Christian Witness: Everyday Politics as a Form of Resistance

Christian Witness: Everyday Politics as a Form of Resistance

Chi W.HUEN

Duke theological ethicist Luke Bretherton, in his award-winning book Christianity and Contemporary Politics, sets out to do a theological politics. This essay follows his lead in discerning the conditions and possibilities of faithful Christian witness, especially in non-democratic situations. While concurring with the “ecclesial turn” in contemporary theology to regard the church as itself a particular polity, Bretherton endeavours to further explore: what does it mean for the church qua church to negotiate a common life with various non-Christian others in relation to the state and the market? Adopting Augustine's notion of saeculum, he regards this in-between “ordinary time” of wheat and tares as the mutual ground for pursuing earthly peace and goods in common. He interprets Jeremiah 29:5-7 as admonishing Christians to invest in the wellbeing of wherever they are sent, without compromising their faithful particularity and obedience to God. Using the method of “ecclesiological ethnography”, he elaborates on the practical possibilities of political witness on the local, national and global level respectively. In Saul Alinsky's "broad-based community organizing", he discovers the mutually disciplining partnership between grassroots democracy and Christianity. In effect, upholding Hannah Arendt's definition of "the politics" as the common world of meaningful shared action, he proposes a kind of "everyday politics" . Thus one possible form of the church's political witness is to participate in the organizing and empowerment of ordinary people in their daily life to regain their civic agency. However, the Jeremianic pattern also challenges us, as resident aliens (whether spiritually or legally), to take risk in bringing justice and making peace. In many less than favorable political conditions, our nonresistance inevitably calls for resistance, and vice versa. In fact, genuine politics requires citizens who are not enthralled by state power, ie for the good of the society, we need dissidents, and Christians are born-again non-conformists and protestants. When Christians are loyal citizens of the “City of God”, they make the best earthly citizens. As it turns out, even though Bretherton finds counter-cultural resistance alone inadequate and not missiological enough, he too has to admit that the church in seeking to be faithful to her own vocation always already inherently seeks the welfare of the “Earthly City”. Our faithful political witness is consequent upon the church acting and living as a church.