"God’s servant for your good"

Memorial Day has occasioned some provocative reflections on the nature of what allegiance, if any, the Christian should give to the secular political order. Pastor John Wright (via Eric) called this the “most dangerous weekend of the year” because it tempts Christians to buy into the mythos of the nation-state, something Pr. Wright deems a parody of the Gospel, complete with its saints, martyrs, and sacrificial economy.

On a similar note, Dwight at Versus Populum discussed an essay by Michael Budde (from the collection The Church as Counterculture, edited by Budde and Robert W. Brimlow) that contends that Christians should withdraw their allegiance from the nation-state altogether, because it divides them by national loyalty and becuase, whatever good the nation-state does, the price it demands is a willingness to kill in its defense.

I think these kinds of arguments often grow out of a “thick” eccleisiology as touted by thinkers like Stanley Hauerwas. On this understanding, the church is taken to be a new, alternative polity that in some sense replaces the polities of the world, at least as far as Christians are concerned (though it appears, as Dwight notes, that Budde would go further than Hauerwas in advocating a kind of Christian withdrawal from secular politics).

On this view the primary (only?) allegiance of a Christian must be to God and his church, not to any earthly community. For Budde it is especially urgent that Christians not participate in or in any way bless the state’s wielding of lethal force. He thinks this is too high of a price to pay for even the supposedly good things that states do such as providing relief to the poor:

If you want to use Caesar’s tools, you must commit to doing more than praying for Caesar’s health–you must be willing to kill (or hire killers) on Caesar’s behalf. Lobbying, voting, legislating, and the like all stand as endorsements, legitimations, and blessings of state-based power. Christians might have an easier time seeing the stakes if the tradeoffs were put more starkly: for instance, how many foreign deaths are acceptable for the defense of Social Security? How many of other people’s children may be sacrificed to protect aid to indigent children in this country? The tradeoffs are never so obvious or so simplistic, but states do offer a roundabout version of the choice to Christians and others: if you want the “good” state (or clan or imperial) programs, you must commit yourself to protecting the state from challenges to its health …. In the world of states, empires, power-wielding clans, and the like, the “good” programs are options, add-ons, luxuries; the essential elements are those of coercion, control, and power that preserve the state itself. Whatever the regime type, in a crisis welfare programs will be abolished long before the police, army, and the prisons. (p. 223)

Budde makes a powerful case, but I wonder if he goes to the opposite extreme from those who would deify the state and demand unconditional allegiance. All Christians agree that there are limits to the obedience we can give to the political authorities, but most would disagree that this demands total abstention from politics.

One such was Jean Lasserre, the French Calvinist and pacifist who greatly influenced Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Lasserre believed that Christians should never kill, but this didn’t mean that they owed no allegiance to the political authorities. In his book War and the Gospel, Lasserre sets out the limits of the Christian’s obedience to the state. Depending on the circumstances, the Christian attitude toward the political authorities can take one of three forms:

1. When the State in its activities and its orders does not violate God’s order, the Church will take an attitude of benevolent submission towards it, implying scrupulous obedience of the State’s orders by Christians.

2. But when the State violates God’s order on one point or another, the Church would be unfaithful to its own ministry and its responsibility towards the State, if it did not clearly protest, reminding the State that it is the servant of God for men’s good, not to aggravate their discontent or their disorder. This protest can be embodied in definite and significant acts. However, Christians must patiently endure without rebellion the injustices of which they may themselves be the victims at the hands of the State.

3. When the State, not content with violating God’s order, tries to make Christians take a personal part in such violation, the Church and Christians must respectfully but openly disobey that demand by the State. This is the price of their fidelity to Jesus Christ.

For Lasserre, the Ten Commandments provide the standard by which Christians are to judge whether the state is violating God’s order. There aren’t “two moralities,” one for the State and one for the church; rather, the Ten Commandments provide a kind of “floor” beneath which the conduct of the state should not fall:

Gospel morality is above all positive, proceeding from more or less unlimited declarations: ‘And as ye would that men should do unto you, do ye also to them likewise’; political morality is more negative, proceeding from prohibitions: ‘Thou shall not kill, thou shall not steal,’ etc; but they do not contradict each other. It may not always be easy to bring out in practice the agreement between the demands of these two spheres of Christian morality; but in principle there is still harmony between them. The Decalogue is an indispensable control standard for both political and private morality.

Of course this does not at once resolve all problems; there will always be border‑line cases where making a decision is terribly delicate and difficult. But there is one thing which can be said: if my thesis is sound, it at last makes possible the Church’s prophetic ministry: in the name of the Decalogue the Church can appreciate just when the State, servant of God for man’s good, starts betraying its mission, becomes a demonic factor of disorder, and at once forfeits the right to Christians’ obedience. The Church can protest against the State’s abuses by reference not to an abstract conception of man, but to the Ten Commandments‑which are concrete enough to be comprehensible to any State. Thanks to them the Church can make the indispensable critical judgment on the State’s laws and demands‑while leaving it a no less indispensable margin for liberty of action. By fighting‑with spiritual arms, of course, including respectful disobedience‑to make the State itself respect the Decalogue, the Church is rendering it the immense service of recalling to it what are the limits of the political order it is charged by God to establish and preserve.

The political authorities have an indispensable role to play – namely, establishing and preserving political order. In that sense, the church doesn’t replace the state; the political authorities have their own legitimate function. However, the Decalogue provides the parameters that the state may not transgress in carrying out its God-appointed task. He recognizes that states often will transgress these boudaries, and when they do the Christian’s obligation of obedience finds its limit.

Lasserre takes this to include the sixth commandment in its full rigor: the state is not permitted to kill even acting in its legitimate capacity as protector of its citizens. And Christians do not owe the state the obedience of killing on its behalf:

According to the Scriptures, a political order conforming to the will of God is one where, among other things, human life is respected and protected. … Murder is always a major disorder, because it is a violation of God’s Law. We know today, as Calvin did not, that the burning of Servet was a disorder; what would Calvinists give that this fire had never been lit! When the State kills, it is contributing to disorder, even if apparently, according to human wisdom, it is limiting disorder. By killing, it adds an extra disorder to those it claims to be putting down. The sixth commandment has another relevance to politics which will lead us to the same conclusion. We have seen that if constraint is indispensable to the State for carrying out its function, the degree of violence or cruelty implied in the use of this constraint is by no means a matter of indifference. There is a certain limit beyond which that constraint ceases to contribute to order in society. When the State is too brutal, it becomes itself a factor of disorder. The spectacle of what goes on in totalitarian countries is an obvious demonstration of this. Our government perhaps has the right to order that a factory occupied by strikers be forcibly cleared, but when people are killed in this police operation, everyone feels that the State has failed and that the disorder is aggravated, not diminished. For in the sight of God a human life has more value than a factory or a juridical principle. It is the same with the State’s constraint as with certain toxic drugs, which are useful in small doses but lethal in strong doses. But where do you find this fine the State must not pass? Without going into the problem of torture, I believe the line is given us by the sixth commandment, which properly signifies this: when the State reaches the point of killing, it has already passed the degree of violence allowed it for maintaining order in the society it has charge over. By killing, it increases disorder and injustice, whatever its declared or secret intention. Whether it lets itself be maddened by fear, or is clever enough to adopt Caiaphas’ aphorism (e.g. when making war), the State betrays its true mission by shedding blood. It abuses its power, imagines that it is protecting, but is really destroying.

Lasserre doesn’t even deny the state the right to make use of some force, but lethal force he sees as a violation of the sixth commandment. He also commends forms of non-violent resistance as possible alternatives to defending a nation from invasion with lethal force that should be explored.

I think Lasserre’s perspective provides a helpful corrective to the view of someone like Budde (even if one doesn’t go all the way in embracing pacifism). The advent of the new age through Christ’s death and resurrection certainly “de-sacralizes” the claims of all earthly authorities and relativizes the allegiance owed by Christians to those authorities. The loyalty owed to any political community is, at best, penultimate. But Christians can still support the state in its legitimate functions of creating and preserving a political order and earthly peace. This stance seems to avoid both “sectarianism” and making the Gospel irrelevant to the conduct of politics by invoking a kind of “two-tiered” morality.