In conversations with various folks over recent days, I've been put in the position (really yet again) of defending abortion as a medical procedure against those who whole-heartedly dismiss the procedure as an evil that must be rooted out of the world by faithful Christians.
Gone is any talk of the mercy of God, of the brokenness of the world and of the moral choices we must sometimes make in that brokenness. One of the things I learned rather quickly as a pastor: That sometimes grieving humans have to make grievous decisions in which no faithful choice exists. Sometimes you simply have to decide and throw yourself into the mercy of God. When Christian moral reasoning doesn't account for that, it's lost its Christ-likeness in favor of demonic certainty. After all, the most demonic thing we can know is the difference between good and evil. I see the postmodern "religious right" as all too athetistic in its attempts to articulate a public certainty without any reference to Jesus.
In those arguments, I've been put in the place of trying to connect the "secular" public goods of government with the Christian faith that Jesus alone is the ruler of all that is, seen and unseen. I reject outright any understanding of the body politic that is not an embodiment of that Christocentric faith. It's why I'm a democratic socialist -- with some latent distributivist trends.
I suppose this is something I've learned precisely because I grew up praying the Great Litany. One of the most important characteristics of the Litany in the prayer book tradition is that the prayer for the public order is included in the petitions for the Church and her ministers.
In contemporary versions, petitions for the Church are set apart from petitions for the polity. We see this, for example, in the 1979 BCP as well as the Common Worship (which clearly distinguishes them as sections IV and V). There is a sense in which these contemporary versions create a sort of secular logic, a liturgical divorce, of things that at least earlier Anglicans understood to properly belong together. Earlier Anglicans understood that our common life in the political sphere flowed out of and to him who is above all things, the Alpha and Omega.
The modern state cannot be, and shouldn't be, a "secular" force. The common life of that polity is both a gift and a vocation for Christians, oriented toward a common good. There is no space, no place, where you go to get away from the Lordship of the crucified and risen One. After all, he said, "All power on earth and in heaven has been given to me". There is therefore a deep sense in which Christians pray for that common polity as part of their prayer for their own common life and its witness in the work and world of its ministers.
But let me be clear here: I'm not advocating a clericalist vision. The "will to power" that names so much modern political party-hackery is as atheistic as the Religious Right or Religious Left (since it gives birth, really, to both). I believe in praying for the monarch or president, as well as the magistrates or legislatures, precisely to the extent that those are vocations and institutions that are a gift of the Triune God. Yet they're still fallen vocations and institutions. The very fact that petitions for such offices and institutions within the polity are placed alongside -- rather than separated from -- petitions for the Church and her ministers is testimony to their integrity as gifts and vocations bestowed by God. In fact, separating them from the petitions for the Church and her ministers only signals that these dynamic vocations and gifts are merely secular phenomena.
The reason American (and to a lesser extent Anglican) Christians haven't learned this is that modern statecraft is itself predicated on the atheism of Enlightenment reasoning. You always end up, in a journey, in the place from which you start. And when you start where Locke and Hume (and therefore Jefferson) started, you can't be surprised when you wind up where we are: Christians articulating a vision of polity that is deeply demonic. Both Republicans and Democrats. A political order shaped by the Nietzschean "will to power" stripped of meaning beyond procedural norms.
The prayer book tradition of the Litany rejects all that when it places the prayers for polity alongside the prayers for the Church. For that tradition, politics is shaped by vocation and gifts and duties, that flow from and to the Author and Giver of Life, not set apart in a different realm outside that economics.
This is why I think all the rancor about abortion is so wrong-headed. It's lost the pastoral moral logic that understands we live in a fallen world, yet yearn for the more that Jesus brings. And it refuses to reflect that "more-ness" in its lack of humility and mercy.
For the record, I'm not arguing that abortion is moral. I'm merely saying that Christians who try to make judicious moral proclamations from the vantage point of Goodness have no theology of sin, and an atheistic theology of the polity. Without those two things, you really can't be too surprised when the culture rejects what you say -- because you wind up saying the same relativisitic things the rest of the culture says. For Christians to be distinct in our polity we have to start with Jesus, not somewhere else.
Gone is any talk of the mercy of God, of the brokenness of the world and of the moral choices we must sometimes make in that brokenness. One of the things I learned rather quickly as a pastor: That sometimes grieving humans have to make grievous decisions in which no faithful choice exists. Sometimes you simply have to decide and throw yourself into the mercy of God. When Christian moral reasoning doesn't account for that, it's lost its Christ-likeness in favor of demonic certainty. After all, the most demonic thing we can know is the difference between good and evil. I see the postmodern "religious right" as all too athetistic in its attempts to articulate a public certainty without any reference to Jesus.
In those arguments, I've been put in the place of trying to connect the "secular" public goods of government with the Christian faith that Jesus alone is the ruler of all that is, seen and unseen. I reject outright any understanding of the body politic that is not an embodiment of that Christocentric faith. It's why I'm a democratic socialist -- with some latent distributivist trends.
I suppose this is something I've learned precisely because I grew up praying the Great Litany. One of the most important characteristics of the Litany in the prayer book tradition is that the prayer for the public order is included in the petitions for the Church and her ministers.
In contemporary versions, petitions for the Church are set apart from petitions for the polity. We see this, for example, in the 1979 BCP as well as the Common Worship (which clearly distinguishes them as sections IV and V). There is a sense in which these contemporary versions create a sort of secular logic, a liturgical divorce, of things that at least earlier Anglicans understood to properly belong together. Earlier Anglicans understood that our common life in the political sphere flowed out of and to him who is above all things, the Alpha and Omega.
The modern state cannot be, and shouldn't be, a "secular" force. The common life of that polity is both a gift and a vocation for Christians, oriented toward a common good. There is no space, no place, where you go to get away from the Lordship of the crucified and risen One. After all, he said, "All power on earth and in heaven has been given to me". There is therefore a deep sense in which Christians pray for that common polity as part of their prayer for their own common life and its witness in the work and world of its ministers.
But let me be clear here: I'm not advocating a clericalist vision. The "will to power" that names so much modern political party-hackery is as atheistic as the Religious Right or Religious Left (since it gives birth, really, to both). I believe in praying for the monarch or president, as well as the magistrates or legislatures, precisely to the extent that those are vocations and institutions that are a gift of the Triune God. Yet they're still fallen vocations and institutions. The very fact that petitions for such offices and institutions within the polity are placed alongside -- rather than separated from -- petitions for the Church and her ministers is testimony to their integrity as gifts and vocations bestowed by God. In fact, separating them from the petitions for the Church and her ministers only signals that these dynamic vocations and gifts are merely secular phenomena.
The reason American (and to a lesser extent Anglican) Christians haven't learned this is that modern statecraft is itself predicated on the atheism of Enlightenment reasoning. You always end up, in a journey, in the place from which you start. And when you start where Locke and Hume (and therefore Jefferson) started, you can't be surprised when you wind up where we are: Christians articulating a vision of polity that is deeply demonic. Both Republicans and Democrats. A political order shaped by the Nietzschean "will to power" stripped of meaning beyond procedural norms.
The prayer book tradition of the Litany rejects all that when it places the prayers for polity alongside the prayers for the Church. For that tradition, politics is shaped by vocation and gifts and duties, that flow from and to the Author and Giver of Life, not set apart in a different realm outside that economics.
This is why I think all the rancor about abortion is so wrong-headed. It's lost the pastoral moral logic that understands we live in a fallen world, yet yearn for the more that Jesus brings. And it refuses to reflect that "more-ness" in its lack of humility and mercy.
For the record, I'm not arguing that abortion is moral. I'm merely saying that Christians who try to make judicious moral proclamations from the vantage point of Goodness have no theology of sin, and an atheistic theology of the polity. Without those two things, you really can't be too surprised when the culture rejects what you say -- because you wind up saying the same relativisitic things the rest of the culture says. For Christians to be distinct in our polity we have to start with Jesus, not somewhere else.