This article is Part Two of a two-part series. Click here to read Part One.
We left off with Bonhoeffer agonizing over his impossible choices. Meanwhile, American theologian and political commentator Reinhold Niebuhr (who, as it happens, had been Bonhoeffer’s teacher at Union Theological Seminary in New York) was watching the situation in Germany closely from across the Atlantic. After some careful deliberation, Niebuhr concluded that it had been the right decision to use the fallen tools of violence and military force to oppose the Nazi regime, since “ambiguous methods are required for the ambiguities of history.”[1] Niebuhr saw that what political journalist Connor Friedersdorf has recently called “appeals to moral clarity at the expense of analytic rigor” are often well-meaning but misguided. Niebuhr was skeptical about the degree of moral clarity human beings can achieve, since one of sin’s most pernicious effects is to blind us to our own sinfulness. Now, this is not at all to say that there are not obvious moral evils in the world which demand our resolute and decisive opposition rather than our slow, deliberative consideration. When it came to concrete questions of political justice and policy, however, Niebuhr was quick to point out that history is convoluted and perplexing, and that even on “obvious” issues human beings simply cannot reach a vantage point from which to make perfectly moral choices:
We are men, not God. We are responsible for making choices between greater and lesser evils, even when our Christian faith, illuminating the human scene, makes it quite apparent that there is no pure good in history; and probably no pure evil, either. The fate of civilizations may depend upon these choices of which some are more, others less, just.[2]
So, where does this leave us? On one level, it sounds like a recipe for despair. If every human effort is tainted by sin and self-interest, and if every politician has an agenda, and if every party platform is morally dubious, and if all human accomplishments are only partial at best, should Christians just withdraw from the political process altogether? Maybe we should just mind our own business, try to be decent people, and get along the best we can.
Niebuhr understood the Christian temptation to political quietism, but he ultimately rejected it. True enough, he admitted, perfect solutions aren’t available, but imperfect solutions are. And this brings us to the second major problem with our present culture of ideological purity. Not only, as Bonhoeffer showed us, is ideological purity an illusion, it’s also bad politics. A zero-sum, winner-takes-all approach to politics is making it increasingly difficult merely to speak to one another, yes, but also to contribute toward even a marginal improvement of civic life and to make even modest gains for the common good. Niebuhr once defined democracy as “a method of finding proximate solutions for insoluble problems.” Paradoxically, the quest for pristine ideological purity actually undermines the pursuit of justice, since it supposes that perfect solutions are available for every problem and will settle for nothing less. So, in his or her obsession with perfect justice, the ideologue refuses the opportunity for proximate justice.[3] Instead, Niebuhr proposed, our political life—both personally and corporately—must be defined by responsibility. The responsible citizen will make difficult decisions, recognizing, on the one hand, that no choice is completely (or even mostly) moral and no political problem can be solved perfectly; yet, on the other hand, it is genuinely possible to improve our societies, to reform our broken and dysfunctional institutions, and to craft better legislation.
But all of this requires a lost art: thinking in degrees. “Human happiness,” writes Niebuhr, “is determined by the difference between a little more and a little less justice, a little more and a little less freedom, between varying degrees of imaginative insight with which the self enters the life and understands the interests of the neighbor.”[4] Ultimately, a Christian political ethic challenges us to take responsibility—to do something—even when conditions aren’t perfect. Our common life will always be characterized by ambiguity, but that doesn’t mean that real, tangible goods can’t be achieved or that we shouldn’t bother to attempt them. It is always possible, according to Niebuhr, “to avoid catastrophe and secure a tolerable peace in a world filled with acute tensions.”[5] Promises of “a little more justice,” “a little more freedom,” and a “tolerable peace” are unlikely to appear on anyone’s campaign posters, but Niebuhr is offering, it seems to me, a sorely-needed middle way between sentimentality and cynicism. Once we come to grips with scale of our problems and our complicity in them, we can begin to pursue the common good, especially once we’ve been freed from the illusion that our provisional solutions are perfect. But at the same time, this world, as Niebuhr emphasizes again and again, is intensely meaningful; it’s just not the ultimate source of meaning. “To believe in a meaningful existence which has its center and source beyond itself makes it possible to preserve moral vitality, because the world as it exists is not regarded as perfect even though it is meaningful.”[6]
The Way of Wisdom for Aliens and Exiles
Niebuhr’s approach has been characterized as “Christian Realism”—Christian in that it affirms the real potential for redemption of unjust systems and structures in history; Realism in that it is unflinching about the power of self-interest to warp and twist even our most moral actions. Bonhoeffer was executed before Niebuhr’s political vision took its final shape, but I expect he would have agreed with it. Both thinkers recognized that faithful Christian engagement with the complex and morally convoluted questions of political existence requires not necessarily a particular set of policy positions (although both men had their convictions), but wisdom and courage to live responsibly in an ambiguous world . To put it another way, in our political moment, the way of wisdom requires us to appraise our values and determine which to prioritize—and the courage to prioritize some at the expense of others—as we engage the public square in faithfulness to Jesus Christ and out of love for our neighbors. Christians cannot not build the Kingdom of God on earth, but we do have a responsibility to find where God is already at work making all things new: “The final victory over man’s disorder is God’s and not ours; but we do have responsibility for proximate victories,” wrote Niebuhr in 1953. “We can neither renounce this early home of ours nor yet claim that its victories and defeats give the final meaning to our existence.”[7]
On this point Niebuhr sounds an awful lot like the Apostle Peter. And that’s by design: Christian Realism is an attempt to recover the unique political theology of the New Testament. For example, consider Peter’s letter to the churches of Asia Minor, whom he addresses as the “exiles of the Dispersion in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia (1 Peter 1:1). Peter is writing to those whom he calls the parepidemoi—literally, the “temporary residents” scattered across the ancient world. It’s a legal term for foreigners residing in a host society; so, while these Christian may live, say, in Galatia, it’s not their country of origin. But, Peter concludes, just because these exiles are not native citizens doesn’t mean that they have no stake in the political and civil affairs of the cities where they live. Here’s how he puts it in 2:13–17:
Be subject for the Lord’s sake to every human institution, whether it be to the emperor as supreme, or to governors as sent by him to punish those who do evil and to praise those who do good. For this is the will of God, that by doing good you should put to silence the ignorance of foolish people. Live as people who are free, not using your freedom as a cover-up for evil, but living as servants of God. Honor everyone. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honor the emperor.
We need to be careful here, as passages like this are especially susceptible to misreading in at least two directions. In some Christian traditions, Peter’s complex political ethic has been flattened into a kind of bland escapism: “This world is not my home, I’m just passing through,” as one well-known gospel hymn puts it.[8] The passage has also been taken as an uncritical endorsement of all political authority. Neither interpretation captures what Peter is really after here.
Peter’s primary concern is to put politics into its proper place by reminding the saints where their ultimate allegiances should lie. The key to the passage comes at the very end: “Fear God. Honor the emperor.” These five words, I think, are the germ of a thoughtful political theology for our cultural moment. In these five words, Peter captures something critical about what politics is and what it is not and about what politics demands of us and what it does not. The word translated “honor” is the Greek timáō, from which we get our English word “timid.” Although it is sometimes used in ancient literature to refer to the worship due to a pagan god, it is almost always used to clarify the power dynamics in social contexts. It is used, for instance, in the sense of a child honoring his parents or a society’s duty to honor the elderly. Peter’s meaning comes into sharper focus when contrasted with the kind of honor due to God. The word Peter uses here is phobéō, the root of our word “phobia.” Originally, the term mean “to quake” or “to tremble,” overwhelmed by dread. It’s a frightening word, and rightly so: Peter warns us that God alone is entitled to the kind of reverence and awe that grips us at the center of our being. And here’s the takeaway: I timáō the emperor by recognizing my place before him; that is, political authorities are entitled to my respect, my responsible citizenship, and (alas) my taxes, for what those are worth. But I dare not phobéō any civil authority or, just as crucially, any political ideology. No set of political beliefs can claim the core of who I am, since, for Peter, that territory has already been occupied by the sanctifying power of the Holy Spirit (1:2). It is a fatal mistake, as I have argued, to look to the state as a source of transcendence. That kind of respect is owed to God alone.
In our age of ideology, Peter’s words should sting a little. If we really are the parepidemoi—the “temporary residents” scattered in Denver or Nashville or Los Angeles—then we should feel a little out of place, like our values don’t quite line up with those of our host society. If, then, we find that everything we believe perfectly aligns with one political platform or the other, Peter might well ask us whether we’ve grown a little too comfortable in the country of our sojournings, whether our ideology is driving our theology, and whether we’ve forgotten where our homeland really is. And yet in the end we must deal with the world as it is, not as we wish it were. Although we are temporary residents, we are residents nonetheless. And while we aliens and exiles are making our journey at twilight, we also know that the dawn is coming. “‘Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.’ Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, making the best use of the time, because the days are evil.”
This resource is part of the series Kingdom Politics. Click Here to explore more resources from this series.
Notes:
[1] Reinhold Niebuhr, “An End to Illusions,” in Reinhold Niebuhr: Major Works on Religion and Politics, ed. Elisabeth Sifton (New York: The Library of America, 2015), 623.
[2] Reinhold Niebuhr, Faith and Politics, ed. Ronald Stone (New York: George Braziller, 1968), 56.
[3] See Reinhold Niebuhr, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of its Traditional Defense (1944; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 118, 144-45.
[4] Reinhold Niebuhr, An Interpretation of Christian Ethics (1935; repr., New York: Living Age Books, 1956), 97.
[5] Niebuhr, An Interpretation of Christian Ethics, 10. Emphasis mine.
[6] Reinhold Niebuhr, “Optimism and Pessimism—II,” in Reinhold Niebuhr: Major Works on Religion and Politics, ed. Elisabeth Sifton (New York: The Library of America, 2015), 721.
[7] Reinhold Niebuhr, Christian Realism and Political Problems (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953), 116.
[8] Albert E. Brumley, “I can’t feel at home anymore”
Ryan Tafilowski is the Associate Pastor of Foothills Fellowship Church in Littleton, CO. He earned his PhD in Systematic Theology from the University of Edinburgh. Ryan is a member of the St. Basil Fellowship of the Center for Pastor Theologians.
