Yes, the precise definition of “church” becomes crucial here. Your brief comment in brackets – ‘Church’ that God recognizes – suggests what Kuyper would call ‘church as an organism’. That is the body of Xst permeating the entire social body. I am not sure whether it makes sense of talking about subservience of a political body, e.g. the state, to ‘church’ in this sense. Typically, the Reformational people, as well as Catholics and others, also talk about ‘church’ in a sense of an institution. As two disparate institutions, that is state and church, both are responsible directly to God. That was, at least in part, a historical impetus of the Reformers to disentangle the political body from a distorted ‘Caesaropapism’ of some of the medieval arrangements. (All sorts of qualifications need to follow here.)
What I am perceiving in your comments though, Grant, is not dissimilar from the point I am making: if we are to talk about Christian politics at all, there needs to be a sense in which our political theorizing and activism are infused by the ‘sap’ of the Gospel. What I would reject, along with the mainstream Reformational tradition, is to somehow redraw the institutional lines of ‘church’ and ‘political community’ in such a way that would jeopardize their distinctive and INDEPENDENT of each other responsibility before God.
sgassanov
Sep 21 2002
02:26 pm
Yes, the precise definition of “church” becomes crucial here. Your brief comment in brackets – ‘Church’ that God recognizes – suggests what Kuyper would call ‘church as an organism’. That is the body of Xst permeating the entire social body. I am not sure whether it makes sense of talking about subservience of a political body, e.g. the state, to ‘church’ in this sense. Typically, the Reformational people, as well as Catholics and others, also talk about ‘church’ in a sense of an institution. As two disparate institutions, that is state and church, both are responsible directly to God. That was, at least in part, a historical impetus of the Reformers to disentangle the political body from a distorted ‘Caesaropapism’ of some of the medieval arrangements. (All sorts of qualifications need to follow here.)
What I am perceiving in your comments though, Grant, is not dissimilar from the point I am making: if we are to talk about Christian politics at all, there needs to be a sense in which our political theorizing and activism are infused by the ‘sap’ of the Gospel. What I would reject, along with the mainstream Reformational tradition, is to somehow redraw the institutional lines of ‘church’ and ‘political community’ in such a way that would jeopardize their distinctive and INDEPENDENT of each other responsibility before God.