6.1 The State is Never the Kingdom.

Last night the next group of philosophers in training started social and political philosophy. We primarily went through Niebuhr's five ways Christians have engaged culture. But since I am going beyond my classes in this blog series, I thought I would start with some fundamentals.
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1. One of the basic principles of theology--the study of God--is that any earthly, visible church is not the same as the invisible, spiritual church. Your local church may be great. The denomination to which you belong may be great. But it is not the same as the one, true, invisible church. This is one of the most basic things you learn in Christian theology.

Protestants especially believe this. But it is true even for Roman Catholics. The Roman Catholic Church openly admits that not all of its popes have been godly. The church has had periods of great corruption. No earthly church is ever the same as the true church. 

Even when you dig into the earliest councils of the church, you will find huge instances of all-too-human politics and ungodliness. The church erased a council in 449 that would have likely changed what we believe about Christ for all time. At that council, a bishop was beaten to death and those present were forced to sign a blank document that was filled in later. 

Afterwards, the emperor's horse tripped and killed him. Because that emperor died, there came a different emperor who backed a different position--the one we believe today about Christ being one person with two natures. They had another council two years later (Chalcedon) and erased the first one. Chalcedon established what almost all Christians believe today about Christ being fully human and fully divine.

The one, true church is invisible. No earthly, visible church is equivalent to it.

2. If this is true of the church, it is absolutely true of any earthly, visible state or country. Think about it, is the state more likely to be holy than the church? It's really an absurd thought. If the visible church is never the same as the true church then the state absolutely is never the same as the kingdom of God.

It's important to point out that this is a major blind spot for some Christians at times. We have recognized the dangers of civil religion for as long as people have confused patriotism for worship. Various forms of religious nationalism can't tell the difference between fervor for a particular vision of a country and the worship of God. 

And those infected can't see it. In fact, they are more zealous for the state than they ever were for God. At its worse, they are ready to kill those who do not bend to their vision of the state. They become hard hearted, and anyone whose loyalty to their vision is in question becomes the worst of evil.

In our times, Nazi Germany is of course the classic example, where loyalty to Hitler's Germany became indistinguishable from state Christianity. When German Christians in the 1930s tried to merge Christianity with nationalism, the true church responded with something called the Barmen Declaration. 

This statement pointed out that "Jesus Christ [that is, not Hitler or Germany] is the one Word of God whom we must hear and obey in life and in death." When the state insisted that it was God's kingdom on earth, they rejected "the false doctrine that the church could recognize other powers as God’s revelation."

Whenever our love of nation takes on a fervor that should only be reserved for God, we have begun to lose sight of the real God and our vision for the state has become an idol. The state has become a god for us.

The kingdom of this world is never the same as the kingdom of our God.

3. There may be times when an earthly state aligns more or less with the kingdom than at other times, but we should always be clear. No earthly kingdom is ever identical to the kingdom of God.

It is essential that we never confuse or blur the two.

A theocracy is allegedly a state ruled by God. But apart from the days of Moses, there has never been one and will never be one till Christ actually returns. The book of the Judges, when Israel was allegedly a theocracy, was one of the most godless periods of Israel's history, when everyone did what was right in their own eyes.

In so-called theocracies, there is always a group of priests or a Pope or an Ayatollah interpreting what God says. Theocracies are thus really monarchies (rule by one) or something called an oligarchy (rule by a few) in disguise. 

Sure, someone might say they are only letting the Bible rule--but it is always their interpretation of the Bible. In Calvin's Geneva, the rule of the Bible was the rule of John Calvin's interpretation of the Bible. And in Puritan England and Puritan New England when they were in charge, it was their interpretation of the Bible that ruled. If you were a Mary Dyer or Roger Williams, you were either ousted or put to death.

No earthly state--even if it claims to be a theocracy--can be equivalent to the kingdom of God because humans are involved. A human has to tell the people what God says. A human has to implement what they think God says. A human has to interpret the Bible. 

And people are sinful. "There is none righteous, no not one" (Rom. 3:10). The Founding Fathers of the United States thoroughly took that into account. They put extensive "checks and balances" into the Constitution so that the evil, sinful nature of one person or group was counteracted by other individuals and groups in the government.

This is part of why Jesus, Paul, and the rest of the New Testament strongly distinguished between the church and the state. Jesus told his questioners to "Give back to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's" (Mark 12:17). And Paul told the Philippians--living in a Roman colony--that they were citizens of heaven (Phil. 3:20). 

The implication was that their political identity did not lie with Rome but with God in heaven. Hebrews and 1 Peter imply the same when they call citizens exiles and aliens (Heb. 11:13; 1 Pet. 1:17).

The Founding Fathers were thus wise to dictate that "Congress shall establish no religion." Thomas Jefferson called this a "wall of separation" between the state and religion. It was all too clear to the Founding Fathers that, if there were a state religion, it would end up oppressing the people like the Puritans had in New England or like the kings, queens, and Puritans of England had in the 1500s and 1600s.

3. Lord Acton put the principle wisely: "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men." [1] For this reason, it is best for the church to always be distinct from the state and for there to be more than one church at that. There is surely a correlation between the amount of power someone has and the danger of corruption and corrupt impact. 

It is not an absolute correlation, but it is a general one.

And since wealth brings power, the same correlation is in play there. The more wealthy a person is, the more powerful a person is. And the more powerful a person is, the greater the potential for corruption and corrupt impact. 1 Timothy 6:10 was not lying when it said that "the love of money is a root of all evils."

At times, Western culture has at least given some appearances of resisting these trends. But the more you dig into history, the more you realize that corruption has never been far away from any period of rulers. We celebrate the apparent exceptions. Yet even here the public doesn't always know what has happened behind the scenes.

These are not absolutes. They are tendencies and warnings with serious implications about how society would ideally be structured. The main take aways are 1) keep power from being concentrated in the hands of the few and 2) keep religion separate from the state with the state as a neutral zone. 

Of course, at any given time, most of us don't have a choice about these things. We are born in a particular place and time, and the state is a given.

[1] In an 1887 letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton

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Introduction
1.1 What is philosophy?
1.2 Is philosophy Christian?
1.3 Unexamined assumptions
1.4 Socrates and the Unexamined Life
1.5 The Natural Philosophers 

Logic
2.1 The Structure of Thinking 
2.2 When Thinking Goes Wrong
2.3 Three Tests for Truth
2.4 Knowing the Bible
2.5 Plato and Aristotle
2.6 The Story of Logic 
2.7 Hellenistic Philosophy

Philosophy of Religion
3.1 Faith and Reason
3.2 How can we know that God exists?
3.3 God as First Cause 
3.4 God as Intelligent Designer
3.5 God as Necessary Being (including ontological argument)
3.6 God and Morality
3.7 God and Miracles
3.8 The Problem of Evil
3.9 Augustine and Aquinas

Philosophy of the Person
4.1 What is a human being?
4.2 A Body and a Soul?
4.3 What is the meaning of life? (including existentialism)
4.4 Are we free or fated? 

Ethics

Social and Political Philosophy
6.1 The State is Never the Kingdom (this post)
6.2 How to Structure Government 
6.3 Kingdom Values for Society
6.4 Christ and Culture
6.5 The Social Contract (equal rights and utilitarianism)
6.6 Adam Smith vs Karl Marx

Epistemology
7.1 Beyond Binary Thinking
7.2 Plato's Allegory of the Cave
7.3 Reason vs. Experience
7.4 Kant Breaks the Tie
7.5 The Bible as Object of Knowledge
7.6 Wittgenstein and Language
7.7 Kuhn and Paradigms
7.8 Foucault and Power
7.9 A Pragmatic Epistemology

Metaphysics
8.1 Hard Times for Metaphysics
8.2 A Brief Story of Metaphysics

8.3 A Plug for Critical Realism