Politics and theology: something to say
By Simon Hall
A couple of months ago the Guardian ran a photo-spread under the headline ‘Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition.’1 Aside from how predictable the whole conceit was, the article raised the thorny issue of how morality (and policy) relate to biblical interpretation.
Pastor Phil Richards from Bartlett, Tennessee observes that Peter was still carrying a sword (with which to cut off the ear of a member of the Temple Guard) when Jesus was arrested, implying that Jesus would therefore at least permit the carrying of guns today. The interviewees throw Bible verses backward and forward like so many snowballs. Except some of them have stones inside… Jamie Nabowski, also from Bartlett, offers us this classic, in which the scriptures are trumped by The American Way:
The Bible says that if somebody strikes you, you must turn the other cheek. However, the protection of your loved ones and your home is the responsibility of the individual.
Wow. Christians of the left tend to think that their own theological positions are more nuanced. We generally refrain from proof-text tennis, although it’s my experience that this is often because we haven’t spent so much time memorising our proof-texts. Sometimes it appears that our entire theology is based around one idea: Jesus loves everyone and doesn’t really like it that there are rich people and poor people.
Many of us who are involved in local or national politics would be somewhat suspicious of any policy document or local initiative that was as simplistic (dare I say shallow?) as the theology that justifies our work. As activists we are often guilty of building the flimsiest foundations to justify our strategies. But such an approach to theology – in which God merely agrees with us, rather than the other way around – leaves us vulnerable to blindness, to mistaking a monolithic ideology for a monotheistic ideal.
Now this mistake has been exposed, and theology has not been so necessary for the left for a long time. Over twenty years we have been seduced by a financial system that seemed to be as permanent – perhaps even as good – as God. It has been taken as a given, part of the order of creation. Yet as Walter Brueggemann’s essay (ref) points out, God’s imagination is filled with other things. Before and after Thatcher, there are other forces at work in the universe.
What theological options are open to us? If we are (rightly) suspicious of the violence done to our tradition by the simplistic use of Bible quotes, does that mean the biblical tradition is closed to us? Maybe we’d like it that way… Just last week I had dinner with an old friend. In the time since we were attending a charismatic church together, he has come out and married another Christian gay man. We had a lot to talk about, and we agreed on much, but here’s where we had to part company. Speaking about how he had been liberated by the theology he had learned at a Metropolitan Community Church. ‘If I’d known in my twenties what I know now, I would have f***ed the world.’ In other words, if the literal rules of the Old Testament don’t apply, then there are no rules. I tried to make some kind of lame response about fidelity, but it was clear that we were now on different trajectories.
But I need to get back to my friend. I just don’t think it’s good enough to say, ‘The Bible says God is love and that’s all I need to know,’ because whether you are a literalist or not, our tradition clearly works out what that means in very practical terms. We have chosen a harder task, which we must undertake, and that is to seek and serve not the Bible, but rather the God revealed in the Bible.
I hope you are frustrated by this column. I hope you find the writing splintered, opinionated, inconclusive. Hopefully then you will come back and discuss some of these issues with me another time. And here’s some others: the Victorians were onto something with ‘moral rescue’; God’s idea of freedom is radically different from Milton Friedman’s; Tony Blair got some things (theologically) right, but so did Tony Benn. This is an unprecedented moment of reflection in politics. Let’s make sure we have something to say.
1 Mark Johnson and Monica Meira meet religious, gun-carrying Americans
This article was first published on guardian.co.uk at 00.01 GMT on Saturday 28 February 2009. It appeared in the Guardian on Saturday 28 February 2009 on p22 of the Features & comment section. It was last updated at 15.32 GMT on Monday 2 March 2009.
Simon Hall is the leader of Revive UK in Leeds and is a regular writer and speaker. |
