The end of the 2024 presidential election cycle was bound to be a disappointment, in that neither virtue, nor insight, nor coherence would typify either of the two major parties’ candidates. Both of their outlooks and platforms are detrimental to life and holiness, but many voters can only recognize this about their opponent and not their champion.
Our common life is increasingly less common, riven by Manichean polarities that grow further apart and more extreme. The messianic delusions foisted on the two candidates have deepened this rift with their emptiness. They are only counterfeit hopes, which reflect the City of Man but pose as the City of God. We may tire and even despair of electoral politics, but Christian mission renders politics of some sort necessary at all times, regardless of who is president or what crisis is brewing. But politics of what sort?
Two books address Christian faith’s political import. The first, Paul on Identity: Theology as Politics (Fortress Press, 2021), draws Christ through the eye of the needle of contemporary politics. In it, Troels Engberg-Pedersen draws on Paul’s thought for guidance. Engberg-Pedersen considers Paul paradigmatic of a duality in which people maintain certain cultural distinctions within a more encompassing self-understanding that impels their life and their choices (22). He believes this duality can be constructively applied to the subjects of liberal democracy such that their civic belonging can be maintained without surrendering more primary identity markers.
Engberg-Pedersen thus adapts the “double model” he developed in his earlier studies of Paul and the ancient Stoics. Because “[o]nly one thing is necessary for salvation,” he writes, “all other things are ‘indifferent’ for salvation.” Given this, the indifferent things that characterize us can be maintained without compromising what is essential: Christian faith. As with the Stoics, for whom some things were preferable “if that is allowed for by the only thing that genuinely matters” (84), so it is with national, civic belonging and the markers of difference with which we identify ourselves.
A problem immediately presents itself, however, when he says that Paul’s thought “contains ideas that—quite independently of their specifically Christian framework—offer solutions to problems with which we are ourselves also confronted in our current situation” (1). This assumption that content can be dissected from its source and form diminishes Paul’s witness to Christ. Announcing how he will summarize Paul’s agenda before asking if there are any ideas in Paul that we may use, he writes that “[o]ne has to go through so much that is fascinating in itself but also basically historical before one can see its high relevance to us now” (27). The apostle’s thought is more a matter of history—this was said by someone at some time—than it is of truth.
It is therefore unsurprising, unfortunately, that Engberg-Pedersen frequently announces that we can no longer believe things that Paul believed, or that we cannot immediately make Paul’s theology or ethics our own. But why? He rarely attempts to explain why this is; more frequently he offers no basis for this assertion, leaving readers to fill it in for themselves. I can only infer that Engberg-Pedersen believes the passage into modernity is what sets this limit upon plausibility, but he does not explicitly say this is so. And when this is done, Engberg-Pedersen’s earlier assertion that Paul’s theology and ethics are interwoven (9) is nullified, cleaving apart Paul’s truth claims and their ethical consequences.
Part of the problem is that “identity” is treated as a sufficient concept for describing different types of belonging, as when he typifies conflicts that Paul had to address as “all about identity” (24). “Identity” is less defined than assumed and overwhelmingly treated as self-selected rather than as conferred or as fractured. There are many notions of identity, some of which are mutually exclusive or incoherent. To equate politics and identity, then, as the title does, confuses an already tortured subject and selectively funnels from political philosophical reflection.
At its heart, Engberg-Pedersen’s book is an apology for liberal democracy. But the problem of the first page is the problem of this apology, as Paul’s witness to the gospel is reduced to its political-philosophical utility. Is it not subordinating if we take Paul’s missionary strategy and utilize it as a means to an end?
Paul, I am confident, would take issue with this. Jesus Christ transcends all prior allegiances to tribe or nation or conclave, breaking the spell they weave of ultimacy. But he also orders these patterns and practices of belonging within his kingdom and under his proper place as the foremost (Col. 1:18). To sever Paul’s methods of community formation from their place in service to Christ to serve another program altogether negates their purpose.
Ultimately the question is, What does it matter if you can imagine an analogy between identification with Christ and identification with the American experiment when the things being compared are overwhelmingly dissimilar? Perhaps one can serve both God and liberal democracy, but one cannot treat them as equal in sovereignty or in worthiness. Engberg-Pedersen’s book shows that the impulse to subsume the substance of faith within political ideology is one to which liberals are just as prone as are conservatives.
Engberg-Pedersen has repeatedly contrasted his reading of Paul with Ernst Käsemann’s, largely positioning himself against the apocalyptic interpretation of Paul. How fitting, then, that a translated work of Käsemann’s should appear, drawing politics through the eye of Christ’s needle. If Engberg-Pedersen shaved off much that was distinctively Christ-shaped and Christ-derived, Käsemann, in Church Conflicts: The Cross, Apocalyptic, and Political Resistance (Baker Academic, 2021), conversely tries to shed all that does not submit itself to the Crucified Nazarene (Käsemann’s favored phrase).
Käsemann, a veteran of the Confessing Church’s struggle against the Nazi regime, does not place his hope in a party. Instead he urges disciples toward a prefigurative politics that enacts Christ’s rule on Earth. “Only where Christ is, is there church,” Käsemann writes, recalling how not every assembly that claims the name church serves this lord: “[t]here are always churches of the antichrist that intend to expropriate the glory of the Nazarene” (3).
He warns that whoever “does not take seriously and transfer to the present what is told in the Bible of the night of demonic powers” and does not see baptism and discipleship as deliverance from their dominion and into Christ’s “will be able to do justice neither to antiquity nor to our own life situations” (27). Modern plausibility structures discount such actors and conditions and breed a severe individualism that loses touch with creaturely reality. This hinders the freedom announced in the New Testament, which “has a political and, precisely due to its relation to principalities and powers, a cosmic dimension” (32).
These dimensions fill out what emancipation truly means. Emancipation has become a slogan signifying the arbitrary will to do all one desires, promis[ing] human beings the right and power to realize themselves and therein find the meaning of life” (58), but the truth is that “[i]ndividual liberation is a reflection and promise of the worldwide lordship of God broken in upon the earth” (32). Freedom is more than the availability of options: its truest meaning is “that Christ has drawn us into his victory over all forces and thereby given us a share in his rule (and, naturally, in his service)” (59-60).
Käsemann’s warnings about unchecked technological development, racism, and ecological negligence apply the New Testament witness to today in a way that addresses many of Engberg-Pedersen’s concerns but without diminishing the authority of that witness or inflating the wisdom and rationality of the moment. The goods that Engberg-Pedersen seeks are realized most fully in the Crucified Nazarene. “In his body he holds the world fast as the creation of his Father; he works, as before, among the sick, possessed, lost, and despised, still forever waging war against the powers that distort the image of the human and suppress the truth of God” (86).
He therefore insists that “no theology deserves the name ‘Christian’ that does not dare to tear the masks from the faces of idols, that does not … uncover the clay feet of the world powers and attack the vested rights of the privileged” (196). What is ecumenically needful today, he urges, is demythologization of our self-understanding, our desires, and our allegiances in light of the cross. This will result in actions that testify to the world’s true lord and to how God’s rule will be made “tangible, visible, experienceable” (86).
“One cannot be a guest of the Crucified without challenging his enemies and declaring war against all tyrants,” he admonishes. “Where in the Lord’s Supper the earthly body of Christ is built up, a new world emerges; something of the promise that our God is an enemy of the proud comes true” (125). That new world will not be secured by vibes or our enlightened resolutions and policies; it erupts where the nothings of the world follow their Lord in the power of the Spirit.
Käsemann’s political vision is centered upon a liberated creation that is active now among those who embrace the ignominy of the Crucified and his program to interrupt and restore, to denounce and to forgive. It is a politics of small ends, sure to be belittled by those who think they are something, but it is small deeds carried out by otherwise unremarkable people that most substantively and wondrously change lives. Now is the perfect time for a fresh enactment of such a politics that will renounce the bitter binaries that sow hatred, destruction, and death, and to live out the maxim that can characterize only the disciples of the Nazarene: “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good” (Rom. 12:21).
Ian Olson is a Guest Writer. His work has appeared on Covenant, Mockingbird, and Mere Orthodoxy.
