Jesus’ Fourth Way: On the Christian Understanding of the Faith in Politics and Public Life

Jesus’ Fourth Way:  On the Christian Understanding of  the Faith in Politics and Public Life

Many of us are familiar with Walter Wink’s terminology of Jesus’ “Third Way.”  Wink came up with that phrase to describe Jesus approach to the use of violence.  He means that Jesus does not permit the use of violence but neither is he passive.  Rather, he advocated a third way, a way of active, assertive, creative, non-violent resistance to evil.  Wink is right about that, and by using the phrase “Jesus’ Fourth Way” I in no way mean to disagree with Wink’s presentation of Jesus’ “Third Way” of relating to questions of violence.  Rather, I heard something on the radio recently that made me think that we need to develop a concept of Jesus’ “Fourth Way” to describe Jesus’ position on the relationship of faith to politics and public life.  I came up with this notion when, in the space of not more than ten minutes, I heard in a broadcast on the progressive talk radio station in Seattle descriptions of three possible approaches to the question of the relationship of faith to politics and public life all of which I am convinced are wrong and none of which, I am convinced, reflect Jesus’ position on the subject. No one on that broadcast suggested a fourth way, what I am here calling the Fourth Way of Jesus.

Three False Ways

To understand Jesus’ Fourth Way we need to start with an understanding of the three ways I heard described on the radio that I am convinced do not represent Jesus’ position on our current subject.  The first of them doesn’t even pretend to reflect Jesus’ position on the matter.  It is the way of scientism, the way of philosophical materialism and atheism.  The host of the radio show I heard, David Bender, a progressive talking head type, advocates this position.  He pointed to a real phenomenon, the attack on science by the Christian ultra-right, and he insisted that public policy must be based on sound science.  He’s right about that of course, and I wouldn’t have had a problem with what he said if he had stopped there.  He didn’t.  He went on to recommend to everyone in America a book by Sam Harris titled Letter to a Christian Nation.  Sam Harris is one of the so-called “new atheists” who vociferously condemns all religion because the only religion he knows is bad religion.  Like others of his ilk--Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchins, and others—he builds up a straw man, a caricature of  faith that the religious right of all traditions makes it all too easy for him to do, then knocks it down with simplistic contentions that all religious faith is as absurd as the straw man that he has created.  For this first way of approaching the question of the role of religion in politics and public life religion must have no role whatsoever because the only contribution religion can make to the public dialogue is obscurantist and destructive.

The second way of approaching the question of faith and politics has much the same result as the first but gets there by an entirely different route.  This second way was expressed by a man who called in to the radio program I was listening to.  He identified himself as a “progressive Christian.”  He then proclaimed that we must keep politics out of religion because when we mix politics with religion we “water down” the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  I wondered if he has ever read the Gospels, but more about that below.  This notion that we must not mix faith and politics is something that we church professionals in the so-called mainline traditions hear all the time, or at least we did until fairly recently.  It is an expression of the corruption of Christianity that began with the Constantinian compromise in the fourth century CE.  When Christianity became the official faith of the Roman Empire it warped the Gospel of Jesus Christ into something that wasn’t about this world but only about life in an imagined next world.  Christianity came to be about saving souls for heaven not saving lives here on earth.  That’s where this notion that we must not mix faith and politics comes from.  It has the effect not only of removing politics from the faith, it removes the faith from politics.  Faith and politics become separate realms with no points of intersection.  Faith becomes mute on issues of public discussion, a result of which David Bender and Sam Harris would heartily approve.

The third way, the third approach to the relationship between religion on the one hand and questions of politics and public life on the other, has the virtue of recognizing that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is inherently political; but it totally misunderstands what the politics of the Gospel of Jesus Christ are.  This is the approach of the religious right and of the current crop of Republican presidential candidates, especially Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich, who pander to the religious right.  They insist on faith being involved in politics.  They insist that churches and people of faith be heard in the public arena.  Fair enough.  They’re right about that, but they’re wrong about nearly everything else.  They reduce Christianity to a very narrow, archaic, and oppressive set of rules mostly about sexual behavior.  To hear Santorum talk you’d think that Jesus spent all his time condemning abortion and gay people.  Never mind that Jesus is not reported in the Gospels to have said a single word on either subject.  The reactionary Christianity of these candidates equates Christianity with allegiance to and support for the American empire, never mind that when the first followers of Jesus said “Jesus Christ is Lord” they meant “and Caesar isn’t.”  The Christian right and its political toadies like Santorum and Gingrich discredit the role of Christianity in politics by using the faith to advocate destructive policies on issues about which Jesus said nothing and ignoring everything Jesus did say about justice and peace.

The Fourth Way of Jesus

Which brings us to Jesus’ Fourth Way.  Jesus’ Fourth Way rejects the secularism and the atheism of the first way of course.  Jesus’ Fourth Way is solidly grounded in his faith in God and in his discernment, which Christians take, or at least should take, as valid for all of his followers, of God’s will for God’s people.  John’s Gospel reports Jesus as saying “my kingdom is not from this world.”  John 18:36 NRSV  He meant that the Kingdom of God that he came to proclaim and to institute arises not from this world but from God.  It is founded upon God.  It comes from God and is incomprehensible without God.  Jesus’ Fourth Way is a way of faith in the spiritual dimension of reality, of faith in God.

Jesus’ fourth way also rejects the notion that faith has no place in politics or in the discussion of matters of public import that is common to the first and second ways discussed above.  The Gospel of Jesus Christ is political to its core.  To understand how and why the Gospel of Jesus Christ is political we have first to understand what political means.  Political is not necessarily the same thing as partisan.  Political refers to the way human beings order their life together in communities, in societies, in villages, towns, cities, and nations.  A Gospel that was not political would be a Gospel that didn’t care about how we humans order our life together, and that would hardly be a Gospel at all. 

The Gospel of Jesus Christ is political.  How can a Gospel that has as its central image the Kingdom of God not be political?  It can't. It is political.  Radically political.  We have already noted that when Jesus’ earliest followers said “Jesus Christ is Lord” they meant “and Caesar is not.”  “Lord” was a political term in the ancient world.  It meant the person to whom one owed allegiance, the person from whom one took direction, the person one pledged to obey and to follow.  “Lord” was title that the Roman emperors claimed.  It was therefore a political title.  The first Christians gave that title to Jesus, and when they did they were making a radically political statement.

Nearly everything Jesus said and did had political overtones.  We often miss those overtones because we are not sufficiently familiar with the social and political context of the Gospels.  When, for example, we read of an exorcism at Mark 5:1-13 in which Jesus asks an unclean spirit that is possessing and tormenting a poor soul what its name is and the spirit responds “Our name is legion, for we are many,” Jesus exorcises the spirits, lets them inhabit some nearby pigs, and the pigs then run into the sea and drown we miss the obvious political meaning of the story because we forget that in Jesus’ world a “legion” was a large unit of the Roman army.  We don’t hear the story saying that God wants to free Israel from the Romans the way Jesus freed this possessed man of his demon, but that is what it says.  We don’t hear the story saying what all of Jesus’ first audience would have heard the story saying.  We don’t hear it as political, but it is political at its core.  

All sorts of other things that Jesus said and did were political too.  He treated women as people of worth and dignity.  Doing that was radically counter-cultural in his world, and anything that is counter-cultural is political because it criticizes and upends the social and political norms of a society.  Jesus’ driving the money changers and the sellers of sacrificial animals out of the temple was political, for it was a symbolic overthrowing of the power of the Jewish religious leaders who collaborated with the Romans and who oppressed the people with their temple tax and the other burdensome requirements that they laid upon the people.  Jesus said “blessed are the peacemakers,” which is a thoroughly political statement that condemns the war makers who ran the world in his time and who run it in ours.  Jesus said “blessed are you who are poor,” which is a radically political statement because it elevates the people upon whose subservience and poverty the privilege and the wealth of the elite rested.  Jesus said “blessed are the meek,” which is a radically political statement because it condemns the proud and the powerful whom the world honored in his day and honors in ours.  The examples could go on and on. 

The Gospel of Jesus Christ is political.  Jesus said nothing at all about homosexuality or about abortion, but he said a great deal about justice.  Jesus knew and proclaimed a God whose primary characteristic is love, with love (agape) understood not as a sentimental emotion but as a giving of the self for the sake of the other.  Justice is the social aspect of love.  Love that does not go out from itself and become a matter of justice is a stunted and incomplete kind of love.  The love Jesus taught and lived was anything but stunted and incomplete.  It included justice, and justice is a radically political concept.  The love that Jesus proclaimed is therefore necessarily and unavoidably political. 

So those Christians who say they want to separate politics from faith misunderstand the Christian faith.  The Christian faith is never only political of course.  It is also always personal, but a Christianity that shuns politics is a stunted and incomplete Christianity.  It isn’t fully Christian because the Gospel of Jesus Christ is political. 

Christianity is necessarily political because the Gospel of Jesus Christ is political, but that doesn’t mean of course that any politics professed by one who claims to be Christian are truly Christian politics.  Truly Christian politics are politics that reflect the values and the teachings of Jesus Christ.  That means that truly Christian politics reject violence as a tool of public policy because Jesus rejected violence in all aspects of life.  Truly Christian politics are politics that call a society as a society and not merely as individuals to care for the poor, the vulnerable, and the marginalized.  Truly Christian politics are politics of justice that extend beyond mere charity (as important as charity is in an unjust world) and seek so to structure society in a way that all are cared for, all have enough.  Truly Christian politics are not the politics of radical individualism but of social conscience.  Truly Christian politics have, in a great phrase from the Catholic social teaching, a preferential option for the poor.  Truly Christian politics value every individual even as they recognize that none of us lives in total isolation, none of us has acquired whatever we have acquired entirely alone, and that from those to whom much is given much is required.  Truly Christian politics are the politics not merely of justice as due process but of distributive justice, justice that sees that all have enough because none have too much at the expense of those who have less.

That is Jesus’ Fourth Way.  It is the way of faith.  That faith is political.  Those politics are about peace and justice, indeed about peace through justice.  Jesus’ Fourth Way is the way of justice and peace grounded in faith.  It rejects atheism and secularism.  It rejects an apolitical distortion of the Gospel.  It works for, indeed it demands, peace and justice for all people.  That is Jesus’ Fourth Way.  It must be the way of the Christian too.

Jesus’ Fourth Way and American Politics

It must be made perfectly clear that no political party in the United States today truly advocates Jesus’ Fourth Way.  No political party in the United States today, at least none of any prominence or any possibility of influencing public policy, truly reflects Jesus’ Fourth Way.  We have only two really significant political parties in this country, and my purpose here is definitely not to advocate one of them over the other.  Neither of them so reflects Jesus’ Fourth Way that I can endorse either of them without reservation.  Perhaps most significantly from the perspective of Jesus’ Fourth Way, both of them advocate and readily resort to the use of violence as a tool of American public policy, both at home and abroad.  Neither of them advocates the creation of a truly adequate social safety net for the poor and the vulnerable supported by a fair system of taxation that recognizes that those who have benefited most from the structures of our society, our political system, and our economy must pay the most back to their country for the building of systems of care and justice. 

There are significant differences between our two major political parties.  I personally believe that one of them is worse than the other, and you can probably guess which one I think that is.  Yet that isn’t really the point here.  The point is that so few in our country seem really to understand the appropriate relationship between faith and politics, and so few seem to understand the politics of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  Most Americans who advocate for peace and justice aren’t Christians.  Most vocal, self-proclaimed politically active Christians focus primarily upon issues related to sexual morality about which Jesus said nothing and support a political party and candidates whose policies benefit only the wealthy, which is a profoundly un-Christian kind of politics.  We desperately need to reclaim Jesus’ Fourth Way, and we need to do it now.