When Jesus suggests that God and Caesar each be rendered his due, he does not thereby envision a division of labor between two divine beings. There is no realm of life called ‘politics’ that is only indirectly under God’s providential care. Once one renders to God what is God’s… there is nothing left that properly belongs to Caesar.
The Jewish and Christian conviction about salvation is remarkable precisely in that salvation has a history. Salvation is a fully public event that unfolds in historical time before the watching eyes of the nations. Salvation is not a matter of pulling a few individual survivors from the wreckage of creation after the Fall, but is about the re-creation of a new heaven and a new earth.
Christian ethics is not about managing history, but about overaccepting the apparent givens of human life and turning them into gifts in the light of God’s grace.
What both the Nestorians and the Monophysites had failed to grasp fully was that the Word became flesh not merely to repudiate sin, but to take it on, to assume it. That which is not assumed is not saved.
The church must be wary of nostalgia for Constantinianism. A Christian should feel politically homeless in the current context, and should not regard the dreary choice between Democrats and Republicans, left and right, as the sum total of our political witness.
When Jesus suggests that God and Caesar each be rendered his due, he does not thereby envision a division of labor between two divine beings. There is no realm of life called ‘politics’ that is only indirectly under God’s providential care. Once one renders to God what is God’s… there is nothing left that properly belongs to Caesar.
When Jesus suggests that God and Caesar each be rendered his due, he does not thereby envision a division of labor between two divine beings. There is no realm of life called ‘politics’ that is only indirectly under God’s providential care. Once one renders to God what is God’s… there is nothing left that properly belongs to Caesar.
The church must be wary of nostalgia for Constantinianism. A Christian should feel politically homeless in the current context, and should not regard the dreary choice between Democrats and Republicans, left and right, as the sum total of our political witness.
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
- T.S. Eliot
