Christianity is the True Politics

Politics and religion are inseparable.

This fact alone accounts for the persecution of the early Church by the Roman State. Francis Legge stated the matter clearly when he said that “The officials of the Roman Empire in time of persecution sought to force the Christians to sacrifice, not to any of the heathen gods, but to the Genius of the Emperor and the Fortune of the city of Rome; and at all times the Christians’ refusal was looked upon not as a religious but as a political offence.”

At the trial of Christ the chief priests of the Jews said to the officials of the Roman Empire: “We have no king but Caesar” ( Jn 19:15). The early Christians, when faced with the same question, replied: “We have another King: the Lord Jesus Christ.” The Romans understood what this meant: either Jesus would bow the knee to Caesar or Caesar would have to bow the knee to Jesus (cf. Jn 19:12).

The Church faces this same question again today, and in a way that she has not had to face it since the days of the Roman emperors. Who is Lord: Christ or Caesar? Christ or the modern secular State? There was, and is, no third option, no “third way.” This was, and still is, a political issue. Jesus Christ was victorious in his struggle with the Roman State. He will be victorious in his struggle with the modern secular State. The only question that remains is this: on whose side will you stand? Whom are you for? Whom will you obey? The Lord Jesus Christ or the modern idolatrous secular State?

Christianity is not a mystery cult, a private devotional worship hobby, that could find a quiet place in the greater context of ancient Roman idolatry. Christianity is not comparable with the mystery cults that were popular in ancient Rome. For the early Church, merely adding Christ to the Roman pantheon—a tactic that was tried, unsuccessfully, by at least two Roman emperors—would have been a denial of his lordship and sovereignty and would have successfully neutralised Christianity as a threat to the Roman State.

But Christianity is more than a devotional cult. It is a religion that structures the whole of man’s life. Both the early Church and the Roman State understood this. Modern Christians on the whole have signally failed to understand this. And it is in large measure this failure that accounts for the decline of Christianity in the West today.

The Lord Jesus Christ does not merely demand that we refrain from burning the incense to Caesar; he demands that Caesar burn the incense to him and acknowledge his lordship and sovereignty over Rome and the empire. To burn the incense to Caesar was to acknowledge that Caesar was the political overlord. For Christians, to refuse to burn the incense meant that Jesus Christ is the political overlord, the King of kings to whom all kings must bow, Caesar included. There is no area of religious neutrality anywhere in the created order. Politics is not a religiously neutral enterprise, it is an intensely religious enterprise. Burning the incense was a religious act of political submission. Refusing to burn the incense was not a religious crime in the narrow sense (a devotional offence); it was, rather, a religious act of political rebellion against Rome.

The Church in the twenty-first century must recognise this truth and begin living in terms of it, as did the early Church, by challenging the political idolatry that is destroying the Western world today. Only when the Church awakens from the deadening slumber that has overtaken her and proclaims once more the lordship and sovereignty of Jesus Christ over the whole of life, including the political realm, will the world be delivered from its slavery and bondage to sin as manifested today in the politics of rebellion against God; and only then will the world experience real freedom, the glorious liberty that the gospel of God brings to all nations that submit to Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour.

The law and gospel of God is a public truth, a light not only for man’s personal devotions but also for the government of the nations. This is not a new doctrine, it is the established orthodox teaching of the Christian faith. For example, on 2 June 1953 Queen Elizabeth II was crowned in Westminster Abbey. One of the first things she did in the coronation ceremony was to swear an oath that she would to the utmost of her power “maintain the Laws of God and the true profession of the Gospel” and to the utmost of her power “maintain in the United Kingdom the Protestant Reformed Religion established by law.” After swearing this oath a Bible was presented to the Queen with the following words:

“Our gracious Queen: to keep your Majesty ever mindful of the Law and the Gospel of God as the Rule for the whole life and government of Christian Princes, we present you with this Book, the most valuable thing that this world affords. Here is Wisdom; This is the royal Law; These are the lively Oracles of God.”

It is true, of course, that since this oath was taken and these solemn words were spoken the British political establishment and the British people as a whole have turned away from the Christian faith and adopted the atheist religion of secular humanism as public truth. What this means, however, is not so much that Britain is no longer a Christian nation, at least covenantally and constitutionally, as that Britain is now an apostate nation. The answer to this apostasy is not abandonment of the Christian faith as the religion of State, but rather repentance and reformation, a whole-hearted return to the Christian faith as the guiding principle of our national life.

If this is to happen the law and gospel of God must inform all that we think, say and do, as individuals and as a nation. Only when submission to the Lord Jesus Christ becomes a reality in the life of the nations of the earth can it be said that the Great Commission is being fulfilled, since the Great Commission is not a command to disciple individuals from among the nations, but a command to disciple the very nations themselves—i.e. to make Christian nations.

Over the past century Christianity has increasingly ceased to function as public truth in the Western nations. Whatever a society considers to be public truth will inevitably function as the religion of that society. What functions as public truth in modern Western nations is secular humanism. Secular humanism is the religion of the West today. Christianity has been reduced to the status of a mere mystery cult, i.e. a personal salvation cult. But secular humanism is too weak to function as a stable foundation for civilisation. Nor is this a problem that can be corrected.

The spiritual and moral relativism that lies at the heart of secular humanism’s core values makes it impossible for secular humanism to function as a stable foundation for civilisation. Like it’s offspring, multiculturalism, secular humanism is a temporary phenomenon, a staging post in a process of transition from one civilisation to another. Eventually the secular humanist multicultural society must give way to the dominating influence of some other religion as the foundation of Western civilisation.

It is my contention that only the Christian religion can provide a true, stable and lasting foundation for civilisation, and that the abandonment of Christianity as public truth in the twentieth century has led the world into chaos. The answer to the chaos that the modern world faces is therefore the revival of Christianity as public truth, i.e. as the religious foundation of our civilisation, in terms of which both individual men and nations, with their civil governments, must organise their whole life by conforming to the precepts and teachings of the Bible. In other words Christianity must be the established religion of all nations.

This is precisely what the Great Commission calls for. But this brings us to another equally important point, namely that the fulfillment of the Great Commission will not be possible without the manifestation of the Kingdom of God in the lives of both individual Christians and the Christian communities of all nations as a concrete social order that models to the world what true society should be, and by doing this calls the world to repentance and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. Without the manifestation on earth in tangible form of this prophetic social order the world will not be won for Christ. The Christian community is to be a light to the world. Only as that light is seen, i.e. only as Christians are seen living as a real social order that transforms the whole life of man, will the world be drawn to it:

“And it shall come to pass in the last days, that the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established in the top of the mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills; and all nations shall flow unto it. And many people shall go and say, Come ye, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; and he will teach us his ways, and we will walk in his paths: for out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many peoples: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up swords against nation, neither shall they learn war any more” (Is. 2:2–4).

The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English defines politics as “the art and science of government.” It is not pragmatism or “the art of the possible” as Otto von Bismarck famously claimed. Politics deals with how society should be governed.

What, then, is the relationship between politics and Christianity? Does Christianity have anything to do with politics? The correct answer to this question is that Christianity has a great deal to do with politics, indeed that the Christian religion is, by its very nature, a political faith. It is not merely that Christianity has a political dimension. Rather, in its purest form—i.e. when it appears unmixed with the compromising effects of syncretism with false religions and idolatrous spiritualities that are alien to its own principles—the Christianity faith is essentially political in nature.

Christianity is the true politics, and this is because the body of Christ, the Christian community, is the true society, just as the Kingdom of God is the true social order, in the sense that all societies that turn away from the covenant social order established by God’s word are idolatrous, the abandonment of God’s true purpose for mankind and therefore the corruption and defacing of what humanity and human society were meant to be in the divinely ordained order of Creation. Rebellion against God and rejection of the covenant social order revealed in his law is a move from life to death, from the true meaning of man’s life to a false meaning for life, from the true humanity to human corruption and depravity, from true society to social dysfunctionality and disintegration, with all the consequences that such apostasy entails. If the history of the human race has taught us anything it is surely this, since as Scripture declares, “he that sinneth against me wrongeth his own soul: all they that hate me love death” (Pr. 8:36).