Jesus Christ has never been a social activist or a moral philosopher. To pitch Him that way is to drain His glory and dilute His excellence. While justice is important, justice apart from Christ is a dead thing. The only battering ram that can storm the gates of hell is not the cry of justice, but the name of Jesus. Jesus Christ is the embodiment of justice, peace, holiness, righteousness, and every other virtue.

Christ is the sum of all spiritual things, the “strange attractor” of the cosmos. When Jesus becomes an abstraction, faith loses its reproductive power. “Jesus did not come to make bad people good. He came to make dead people live.”

Paul said that Jesus is “head over all things [for] the church.” Notice, Jesus is head over all things not for the state but for the church. All things are placed under His feet, Paul wrote, but Jesus has been appointed “head” of “all things” for the church.” Some have made Jesus the chaplain of the American dream. Others have made Him the chaplain of the Democratic Party. Still others have made Jesus the chaplain of capitalism and Republicanism. All are equally blasphemous. Most blasphemous of all are those who would decapitate the head from its body and render Christ irrelevant.

There’s a wideness in God’s mercy,
Like the wideness of the sea;
There’s a kindness in His justice,
Which is more than liberty.
—Frederick William Faber

Reframing the Kingdom

Some today teach that the kingdom of God is a political utopia taught by Jesus that we Christians are charged to bring about. This is essentially the old-fashioned “social gospel.” Those who hold this view are still caught up in the old “fundamentalist individual gospel” versus “social gospel” dichotomy. Advocates think that the only way to talk about social justice is to do it in social gospel terms.

We do not reject Jesus, or justice, or the kingdom. But we reject the notion that you can take the justice side of Christ and push it into a separate theme on its own. Origen said that Jesus is the autobasilia. He is, in Himself, the kingdom. As the stories were told, “entering the kingdom” became the favorite metaphor for experiencing Christ. Jesus’ own person and work are the establishing of a new humanity—a new social form of existence. In Him, we find the kingdom of God. In Him, we find what freedom and equality genuinely mean. Practically speaking, the church (when she is functioning properly) is the new society that Jesus is creating. Christ and the church cannot be separated.

To put it in Bonhoeffer’s terms, God is both Act and Being, and the act and being of God are found in Christ. He is God’s Act and God’s Being. It’s a royal mistake to separate the two.

A good definition of the kingdom of God is as follows: the manifestation of God’s ruling presence. “The kingdom of God is in the midst of you,” Jesus said. In other words, Jesus was saying, “I’m standing here in your midst. I am the kingdom incarnated. Not only in what I do, but in who I am.”

The kingdom of God is made visible when the community of the King embodies justice, peace, and love together and then shares it with the world. The church, therefore, is the embodiment and instrument for displaying the kingdom of God.

The stripping of Jesus from His kingdom is a little like the wording Harvard stripped from its motto. Harvard’s current motto “Veritas,” or Truth, used to be a mite different. The university’s original motto was “Veritas pro Christo et ecclesia,” or “Truth for Christ and his Church.” Truth is more powerful than lies. The power of truth remains, even if truth is not followed. But real Truth is a Person. Truth comes to us now, as it always has, through the Holy Spirit, who is the Spirit of Truth who brings that which is true to life in our lives. Truth is also always in line with Scripture, for the same Spirit who makes truth come alive has breathed upon the written Word.

We must never avoid social issues. But the distinctive mark of a Christian is that you don’t begin with a social or moral issue. You begin with God. You start with God’s revelation in Jesus, and the relationship of justifying/sanctifying/glorifying grace that the “heir of all things” releases in all of us. You make the Light of the World, not culture, your reference point. Our time should be spent figuring out our relationship to Jesus, and what He is doing in the world. Why? So we can join Him in what He’s already doing. If we start anywhere else but Christ, we lose our way. If we start with the social and political as our reference point, the “social gospel” becomes very much “social” and very little “gospel.” In truth, there is no “gospel” that is not a “social gospel.”

The preferential option for the poor is
implicit in Christological faith.
—Pope Benedict XVI

For example, when we reach out to the poor and sick, we are not doing so because of some principle of justice, or some theology of poverty and sickness, or some political platform or legislation, or some responsible way of dealing with surplus wealth. We do so for three reasons:

1. The deepest hungers of the human heart are for forgiveness and reconciliation with God.

2. We are reaching out to Jesus Himself (“I was sick and you visited Me”). In the poor and sick, it is Christ whom we attend and feed and love. Followers of Jesus exist for others, not for themselves.

3. The life of Christ within us compels us to reach out to such. The Galilean prophet who healed the sick and cared for the poor continues His ministry in and through us today.

This reframing of “the poor” was one of the greatest contributions of Christianity. The pagan world called poor people “base and shady.” The Christians called them “sisters and brothers,” and identified them with Christ. The “needy” and “afflicted” received more than alms; they also received prayer and affection and relationship. The poor were not a political problem. The poor were “us,” not “them.” Care of the poor is a matter of orthodox faith.

The story of redemption is where we begin talking about moral and social issues. Of course, it is one thing to get the meaning of what Jesus said and did; it is another thing to start meaning it. Meaning is meaningless until and unless you start “meaning it.” In the same way, respiration is composed of inspiration (breathing in the meaning) and exhalation (living out the “meaning it”). To do only one or the other is called expiration.

But “meaning it” means something other than politicization. The pressure on the church to “pietize” politics and mumble polite noises in political directions will only get stronger. What happens when these siren songs are heeded is evident in any reading of the history of the church, where the worst in the history of politics is on display. The perversion of the best yields the worst.

Cambridge historian Eamon Duffy visited the National Gallery’s “Seeing Salvation” exhibit (2000), which makes both of us jealous. The earliest symbolic representation of Christ he could find on display was the Chi-Rho monogram, encoding the opening letters of the name “Christ” in Greek. Duffy found the monogram on the reverse of a coin the emperor Constantine struck in 327, fourteen years after seizing control of the Roman Empire by force. On this coin, Christ’s name halos a war banner bearing the inscription “The hope of the State.” Duffy comments, “From the very beginning, Christian art was hijacked to serve the powerful and the successful.”

“Surely goodness and mercy will follow . . .”
—Psalm 23

It is a Christian’s fatal conceit to think he can bring in the kingdom. A careful reading of the Scriptures reveals that the kingdom is not something that we bring, or build, or cause, or create. The kingdom is a presence that we enter, a gemlike gift that we receive and treasure, a new creation that engulfs and embraces us. In other words, the kingdom of God is Jesus the Christ, and His righteousness. In seeking Him, “all these things [are] added” in our lives.