 2 Tim. 4:9–12). In later centuries, Augustine, the austere monk, always lived in community. In other words, we need friends, we need companionship. We all need – like Bonhoeffer – to be intimate.

Edwin Robertson reports that when Letters and Papers from Prison was published in 1953 it was not known that Bethge was the friend who received the letters. Nor was it known who was the subject of the poem, “The Friend.” However in 1957 Bethge was speaking at a student conference in New Hampshire where one of the participants asked him who the recipient of letters and poem might be because “it must be a homosexual partnership.” Bethge replied immediately, “No, we were fairly normal!” andhe went on to show that there was no such sexual relationship.

However, the intimacy of lines like:

Beside the staff of life,
taken and fashioned from the heavy earth,
beside our marriage, work and war,
the free man, too, will live and grow toward the sun.
Not the ripe fruit alone –
blossom is lovely too . . .
Finest and rarest blossom, at a happy moment springing
from the freedom of a lightsome, daring, trusting spirit,
is a friend to a friend.

must lead us to a lack of surprise that “an American assumed a poem as intense and intimate as ‘the Friend’ must indicate a sexual relation.” Such an assumption would probably be made (in ignorance) anywhere in the Anglo-Saxon world; but intimacy is not the same as sex. Conversely, it’s also a tragedy of our fallen existence that so much sex is divorced from intimacy; we must indeed “be persuaded, with Augustine, that there is some deep disorder in the sexual instinct, as it exists at present in the great majority of the human race.”

War and Peace in the Twenty-first Century

But it is to be more than restoration. Jesus did not say blessed are those who keep the peace; blessed are those who do nothing to promote war; but blessed are the peacemakers (see Mt. 5:9)…
Bonhoeffer’s message in Discipleship (quoted above) echoed the call he had made at the Fanö conference in 1934:

For the members of the ecumenical church, in so far as they hold to Christ, his word, his commandment of peace is more holy, more inviolable than the most revered words and works of the natural world . . . These brothers in Christ obey his word; they do not doubt or question, but keep his commandment of peace . . . They cannot take up arms against Christ himself – yet this is what they do if they take up arms against one another!

Here, of course, is a possible answer to those who insist that, even if the Second World War was fought unjustly, the scourge of Hitler, or, more generally fascism, had to be fought: what if Christians had refused to fight neither for Hitler or against him because in doing so they would have been taking up arms against their fellow human beings – their fellow Christians?  And what did the Second World War lead to, but the Cold War, which has led in turn (with a very short historical gap) to the unwinnable, and unconcludable war on terror?
But this begs the question: “Who will call us to peace so that the world will hear, will have to hear?”

A Wonderful World? The Environment

So if dodgy eschatology leads us to dismiss ecology, what is the “right” eschatology here? Right eschatology looks at the whole overarching story of the Bible, from creation to re-creation: “I saw new heaven and new earth.” The old, fallen world will be restored: but is it an act of God solely, to be undertaken at the end of time, at the last judgment? Or are there undercurrents, smaller stories within this overarching narrative that encompasses Genesis to Revelation?

Of course, there are. God’s plan for salvation begins at Genesis 12 with the call of Abram. And it climaxes with Christ Jesus; whose resurrection (if nothing else) shows us that heaven and earth (or, if you will, the kingdoms of heaven and earth) overlap: they are not separate space/time entities. We are not therefore about to be rescued out of the one and plonked into the other. When Christ shall come with his angels and we are “caught up with him in the air;” we shall become part of the escort to bring him to his kingdom on earth. This is the correct imagery – we are emphatically not “caught up” as a means of escape from this evil world: as our discussion of Bonhoeffer’s theology has shown, God may say “No” to the world, but he says “Yes” as well. We will be seen as we are already seen, as his stewards and servants – or else why do we pray that his “kingdom will come on earth as it is in heaven?” And, of course, we too shall be judged for our actions.

Therefore, for Hauerwas, “the original creation was aimed at a new creation,” and “the church is faithful when it lives out the fact that ‘nature’ has a sacred element, not because Christians wish to uphold or preserve ‘nature’ for its own sake, but because ‘nature’ is creation in travail and as such has its own end to glorify God rather than to serve humans.” However, and here I wish to nuance Hauerwas’ stance, we must not assume that the glorification of God and the service of humanity is always incompatible. Genesis 1:28 still exists in the canon of scripture, and so we must take account of it, even if we no longer can accept the old meaning of domination: any “stewardship” over creation mandated to humanity must, as Hauerwas notes, imitate God’s rule over us… we still are deputized “rulers” we still have the responsibility of care and of use. Just because some plant or animal is not immediately of use to us, does not mean that it is “useless,” but, on the other hand, a plant or animal that is useful to us, is still useful.

Conclusion

“But what can I do?” That is so often the cry and the excuse for doing nothing, and, no, we will not all be William Wilberforce – who campaigned against slavery for most of his life – or Martin Luther King Jr. But (as the Bishop of Durham put it in his Christmas midnight sermon, December 2006): ‘we can pray, we can watch, and we can listen…’