Credo
20 January 2025
When a person becomes a Christian, he or she essentially enters a different life narrative. This is a narrative that seeks to create a counter-community, the church, based on the story of Jesus Christ. It is the story of the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ which gives to the church its most basic identity. One core implication of this truth for the church-state relationship is that no nation-state has the sovereign right to define the ultimate meaning of life and the human community. The gospel narrative of our Lord Jesus Christ exposes the pretentious claims of any state that strives to be the ultimate arbiter of human affairs, and shows that the particularity of the gospel cannot be reduced to general ethical principles.
There are two perennial dangers that the church faces in the modern world. One is the failure to recognize its own unique identity as a people shaped by the gospel of Jesus Christ. When Christians confess “Jesus is Lord” they are in fact claiming that they owe ultimate allegiance only to Christ. But this claim has been usurped by some nation-states. They, too, claim sovereignty over their citizens. Bitter wars are fought in the name of “national integrity.” This is nothing but the idolatry of the state.
The background of this idolatrous claim can be traced to the so-called religious wars in Europe after the Reformation. The rationale is simple: State intervention is necessary to prevent religious conflict. But historians such as William T. Cavanaugh have shown that the Hundred Year War in Europe was not so much a religious war as a war between the emerging nation-states seeking to assert absolute sovereignty.
The second danger to the church is the temptation to look for a “neutral” or common ground on which people of different faiths could live harmoniously. This is not to say that Christians cannot find common ground to live harmoniously with people of other faiths or no faith at all. In a pluralistic world, finding common ground is both urgent and necessary. But it is a mistake to think that Christians (or people of any faith, for that matter) must surrender their truth-claims in order to live harmoniously.
For Christians, this temptation comes in many forms. One is the “political theology” of Jürgen Moltmann which has impacted various forms of liberationist theologies. Their common assumption is that certain principles of state like liberal democracy and human rights are universal and absolute. These principles are secured by the nation-state. Another form is the “reconstruction” (vs. “deconstruction”) of the “radical orthodoxy” of John Milbank. A third is the redefinition of “creator spiritus” or the spirit in creation along the lines of Hegel’s phenomenology of spirit in order to build bridges to the world religions.
What all these attempts have in common is that the language of Christianity can be translated into another idiom with absolutely no remainder. Thus, e.g., we sometimes hear contextual theologians say that Christian doctrines are only the mythological expressions of a more basic common ethic or metaphysic it shares with other religions and philosophies. Therefore, it can be translated into purely ethical or metaphysical principles.
When we adopt this strategy, the Christian Story is no longer essentially Christian. When salvation in and through the crucified and risen Christ (the Christian language of salvation) is translated into the language of “new being” (e.g., Milbank) it is no longer quite Christian: there is no reason why that language could not also describe the “new being” in Hinduism or Buddhism. Similarly, when “creator spiritus” could well be the same spirit inspiring the Korean shaman or the Taoist medium, one wonders if that spirit is really the third person of the Trinity.
The particularity of truth-claims is not unique to Christianity. All other religions make similar assertions. In fact, it is when adherents of various religions respect each other’s particularity that they can engage in meaningful inter-religious dialogue. Real dialogue goes beyond merely acknowledging shared ethical principles.
The sad fact is that many Christians could see a compromise when explicitly doctrinal matters are involved but pass over the more subtle compromises when matters of state are involved. When a nation tells its citizens to put their earthly citizenship before everything else (for “national security”) some Christians are quick to say “Amen”. But if our citizenship is in heaven and there are fellow-Christians in other nations, then it follows that the first interest of Christians cannot be national but inter-national and ultimately supra-national. It is from a supra-national perspective that we gain the critical distance to judge national interests aright. Does this mean that Christians cannot be patriotic? By no means! It means, rather, that for Christians, patriotism cannot be absolutized. For the Christian, it can never be: “My country right or wrong!”
It is in the light of these very real threats to the integrity of the church, so cleverly camouflaged under cliches like “rule of law”, “democratic rights and freedom” or “inclusive society” that what it means to be deeply embedded in the narrative of the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ needs to be retold to the present generation of Christians deeply mired in political correctness.
Rev Dr Simon Chan had taught theology and other related subjects such as liturgical, spiritual, and contextual theologies at Trinity Theological College.