Five Theses on Politics and the Moral Life

God, Time, The World, and Human Endeavors

Governing Notions for Life Together in God’s World

#1: God is Not the World

In the beginning, we are told, there was only God. From a theological vantage point, this is the most important thing to be told: God is God, and all else is not. There are two genuses in the world: God, and everything else, and we don’t entirely know what the first genus consists of¹.

So, the first word here is deflationary. To begin with God is to name a great difference between God and creation: that all that creatures do is not bad because it is not God. Not being God is quite simply what creatures do. That creatures think in terms of tomorrows and todays and twenty-five-yearses is what the human does, and it is not to be faulted as such². That creatures think in terms of possibilities, and of alternate forms of society is just what humans do: there is no ideal form of human governance, much less one which could be modeled off of the divine life³.

Theocracy, you say? I’d like to introduce you to the book of Exodus, or perhaps Judges. Monarchy? 2 Kings would like a word. This qualitative difference between God and the world is not occasion for despair, but an invitation to pay attention to the particulars of the world as we find them. The world, born from God’s wisdom, invites us to live in it not as machinists, copying in clay and stone what we find in the heavenly of heavenlies. Rather, we are invited to embrace being God’s creatures, to know that we are not God, and to live wisely with those other creatures, friends and strangers. Such an invitation is one which we undertake within the limits of being God’s creatures. It is one which God gives to that which is not God, nor expected to be.

Being God’s creatures, with its limits, comes its benefits, not as some mystical additions to what creatures are, but as their rightful inheritance. To be a little lower than the angels has its benefits. For one does not have to be God in order to be wonderful. And humans are wonderful. However one wants to talk about natural law, and what it means or does not mean, it must mean this: humans have been gifted order in our bones, in the habits of body and soul which we cannot efface, and not having to start from scratch is a great gift.

And so, not being God opens up a great deal of freedom, but one which is undergirded by the ability to navigate a world as God’s creatures, built as it were for the landscape we must travel. That we are not God does not mean that God is somehow absent, for as one writer has put it, God opens up space for creation as a distention of time. If Mary is the one who bears forth God into Israel, then the distance between God and creation is not marked by some unfathomable gap, but exists as a kind of haunting intimacy: God lingers, infuses, surrounds, marking our ways, without expecting that we will be able to—like God—linger without being lost for time.

#2: Time Is Not For Us

To begin with God is to confess not only that whatever else we do as creatures, it does not measure up to the importance of being deity, but that all the things we do are on borrowed time, quite literally, for death is coming for us all. Time will put an end to our projects. It will eat your breakfast and your dinner and bury them both in the yard with you. The slow-moving train rumbles forward, and as much as we try to accelerate the world, it is better to be attuned to what the world has to offer us. Being a creature within God’s world means, among other things, living as a creature who has been provided for, socially and personally.

This too is a deflationary claim: time does not move at the speed we wish. With every presidential cycle, the economy lags behind, such that each presidency inherits that which it did not make, and deals with the problems its predecessors made. Sometimes this lag time is very short, with Nixon having to withdraw from a war he did not start. Sometimes that lag time is decades or longer, with Lincoln’s tenure defined by arrangements made with slavery in the foundations of the Constitution itself. But in any event, politics and time are not friends: the past stuffs itself into the present, like extra luggage for the airport, and we cannot take off without finding a place for all the baggage.

All of this is bad news for democracy, the most time-intensive form of governance yet to be devised. If democracy is not just a procedural enterprise, but a consensus, coalition-building enterprise which is supposed to take account of voices and deliberate reasonably, time is a substrate to politics. But it does not take any amount of life to know that this would ultimately require infinite time to function well without resorting to shortcuts which undermine the whole project. The shortness of time is why listsicles overtook the essay, why podcasts overtook everyone’s commutes. At 46, I know that I am better than halfway done with whatever marks I wish to make in the world, and that there are so many I wish to make. I write like I’m running out of time, and every day is a constant squeezing out all the juice that’s there to have.

None of this lack of time is reason to abandon democracy, but it is reason to not kid ourselves about what it requires. It requires faces, time, and intention. It is ill fit for a world which is constantly accelerating, unless we think somehow that hearing a person’s voice is something that can happen simply by answering “Yes” or “No” to a question. For it is time that allows us to see that all Yeses are not the same: some support a candidate for expediency, for fear, for money, for love. And not all Nos are the same: some refusals are from prudence, from grudges, from hope for a better possibility.

And so, in time’s shortness, our politics too will come up short, stamping themselves as provisional, and require our humility to their resolutions. We are doing the best we can on borrowed time.

Photo by Mateus Campos Felipe on Unsplash

#3 The World is Not Organized

This world, bound up in time before God, is a world which is brimming with life, overflowing in love, filled with creation of God of all kinds. This acknowledgment can be an occasion for fear, or for wonder.

Hartmut Rosa, in describing what makes the modern world function well, has honed in a concept he calls “resonance”. Resonance, briefly put, is how the motion of living things works together with other living things—we cannot control the actions of another being, or of another organization, but rather try to move in sync with others. Psychologists have long noted how moving in sync is just part of children’s play—jump ropes, clapping games, chants—and that denial of this (and replacing it with controlled games and excessive adult protection) early on leads to negative socialization⁴. We do this, it seems, not as a matter of controlling others, but learning how to sync ourselves up with others.

As Maximus the Confessor put it, the soul is a microcosm of the cosmos. And so, the world, in all of its fecundity and wildness, is not a place to be locked down, but a place to work in concert with. It is a fluctuating, undulating creation, pulsing with life, and one which is forever reworking what it means to be in sync. We are apt always to forget this, and we reinforce this forgetfulness in our institutions and our politics. This is not a chicken and egg situation, but more of a call and response: our institutions tell us things are stable, and we organize our politics thusly, which leads to more institutions presuming that stability and predictability.

Photo by Sam Mkhize on Unsplash

But if the soul and the cosmos are mirrors, as Christian theologians have long contended, then it should be no surprise than neither are controllable. A 5.0 earthquake occurred an hour from my house this week. A suppressed creekbed in my hometown collapsed an entire shopping mall strip. Anger, unattended to, filters into rational propositions and oozes out as prejudice and institutional biases.

None of this is an argument for leaning into a politics of resentment, anger, or revenge. Nothing here suggests that we should swing our political influence over others as a cudgel or replace granular decisions, meant as fine rivulets of water, for sweeping floods which wash away the past and its opposition. There is a place for this, in the justice of God which will remake even the most obstinate pain, but even in this, we exist within a cosmos not made by human hands, brimming with life which preceded us, and which exists before God independent of our control.

A politic which attempts to overdetermine and control is one which will become more brittle over time, buffetted and torn by the movement of a wild world. But a politic which thinks there is no baseline, no collective possibilities, abandons individuals to torrential floods and rains, with no ark to shelter them. Beyond both of these is a politic of the soul, in which just and patient people inhabit systems which know their limits, and live as gracious entities within those limits.

#4 God is For the World

This wild world is one which God has created, and created as something other than God. And it is a world which God loves, in a love which desires that creation grow into maturity and fullness, rich in its love for one another and in its communion with God. God is, in other words, not against that which God has made.

Eugene Rogers, in his brilliant After the Spirit, proposes the following. We know of God’s great patience with creation from Paul’s letter to the Romans, that “God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement, through the shedding of his blood—to be received by faith. He did this to demonstrate his righteousness, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished”. This patience with the world, that “our Lord’s patience means salvation⁵”, goes hand in hand with knowing that “all things hang together in Christ”, that this patience of God is God’s eternal character which draws out of us that which is killing us.

It is this patience of God which we see in Christ, in Christ’s unwillingness to resort to calling in armies of angels to instantiate the kingdom of God, to refuse to be raised up on top the temple by the Temper, to suffer death and failure of the Messianic mission in favor of being resurrected from the dead. For in that resurrection, an opening is created in which all humanity can come: a sharing of our collective lives with God. It is through this patience that the Gentiles will, in time, enter in. It is through this patience that the preacher in Hebrews can proclaim that “All these, though commended through their faith, did not receive what was promised, since God had provided something better for us, that apart from us they should not be made perfect⁶”.

This patience of God, through which the resurrection of the dead happens, is the possibility of a renewed common life, a renewed politic. It is because God is for us, not against us. This unruly world, the one which God holds, is one which God asks us to be patient with, for we are part of that world. It is that patience with us that God exhibits, and asks of us for each other.

#5 Our Lives Are For God Through the World

If God is not the world, and yet remains patient with the world, and if God opens up our lives together toward God in Christ’s resurrection, then a new vision for our politics emerges: our lives with God, and our lives with one another are inextricably related. There is a roominess in our deliberation, and there is a summons to action, but the aim for these things is not for their own sake. Rather, our lives and all their actions are made possible by God: in the creation God gives, the patience God exercises, the opening God provides for eternal corporate life.

Our collective life—our politics—thus must be a politics of offering, of returning back that which God has given. It means respecting the world as given to us and not a wasteland to be endured or managed. It means resonating with our world and not controlling it in hard power, conforming it to our eternal will. It means patience with one another which mirrors God’s own patience. It means, in other words, being conformed to the image of Christ in character and deed.

This is, and is not, a politic of the common good. For the common good is common in the sense that it is given by God to the just and unjust, to creation as a bonum which depends on God. But it is not common, in that any politic requires action, and in the actions of any polity, our naming of God (or lack thereof) will create a division within this common bonum. These divisions are not as clean as “church and world”, but run through every fissure. Here again, patience enters in: not patience with evil, but patience with the ones who do it—both in judgment of ourselves and with others. It is not a refraining from naming evil as such, or refraining from naming denials of the world as God’s, but a refraining from refusing the world as God’s world with which He has patience.

It is that refusal that enables our patience with ourselves, with others, and ultimately, with God. For we are impatient, and wish to build a stable world, one with which we do not need to resonate, but one which remains still. But to long for a stilled world is to long for a dead world, one other than the one God makes alive and fecund. God’s patience has our penitence, our reunion, in view. And this takes a while. To lose this nexus—of penitence, patience, and refusal—is to break the bond which we have with one another, and in doing so, to push ourselves away from the God who makes our common life possible. To embrace it is to enter into a political life tied up with worship, for it is a political life tied into the desire for the redemption of our bodies in the resurrection of the dead.

1. This is ground zero for a doctrine of God: we know that God is, and Scripture and theological tradition instruct us in the nature and attributes of this God. But this is different than being able to say what it means for God to be God, for only God knows this. God is other than everything else.

2. Whether cows and dogs think in such parameters, we do not know. For who knows what a dog thinks or doesn’t? I have, in print, gestured to the possibility of a dog’s moral life, but only as a speculative experiment. But I hope I’m right.

3. It was quite trendy for about twenty years to think of God as a kind of “divine dance”, which gave a model of human society. Conveniently, God turned out to be a democracy just like us! But even the most vigorous proponents of this position have walked back this notion. Thanks be to Karen Kilby’s article.

4. This is also an important point of Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation: that asynchronous activities stunt an important development of developing how to be in sync with others, similar to what Rosa names as “resonance” on a societal scale.

5. 2 Peter 3:15

6. Hebrews 11:39-40