At the end of April, Rt. Rev. Paul Hannington Suubi’s Pastoral letter to all Archdeacons and parish priests in East Busoga diocese circulated across social media.
In the letter, the Rt Rev. banned partisan politics in church and all other church related programs. Reason: Partisan politics is divisive, yet Christians come to church to worship God and be spiritually ministered to.
The letter does not only in fringe on the people’s right to political participation, it also disingenuous especially when the church continues to be an active actor in the politics of clientelism, receiving gifts in form of vehicles from government, organizing development harambees targeting politicians’ wallets. There’s no line in the letter stopping priests from doing such. The letter only seeks to remove the microphone from the politician.
But what has been the history of the relationship between Church and politics? What was the hope of the early church? In this four-part series, I, in the hope that it gives you, dear reader, a background on relationship between church and politics, reproduce select abridged arguments of Prof. Thomas C. Hall, a professor of Christian Ethics in Union Seminary in the thesis The Biblical World, under the headline Christianity and Politics.
Part One
The Radicalism of Jesus Professor Thomas writes: Christians are interested in politics as never before. The desire for human welfare on its moral as well as its economic side is the new factor which is everywhere transforming political life. In the very nature of the case the church is deeply concerned in this changing order. But what should be its relations with politics? How far may church and state mutually affect each other?
Politics was not in the foreground of early Christian thought. The class among whose members Christianity was making headway was politically and socially too weak, too unorganized, and obscure to take any very vigorous interest in statecraft. Moreover, the “age” was so soon to pass away, and the present duty of individual preparation for the coming “age” so pressing, that proclamation of the advancing reign of God and personal purification in anticipation of the coming judgment swallowed up all else. Nevertheless, this very proclamation was politically of profound importance, and in fact was both radical and revolutionary.
Christianity was no message of social patchwork, no program of gentle social amelioration by gradual reform. It doomed the present age, with its kings and princes, its rich men and rulers, its pride and despotism, to eternal destruction. Jesus felt there could be no compromise. Men could not serve God and Mammon (Matt. 6:24).
Faith in this kingdom meant for Jesus and his earliest followers the abandonment of all the values that were linked with the ambitions of the ordinary life (Luke I4:33; Matt. Io:34-39). The world as Jesus knew it was condemned (Matt. 24:3-5; Mark I3:5-37).
Not even the tremendous indictment by the Apocalypse of John of Rome and Caesarism exceeds the revolutionary fury that echoes in the words ascribed to Jesus by both Mark and Matthew and abundantly emphasized by Luke. Nothing would survive that judgment, neither the throne of the Caesars nor yet the Temple of Jerusalem (cf. also John 4: 21).
Even the famous answer so often misinterpreted, “Render to Caesar the things that be Caesar’s, and to God the things that be God’s,” was really revolutionary. It put God and Caesar, where Jesus really considered them, at the two poles. This age was Caesar’s, the judgment and coming age was God’s. Men had to live their lives, it was true, in this age, but they were to live them as in stern quest for the new age and were to go forth unhampered by any of the old age’s ambitions. God and his justice were alone worthwhile, and he who found these would have all the other values of life added unto him (Matt. 6:33).
It was Jesus who exclaimed, “Let the dead bury their dead, go thou and proclaim the kingdom.” God’s reign and Caesarism had for Jesus nothing in common. There was no use drawing a sword to destroy individuals, the messengers of Caesar, they who lived by the sword died by the sword, but in due time God must judge and reign.
This zeal for God and his righteousness was to grow and spread until all who were children of God had heard the message and then the kingdom would come as a thief in the night and a new earth and an age of purity and peace would dawn.
The misnamed “Sermon on the Mount” is a later compilation of the constitution and morals of that new age drawn from several discourses of Jesus given at different periods of his ministry.’ The whole vision is sweeping, thoroughgoing, and revolutionary. It fired a few followers with a deathless hope, it filled the mass of the power-possessing class with equally deathless hate. The only value of life, the only meaning of eternity was the fuller revelation of God’s will.
The present age was an age dominated by its own prince, and he had nothing in common with Jesus (John I4:30; I6:II). Jesus had come not to share his throne (Matt. 4:8-Io) or dispute his supremacy in the present age, but to sweep the age away and establish the Father’s reign. The ethics of Jesus centers about the personal purification of life in preparation for the coming king-dom. His theology is dominated by his revelation of the actual character of the Father whom he worshiped, and his religion was the love and hope and joy evoked by that Father of mercies, who summoned all his wandering children to penitence and trust.
