Top Ten Quotes on Church and Society

The Church

“The church is herself a society.  Her very existence, the fraternal relations of her members, their way of dealing with their differences and their needs are, or rather should be, a demonstration of what love means in social relations.  This demonstration cannot be imposed directly into non-Christian society, for in the church it functions only on the basis of repentance and faith; yet by analogy certain of its aspects may be instructive as stimuli to the conscience of society.  For the Church and the reign of Christ will one day be englobed in the same kingdom.  That kingdom will mean the victory of the church and the overcoming of the world; as anticipation of that consummation it is possible for the potentially victorious order to testify to the potentially vanquished order concerning the absolute norm which is valid for both and in contradiction to which the world will never succeed in building even a stable temporal order.” – John Howard Yoder^[1]The Christian Witness to the State (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1998), page 17.

“The church is Christ’s true body insofar as it is a discipline, that is, a way of inscribing bodies into certain practices.  It is not relegated to some ghostly interior realm of the soul as separable from bodily practices — gathering, feeding, judging, reconciling — which modernity ascribes to the realm of “politics” and the “temporal.”  Christ’s [true body] is not simply another state however, because its discipline is a preparation not for surveillance and dominance over a particular earthly territory but for martyrdom.  The true body of Christ is wounded, marked by the cross.  As the body of Christ, the church participates in the sacrifice of Christ, his bloody confrontation with the powers of this world.  The church’s discipline then is only the discipline of martyrdom, for Christ’s body is only itself in its self-emptying.  The church does not exist for its own sake; it is not predicated on its own perpetuation, as is the state.  Its discipline is a constant dying to itself for the sake of the other.” – William Cavanaugh^[2]Torture and Eucharist:Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), page 271.

Christianity and Politics

“The practical problem of Christian politics is not drawing up schemes for a Christian society, but that of living as innocently as we can with unbelieving rulers who will never be perfectly wise and good and who will sometimes be very wicked and very foolish.” – C.S. Lewis^[3]God in the Dock (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014), page 325.

“As Christians, our role in society is not to wring our hands at the corruption of power or simply to pick a candidate that supports one or another supposedly Christian policy.  The Christian role, as part of naming the name of the crucified and risen Jesus on territory presently occupied by idols, is to speak truth to power and especially to speak up for those with no power at all. . . Sometimes it gets the church into trouble.  “Keep out of things you don’t understand!” we are told.  “Teach people to pray and don’t meddle in public affairs!”  But followers of Jesus have no choice.  A central part of our vocation is, prayerfully and thoughtfully, to remind people with power, both official (government ministers) and unofficial (backstreet bullies), that there is a different way to be human.  A true way.  The Jesus way.  This doesn’t mean “electing into office someone who shares our particular agenda”; that might or might not be appropriate.  It means being prepared, whoever the current officials are, to do what Jesus did with Pontius Pilate: confront them with a different vision of kingdom, truth, and power.” – N.T. Wright^[4]The Day the Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus’s Crucifixion (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2016), pages 400-401.

“The good that society has learned may be forgotten in a moment.  Those who wished to persuade Christendom in the eighteenth century to accept the commercial necessity of slavery as part of “the great colonial system” were unpicking a millennium of Christian moral teaching, though they thought of themselves as having an understanding of the economic basis of international power that put them ahead of their times.  Successful for a while, they very well could have been successful permanently. . . In our lifetimes we have seen similar readiness to accommodate the Christian conscience to the conditions of late modernity.  Christians must participate actively in their communities, but they must do so with their eyes open to the kind of community that is emerging.  Witness is not simply a matter of being good team players; it means questioning the compromises society wants to make, incurring the disapproval of socially active people.  The prophet complained of those who said “‘Peace, peace’ when there is no peace” (Jer. 6:14).  To be messengers of peace in a world of strife, we must sometimes be messengers of strife in a world of false peace.” – Oliver O’Donovan^[5]Entering into Rest (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2017), page 101.

“Today, [nuclear weapons are] legal; capital punishment is legal; abortion is legal. . . The crucifixion of Jesus was also legal.  But Jesus’ resurrection was illegal — he went past the Roman soldiers guarding his tomb and went out to encourage his followers to continue the work of love and resistance.  Jesus acted illegally to transform evil into goodness and continued that work by rising from the dead, an illegal act.  To be more faithful today, we need to get on the side of the troublemaking, illegal Jesus.  We need to become  troublemakers.  The risen Christ invites us to the troublesome, uncomfortable work that publicly challenges the ruling authorities that get away with murder.  A measure of discipleship, it has been said, is the amount of trouble that we are in, the persecution that we face from the ruling authorities of society.  As true disciples of the unarmed, illegal Christ, we will be in trouble with the powers and principalities of the world.” – John Dear^[6]Our God is Nonviolent: Witnesses in the Struggle for Peace and Justice (New York: Pilgrim Press, 1990), page 129.

The World’s Criticism

“In the word it speaks to the church, in its judgments and criticisms, the world often speaks at two levels.  In explicit content, and according to its own express intention, what it says is of little worth and simply expresses secular mediocrity. . . But behind this word, even though the world is unaware of it, there is hidden a profound truth, which faith can apprehend because it descries God’s intention. . . It is at this level and within these limits that the church should be infinitely attentive to the criticisms and attacks of unbelievers or enemies.  It should not accept their advice or motivation but should look behind this to the judgment which God pronounces on it, and which may be the very opposite of what the world has in view.  For the church does not have to follow the logic of the world’s political lesson.  It must follow God’s logic.” – Jacques Ellul^[7]The Politics of God and the Politics of Man, translated by Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1972), page 148.

Christianity and Modernity

“We are creatures destined to die.  We fear ourselves and one another, sensing that we are more than willing to sacrifice the lives of others to sustain our fantasy that we can get out of life alive.  The widespread confidence that medicine will someday free us from the necessity of death exemplifies what I mean by “fantasy.”  The attempt to create a medicine aimed to get us out of life alive, moreover, depends on the creation of wealth as an end in itself.  A people constituted by such wealth are by definition unable to learn to use the word “God,” because wealth cannot but make us dull. . . A social order bent on producing wealth as an end in itself cannot avoid producing people whose souls are superficial and whose daily lives are captured by sentimentalities.  They ask questions like “Why does a good god allow bad things to happen to good people?”  Such a people cannot imagine what kind of people would write and sing the Psalms.” – Stanley Hauerwas^[8]Working with Words: On Learning to Speak Christian (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2011), page xiii.

“A new and intolerant utopianism seeks to drive the remaining traces of Christianity from the laws and constitutions of Europe and North America.  This time, it does so mainly in the cause of personal liberation, born in the 1960s cultural revolution, and now inflamed into special rage by any suggestion that the sexual urge should be restrained by moral limits or that it should have any necessary connection with procreation.  This utopianism relies for human goodness on doctrines of human rights derived from human desires and — like all such codes — full of conflicts between the differing rights of different groups.  These must then be policed by an ever more powerful state.  A new elite, wealthy and comfortable beyond the fantasies of any previous generation, abandons penal codes (especially against narcotics) and abolishes marital fidelity so as to license its own comfortable, padded indulgence, and it therefore permits the same freedoms to the poor, who suffer fare more from this dangerous liberty than do the rich.  Inevitably, it is the Christian churches who are the last strongholds of resistance to this change.  Yet they are historically weak, themselves infiltrated by secular liberalism, full of uncertainty and diffidence. . . The Rage against God is loose and is preparing to strip the remaining altars when it is strong enough.” – Peter Hitchens^[9]The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2010), pages 213-214.

“What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us.  And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope.  This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time.  And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament.  We are waiting not for Godot, but for another – doubtless very different – St. Benedict.” – Alasdair MacIntyre^[10]After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, third edition (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), page 263.