Christ and politics in paradox : Martin Luther and Charles Colson

For centuries faithful Christians have struggled in a variety of historical contexts to forge a viable political ethic. In the process, many perceptive believers have sensed an inherent tension between biblical demands and the realities of the political order. How, for example, do the teachings of Jesus about humility, servanthood, and discipleship relate to the arena of government and politics? What relevance does the gospel hold for those engaged in quests for worldly power and influence? Or, to pose the question in a broader, Augustinian framework, what does the civitas Dei have to do with the civitas terrena? In his 1949 lectures at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, Yale theologian H. Richard Niebuhr set forth five historical models that Christians have exemplified in dealing with the problem of Christ and Culture ( Christ against culture, Christ of culture, Christ above culture, Christ and culture in paradox, and “Christ the transformer of culture”).l As Gary Scott Smith has shown, all these responses to culture have implications for Christian political attitudes and behavior.2 In fact, politics can be substituted for culture in each of Niebuhr\u27s analytical categories without doing violence to the shape and direction of his thought. Thus Niebuhr offers the contemporary observer some useful tools for examining the relationship between Christian faith and the world of politics. In light of controversial Christian involvement in the ideological politics of both the right and the left over the last two decades,3 Niebuhr\u27s model of Christ and culture in paradox may well prove to be the most instructive and intriguing for those attempting to place this political activity in historical and theological perspective. Niebuhr summarized the paradoxical character of this approach by noting its refusal to accommodate the claims of Christ to those of secular society as well as its conviction that obedience to God requires obedience to the institutions of society and loyalty to its members as well as obedience to a Christ who sits in judgment on that society. Hence man is seen as subject to two moralities, and as a citizen of two worlds that are not only discontinuous with each other but largely opposed. In the polarity and tension of Christ and culture life must be lived precariously and sinfully in the hope of a justification which lies beyond history. For lack of a better word, Niebuhr labeled this view dualist and suggested that Martin Luther was probably its “greatest representative.”