The Overton Salon

By Austin

On Friday’s post I mention two common objects to religious beliefs in the public realm, and the answer to one. The first objection mostly comes from the “secular” side of things. Today, I want to think about the second objection – religious beliefs or ideals are unrealistic. This objection does come from the secular side of things sometimes, but more often from Christians themselves. The standard objection is that not everyone is committed to Christ, so it does not make sense to expect them to follow something like a politics of the cross. Their heart must be changed before that can happen, so we ought to advocate for the change of heart, not for a different politics – that will come later.

My answer to this objection is twofold: first, we must be understand how a prophetic voice works. Second, we must be clear what we mean when we say “Jesus is Lord.”

a. The prophetic voice speaks what ought to be, not necessarily what is right now. It does not need actual change to be itself, but just the word that God provides in the person of Jesus, and the witness of the prophets and the early church. We witness to the rulers and powers (Eph 3.8-10) not because we think our criticism will change them, but because we what we say is true (as a side note, we are still in a position of interpretation of this word of God, and so the truth we speak must be argued for internally).

No heart must be changed for the truth to be true.

b. Jesus is Lord is a statement of fact and a statement of allegiance. The Christian confession is not a statement of subjective feeling, but an objective statement of the way things are, and a statement of one’s commitment to the way things are. “Reality” is defined not by what people can do but what Jesus has done and does do. His Lordship is reality, not our subjective feeling about it.

So this prophetic voice says that Jesus is Lord – not Caesar, not any party or president, not any nation or movement. No matter what our particular witness is, we are not witnessing in order to be good citizens of the U.S., or Britain, or Russia, or China, but of the reign or kingdom of God. If this is the case, our advocacy for how reality ought to be does not depend upon what this or that particular nation can do, but what our nation – the kingdom – is about.

To a critic who might say a similar thing but from the non-religious side these points would hardly be convincing. Yet to them I would simply point out that so far, there has never been really any realistic idea of what the world should be. From full on free-marketers (who do have a point) to socialists (who do as well), no one system has ever been fully integrated without violence or force of some kind. And violence, for all it intends to fix, never does get around to anything save fixing the mess it leaves behind…