By Stephen Unthank - Posted at Reformation21:
God’s required commandments of mankind are summarized by our Lord through first, loving God and second, loving our neighbor. This is the whole of ethics, the required oughtness of how mankind is to live in God’s world. And of course, politics is subsumed under ethics. If ethics is the study of how men ought to live in light of God, and politics is the study of how we ought to love our neighbor made in the image of God, then Christians ought to be the best and brightest of political thinkers. Alasdair MacIntyre reinforces this truth reminding us that “for Aristotle ethics is a part and aspect of politics and that the human good is to be achieved in and through participation in the lives of political communities. This is a familiar and uncontroversial thesis with respect to Aristotle.”[1] He’s not wrong. But is this familiar with respect to Christians, especially evangelical Christians today?
It seems to me that one of the major culturally corrosive acids to Christian political thought today has been the ubiquitous rise and presence of materialism (and with it an ever-invasive Marxism) which, in denying anything transcendently Divine, has made everything immanently Dire. If there is no God then all sickness, all suffering, and all sadness falls on us to alleviate.[2] We’re all we’ve got and therefore all responsibility falls on man. This of course plays out in unchecked Governmental growth and the increasingly magniloquent meddling of a the so called “expert class”. As a result, everything becomes politicized and polemicized. We become, in the words of R.J. Snell, overly excessive hand washers to control our unpredictably immanent world.[3] And if you don’t do as the experts say, then “right to jail!”[4] Gone is the transcendent Providence of a God who lovingly controls all things, fallen though our world is.
The result of this on Christian political thought seems to have been the reactionary adoption of a pervasive pietism. Only loving God is what matters now. Why? Because politics and political power are what the unbelievers do. They, in their denial of God, have made politics god. And what has Jerusalem to do with Washington D.C.? When Christ comes back, He’ll sort it all out.
Read Part 2 here: