Best of It: Conclusion (Part 4)

[Series Index]

We come now to the end of the last chapter in John Stackhouse’s Making the Best of It. We left off in the middle of the section dealing with “Behaving in Public,” having dealt with the subsections of “Show” and “Tell.” Today we skim over “Campaign” and “The Fundamental Move.” Then we will wrap up with final section on “Governing Motifs.”

Campaign

While there should be Christians involved in politics (beyond voting and the occasional contribution) it is not true that all Christians should be politically active. Stackhouse returns to the issue of individual call. He is particularly concerned about pastors.

Indeed, pastors and politicians work not only in different categories but also to a considerable extent in mutually exclusive ones. Pastors emphasize purity, loyalty, clarity, and totality, while politicians must work with mixedness, expedience, ambiguity, and compromise. (341)

Pastors who too closely identify with candidates and regimes get brought into the sin and failure that inevitably is part of a regime. Their prophetic voice is compromised.

One of the things I really appreciated was Stackhouse’s position that church institutions and their leaders should be less prominent in their political action. They should focus on shaping culture through the formation of individuals who are at work in their various spheres of life. Christians should form partnerships and campaign with folks based on common cause, not necessarily religious affiliation. We are to be ever searching the political landscape in search of what will bring the greatest shalom, trusting God to lead the way … all the time recognizing that God does not simultaneously move on all fronts. Some important things will need to be placed on the back burner to accomplish even more important things. We keep working at making the best of it as we seek God’s leadership.

There is a real danger here. This approach … with all its ambiguity and paradox … can morph into rationalization:

... But here is where diabolical mischief lies closest at hand: in rationalization and ideology, in veiling both our ruthless voracity and our lazy conformity in the guise of “Christian Realism.” So we must be vigilant against this constant peril. (344)

But he also adds:

Yet, as I have argued, the options of total purity or total conquest seem to be not only inconsistent with the (whole) Bible’s teaching but also simply impossible short of the return of Jesus in power and glory. ... (344)

The Fundamental Move

The fundamental move to make is quite simple: to turn the tables, to put the shoe on the other foot, to ask, “How would you feel if it happened to you? ...” (344)

Stackhouse challenges the desperate political agitation by some Christians to preserve things from a by-gone era of Christian consensus that are no longer representative of our society (say, school prayer, putting “God” on our money and in our anthems, or trying to make Easter a national holiday).

... Indeed, we should use what influence we have left to help construct the sort of society in which we ourselves would like to live once our power to effect it has disappeared. ... (345-346)

Stackhouse closes this section with some good comments about “representative democracy” versus “direct democracy” and what that means for electing candidates. He suggests we need to elect candidates that will pursue shalom and free space for the church to function. I will not dwell on that here.

Governing Motifs

In this closing section Stackhouse writes:

We thus must distinguish the concern for shalom making from mere utilitarianism, which is at best half right. Yes, we seek the greatest good possible, but not just for the greatest number. Moreover, what counts as “good” is not merely calculable along an axis of pleasure and pain, and certainly not merely the pleasure of the powerful (whether an elite of the majority) at the expense of others. (350)

Our path of discernment is complex and there are dangers if we don’t do our work well. Here are motifs Stackhouse suggests help us avoid the dangers

Dialectic Without Capitulation

We are neither to capitulate to nature nor to pursue total dominance.

… We human beings were put in charge of the world to cultivate it – indeed, to subdue it. we are not to succumb to the lure of “natural rhythms,” of letting things be, however beautiful they are and however ashamed we feel about our previous mismanagement. We are to garden the world, to take its potential and improve it. We are not to abandon our dignity and responsibility, however intimidating the task may seem and however unnerved we are by our recognition of past failures. We are to make shalom. (351)

Neither are we to capitulate to the powers of human institutions like government, commerce, or entertainment. We are not to withdraw from the cultural mandate. Nor are we to seek total domination of the culture. We make alliances and pursue shalom but we will not accept, “… the cessation of evangelism , our complicity in wrongdoing, our silence in the face of injustice, and our basic allegiance above all.” (352)

Another dialectic is to withdraw from the church in disillusionment versus esteeming the church as more righteous in its actions than it is. We have to be realistic about what the church is in this era prior to the consummation of the new creation.

Transformation Without Imperialism

This impetus to garden, and the specifically impetus to recover and redeem, must be tempered by the recognition of our own limits and sinfulness.  ...(353)

Quoting Lesslie Newbigin:

We are not conservatives who regard the structures as part of the unalterable order of creation, as part of the world of what we call “hard facts” beyond the range of the gospel, and who therefore suppose that the gospel is only relevant to the issues of person and private life. Nor are we anarchists who seek to destroy the structures. We are rather patient revolutionaries who know that the whole creation, with all its given structures, is groaning in the travail of a new birth, and that we share this groaning and travail, thus struggling and wrestling, but do so in hope because we have already received, in the Spirit, the firstfruit of the new world (Rom, 8:19-25). (354)

Plurality Without Relativism

Here he reflects on the challenges of extending pluralism while also using our voice to speak out against evil and injustice.

Conviction Without Hubris

We walk in confidence that Jesus is Lord and we have been assigned mission that includes “cultivating the earth.” We have confidence God will bring about the new creation he promised.

But we can’t succeed without others and without Christian community. We recognize here that we (individually and as communities) are certainly wrong about some things. But which ones? Our best efforts and best intentions are going to fall short. Yet we dare not go forward in timidity as we engage the world. We have been given a mandate. That is the tension into which God calls us. Even as we go forward in boldness we have to be open to being reformed by God.

This concludes the last subsection of the last section of the last chapter of the book. I’ll have one more post that offers some final remarks.

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