THE RIGHT BOOKS

Although it is true, as Paul Marshall reminds us, that “most of the deeper political thinking of the West, for the last one and a half millennia, has been by Christians seeking to be faithful to their politics,” it is true also that, contemporarily, when Christians talk about politics as Christians, their remarks, more often than not, reveal an embarrassing naïveté that appears to have come to them from Samantha Smith rather than Augustine or Thomas Aquinas. According to Marshall, in his book Thine Is the Kingdom: A Biblical Perspective on the Nature of Government and Politics Today (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 255 Jefferson Avenue, S.E., Grand Rapids, Mich. 49503; $7.95 paper), the reason for this unhappy state of affairs is that too many Christians have neglected the duty to think about politics as deeply as they feel about politics, and have involved themselves in politics without pressing themselves to discover either the nature or the purpose of political involvement. They have not troubled to know, “in a Biblical way, something about what the state is supposed to do; what the nature and the limits of political authority and power are; what the purpose of rulers, ‘God’s servants,’ is; what the function of law is. We need not just a Christian understanding of life, nor just an understanding for Christian social action. We need a Biblically inspired understanding of politics.”

There is no excuse, Marshall argues, for Christians, in their discussions of political matters, to content themselves with what one critic has called “pious generalities with which it would be difficult for anyone to disagree, or over-specific prescriptions which owe more to the author’s political ideology than to his Christian faith.” “The content of Biblical faith,” he insists, is not just some moral norms to apply to our situation, it is a way of seeing and understanding that situation itself. For example, we should not take certain Christian “values,” such as love or justice, and then try to work them out in international relations via either a Marxist analysis of world trade, or a systems theory of international interaction, or a neoconservative or Keynesian theory of political economy, or a behavioralist or functionalist theory of the state. Rather we must seek, as much as we can, to ensure that even the very categories with which we analyze and interpret our situation are shaped by our Biblical faith. If we fail to do this then we will find that our attempted Christian approach to the world will be shaped more by the analysis we pick up than it will be by our faith itself. This can be illustrated by the example of Liberation Theology.

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Although it is true, as Paul Marshall reminds us, that “most of the deeper political thinking of the West, for the last one and a half millennia, has been by Christians seeking to be faithful to their politics,” it is true also that, contemporarily, when Christians talk about politics as Christians, their remarks, more often than not, reveal an embarrassing naïveté that appears to have come to them from Samantha Smith rather than Augustine or Thomas Aquinas. According to Marshall, in his book Thine Is the Kingdom: A Biblical Perspective on the Nature of Government and Politics Today (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 255 Jefferson Avenue, S.E., Grand Rapids, Mich. 49503; $7.95 paper), the reason for this unhappy state of affairs is that too many Christians have neglected the duty to think about politics as deeply as they feel about politics, and have involved themselves in politics without pressing themselves to discover either the nature or the purpose of political involvement. They have not troubled to know, “in a Biblical way, something about what the state is supposed to do; what the nature and the limits of political authority and power are; what the purpose of rulers, ‘God’s servants,’ is; what the function of law is. We need not just a Christian understanding of life, nor just an understanding for Christian social action. We need a Biblically inspired understanding of politics.”

There is no excuse, Marshall argues, for Christians, in their discussions of political matters, to content themselves with what one critic has called “pious generalities with which it would be difficult for anyone to disagree, or over-specific prescriptions which owe more to the author’s political ideology than to his Christian faith.” “The content of Biblical faith,” he insists, is not just some moral norms to apply to our situation, it is a way of seeing and understanding that situation itself. For example, we should not take certain Christian “values,” such as love or justice, and then try to work them out in international relations via either a Marxist analysis of world trade, or a systems theory of international interaction, or a neoconservative or Keynesian theory of political economy, or a behavioralist or functionalist theory of the state. Rather we must seek, as much as we can, to ensure that even the very categories with which we analyze and interpret our situation are shaped by our Biblical faith. If we fail to do this then we will find that our attempted Christian approach to the world will be shaped more by the analysis we pick up than it will be by our faith itself. This can be illustrated by the example of Liberation Theology.