A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

The nationalist temptation, part III

Interesting NY Times article about a megachurch pastor in St. Paul who preached a series of sermons against the identification of Christianity with American nationalism and how it cost him a fifth of his congregation.

The Times article sort of tries to spin it as a conservative vs. liberal thing, but the pastor, Gregory A. Boyd, seems to be promoting something more radical. He seems to be essentially calling Christians to give up the whole idea of exercising political power. This is a “Church as counterculture” model more in line with the thought of Stanley Hauerwas than with Jim Wallis-style religious progressivism.

Of course, I’m skeptical that Christians can avoid exercising power over others as long as we’re not prepared to beat a retreat from society. But I admire Pastor Boyd’s refusal to turn his pulpit into a platform for nationalist politics.

2 responses to “The nationalist temptation, part III”

  1. Thuloid

    This is interesting stuff. I wonder how far the retreat from power can go–one could make an argument that it necessarily entails a retreat from the mechanisms of the state, but not from society (inasmuch as participation in the former is involuntary, so necessarily means claiming some power over others, but the latter could be voluntary). So not only should Christians not seek after political power, but should not run for office at all, or vote, or urge others to vote. We could end up with a kind of absolute principle of voluntarism as antidote to the confluence of Christianity and nationalism. And what would that mean–some kind of Christian anarcho-capitalism?

    But then, Paul doesn’t seem to have been shy about asserting his rights as a Roman citizen.

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  2. Lee

    I haven’t read Boyd’s book, so I wouldn’t want to make too many pronouncements about it, but this quote from the Christian Century review seems relevant:

    “Boyd bears courageous witness to a truth that many American Christians utterly dismiss. What he argues so forcefully cannot be said often enough. Yet the book has weaknesses, too. One is that Boyd misses the fact that the people sitting in the pews live in two overlapping worlds. As much as Christ mandates that they exercise power under, they are forced by circumstances to exercise power over, too. They hire and fire employees, pass or fail students, defend the rich and prosecute the poor, and do a thousand other things that Jesus never had to do because of the unique nature of his mission.

    “Of course Christians should try to follow Jesus’ example. But it is not easy; sometimes it might not even be possible. Then what? Perhaps Jesus’ mission was unique for that very reason. To be sure, Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross sets an example to follow. But it does something else, too. It provides the means of salvation for people who try but fail to live as he did. If there is an absolute in the Christian faith, it is not what is demanded of Christians but what is offered to them, which is the gift of God’s grace in and through Jesus Christ. It strikes me as strange that Boyd did not emphasize this point more often.”

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