Skillen: "If our modest efforts to promote justice in an open public square can mature into a multi-faceted program of just statecraft, then perhaps one day an explicitly Christian approach to politics will be respected both at home and abroad as an honorable and valuable part of the political process."

Me:  The problem is not with Christian "efforts to promote justice in an open public square". The problem is with the Christian aspiration to "statescraft"... i.e., when Christians seek positions (and/or political alliances) of power and influence from within worldly structures (including worldly structures such as a "Constitutional Democracy"). The problem is that such efforts ignore the reality that:

1. It is impossible to be a successful politician if one is truly committed to things like honesty, integrity, justice, humility, repentence, love, etc. (Not logically impossible, but impossible in the sense that it has never happened in the history of the world.)

2. Thus, it is impossible to remain a true Christian if one is committed to being a successful politician.

I will confess to a little hyperbole, but I do think politics is different.

Some prostitutes are liars and some are not. However, there is nothing inherent about being a successful prostitute that prevents one from being honest. However, show me someone who is trying to win an election and I’ll show you a liar. Show me an honest politician and I’ll show you someone who is not trying to win an election. It’s not cynicism, just reality.

It is the system that makes politics different, not the particular individuals involved. There is something about people groups that are even more sinful, collectively, than individuals. People groups tend to identify the ‘good’ in purely selfish terms.... The ‘good’ is whatever is good for my group. ‘Bad’ is whatever favors other people groups. In politics, the ‘good’ has very little to do with universal reality or truth. To get elected, a politician must decide what various people groups want to hear. It has almost nothing to do with truth.

I’m not talking about living on a deserted island either. As I said, the problem is not with Christian "efforts to promote justice in an open public square", but rather with the Christian aspiration to "statecraft". If you’re not going to lie, your choices are more limited. Winning elections is not a viable option if you’re committed to the truth. Thus, it becomes a matter of choosing between wasting a lot of energy and resources in a futile effort to get elected honestly vs. looking for other creative ways to promote justice in the public square.

JET: Thus, it is impossible to remain a true Christian if one is committed to being a successful politician.

Jeff: I wouldn't want to ever say never. But I would say at best it's rare that this would occur. And if a society is becoming more inclined, over time, to entitlement and avoidance of accountability, the small likelihood of even the rare case diminishes. But we always have a choice of the lesser of evils. Though, for some offices and certain political campaigns, that, too, is getting harder and harder to distinguish. I've heard of politicians who praise sermons about matters that it's exceedingly hard to believe they're sincere about. If they were, it's hard to imagine why it is that none of their own speeches reflect the values of those sermons. And I'm talking about stuff as generic as the rule of constitutional law, as per original intent. I mean, seriously, could anyone think, reading the framers' articulated opinions on the meanings of various constitutional texts, that those framers would even recognize the modern US as a country governed by that supposed Supreme Law? If so, words have virtually no meaning, as far as I can tell.

Post Edited (Similtude) : 2/13/2010 6:20:56 PM (GMT-6)

Post Edited (Tom) : 2/14/2010 2:23:55 AM (GMT-6)

Post Edited (Daniel M) : 2/14/2010 5:15:51 PM (GMT-6)

Post Edited (Daniel M) : 2/14/2010 5:58:07 PM (GMT-6)

I don't even think of ideologies within the categories of extremes or this one being better than that one.  I would say they should be thought more as a form of idolatry in which they deify something in creation.  If such is the case (which I think it is) then there are good and evil aspects of all the ideologies.  For example, in liberalism there is the idea of God-given individuality.  This is a created good.  When it becomes evil is when it becomes individualism.  With individualism, all social institutions are seen as derivative from and subject to the sovereign wills of the individuals.  Conservativism tradition is seen to be sovereign over the whole range human activities and associations and communities.  In nationalism, for example, the nation is given divine status and all the other communities are seen as parts of the larger whole.  Thus, those smaller communities, are ancillary or subordinate to the  national community and must serve its larger ends.

Democracy is closest to nationalism in its mature form, but has some differences no doubt.  Regardless, democracy very much shuns heteronomous authority.  And as with all ideologies, democracy identifies something as being salvific and thus must identify something as evil from whence it must be saved.  Democracy not only identifies evil with not only being ruled by one who is unlike oneself but with being ruled by someone else PERIOD.  Nationalism will settle for being ruled or even misruled by ones who share their same language, race or ethnicity.  In democracy however, one will diminish the need to obey anyone at all. For a democracy to be effective in preserving such autonomy, it must clearly show that those who make the law on my behalf--laws that I live under--are in some sense following MY will.  One will only be able to obey those laws to which they assent to voluntarily.  If nationalism and democracy are similar to each other and nationalism has the seeds of fascism, national socialism or Nazism then it is not incomprehensible to see that democracy is fully capable of becoming tyrannical or even totalitarian some of which we see (in possible seed form) today.

So.  I can't even jump on board with how Tommy is wording things here.  It's not a question of extremes.

Brandon: I don't even think of ideologies within the categories of extremes or this one being better than that one. I would say they should be thought more as a form of idolatry in which they deify something in creation. If such is the case (which I think it is) then there are good and evil aspects of all the ideologies. I can't even jump on board with how Tommy is wording things here. It's not a question of extremes.

Tom: But what you say here IS my own view, so I don’t see where we’re disagreeing.

I don’t think the only livable ideologies are located at the extreme ends of some continuum, and I didn’t suggest that Communism and Democracy are those two extreme poles on that continnum. I only brought them up to compare two completing systems with each other, period, not as extremes but just as examples of how both are fallen and imperfect systems though both can approximate some good and some evil (though each tends toward its own particular evils and goods)...just like you said.

My point was that one does a better job at approximating a wider set of values than the other. But it seems when people hear me say this, what they HEAR (for some reason) my say is “Democracy is heavenly. It’s soooo good and sooo right and sooo wonderful all the time and Communism is sooo evil and soooo bad and soooo wrong all the time.” But I didn’t say anything like that. All I said was that of these two fallen imperfect systems, one does a better job at “approximating” (i.e., aiming at, striving at) values like freedom, responsibility, creativity, relatedness, tolerance, etc. That seems to be a legitimate way to compare fallen idolatrous systems. One idolatry (let’s imagine) pays healthy salaries for hard work, provides for the elderly, but abuses the poor and burns their children to Molach. Another pays healthy salaries for hard word, takes care of its elderly, but doesn’t burn their children to Molach. The latter system is less fallen we might say. It does a better job of approximating the good.

I wanted to talk about ACUTAL systems, so I compared Communism (as its actually lived) and Democracy (as its actually lived). Forget what they look like on paper. Daniel wants to compare pure theoretical Marxism with actual democracy as its practiced, and then he reminds us that the former values creativity and personal freedom too while the latter requires children to work in sweat shops. That seems unfair. Who wouldn’t choose “creativity and freedom” over “minors working in sweat shops”? We either compare them both on paper in terms of theory (and even then what we know about how economies actually work has to figure in) or we compare them as we know them in their actuality to be. I did the latter and concluded just what you, Brandon, concluded—that a) it’s not a question of extremes and that b) there are good and evil aspects of all the ideologies, and that c) democracy does a better job at approximating the good aspects. We agree on A and B. Do you agree with C? If you admit that ideologies are all a mixture of good and evil aspects, then it shouldn’t be too difficult to also say that some are more top-heavy when it comes to the evil aspects than others. That’s all C says with respect to democracy and communism.

Tom

Post Edited (Daniel M) : 2/15/2010 8:14:54 AM (GMT-6)