Christians are to remain in the world, not because of the God-given goodness of the world, nor even because of their responsibility for the course the world takes. They are to remain in the world solely for the sake of the body of the Christ who became incarnate—for the sake of the church-community. They are to remain in the world in order to engage the world in a frontal assault. Let them “live out their vocation in this world” in order that their “unworldliness” might become fully visible. But this can take place only through visible membership in the church-community. The world must be contradicted within the world. That is why Christ became a human being and died in the midst of his enemies. It is for this reason—and this reason alone!—that slaves are to remain slaves, and Christians are to remain subject to authority.

Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St. Augustine, by R. A. Markus.
New York: Cambridge University Press, c1970, 1988. 254pp.

The resourcefulness of this book is breathtaking, as is its scope, and it deserves to be read (if I can be forgiven so frank a display of academic awe) purely for the joy of watching Markus unfold his masterful collation of a great range of Augustinian themes. He admits in the preface that the exploration of St. Augustine’s vision of history sometimes led him to consider “even more distant topics, such as, for instance, Augustine’s views on prophetic inspiration, or on youth and age” (xxi), but never do these “more distant topics” seem at all out of place or overly labored; Markus simply has an eye for the subtle interconnections of the bishop’s immense corpus. The chiefly aerial image of Augustine’s development that he provides, however, is not without its drawbacks. So quickly does the argument move between texts that it is some-times difficult to keep confidence that the author is really speaking in Augustine’s voice, as one might doubt a real estate agent who moves too quickly through a house. But Augustine’s spirit, at least, is easily discernible, if not always his letter—though an appendix containing a close reading of an especially important section from City of God XIX does mitigate this concern somewhat.

The strong thesis Markus forwards in this book has become famous in the nearly four decades since its original publication: against both the ‘Constantinian settlement’ (represented by Eusebius) and the Donatists’ attempt to make a clean social break with the whole ‘world,’ including and especially the Empire, Augustine secularizes the world and the church alike, divesting them of the absolute or final significance which either has only eschatologically. The Roman Empire is not identical with the earthly city, and the Church, though it can be identified with the heavenly city in a special way, remains a corpus permixtum while on pilgrimage here on earth, the tares growing up alongside the wheat until they are sorted out at the final judgment. Indeed, according to Markus, Augustine broke ranks with many of his contemporaries by secularizing history itself: outside the total interpretation given to salvation history in the biblical canon, no his-tory can possess ultimate significance; since the Incarnation and until Christ returns, history is homogeneous, always ambiguous as to the final end of what comes to pass and always a mystery as to where and how God may be working. This, in short, is Augustine’s theology of the saeculum. The saeculum is the age where the two cities always interpenetrate, since neither can exist sociologically in the purity it is ascribed eschatologically.

The implications are many and profound. Before Augustine achieved this understanding—and according to Markus, it was indeed a heroic achievement, though one often misunderstood—it would have been necessary to instruct catechumens not only in the history of Israel but in the history of Christian Rome, since the conversion of the Empire was understood to be bringing about the fulfillment of certain prophecies. His refusal to grant saving significance to the work of the Empire, besides freeing the heavenly city from any debilitating dependence on a fleeting and self-serving historical institution, made it paradoxically possible to see in the ‘state’ more rather than less potential: not burdened by the need to fulfill all prophecy, the state might bolster the Church in its opposition as much as its support (requiring a fortitude that shakes Christians from complacency) and, in either case, exists as one place where members of the either city might work together for temporal peace. (It should be said, as Markus is careful to do, that the idea of the ‘state’ as such was an alien to Augustine, insofar as that idea suggests a clearly discernible social body separate from and over against the general populace. Markus even believes, though rather more arguably, that in the mind of Augustine the ‘state’ crumbles into a collection of individuals engaged in all different sorts of civic work.) And to name just one more consequence of Augustine’s secularization of history: re-quiring less of our current stage in human history and allowing it more ambiguity with respect to its providential purpose is, according to Markus, the move that distanced Augustine from both Eusebius and Donatus. Under Augustine’s mature evaluation, both fell to the temptation prematurely to name and circumscribe the heavenly city, exalting themselves as already the community of eschatological glory.

Markus’s procedure in the book is perfectly straightforward, which is part of what makes his argument so intelligible. In sequence, he discusses Augustine’s secularization of history (chs. 1–2), his secularization of the Roman Empire (chs. 2–3), and his secularization of the church (ch. 5)—which ideas together, he says, constitute Augustine’s theology of the saeculum. The sixth chapter deals with the most obvious possible objection: if Augustine ‘secularized’ the Roman Empire, denying its intrinsic eschatological significance, how could he also have justified Rome’s coercion of Donatists back into the Catholic fold? Markus thinks that in his repudiation of any theology of Christian empire (which did not happen until relatively late in life), Augustine lost an important part of his rationale for religious coercion—so important, in fact, that he would have had to repudiate it if he had fully thought through his theology of the saeculum. Nonetheless, Markus artfully elucidates the supports for the justification that remained in play for Augustine, showing that the issue for him was, in the end, a pastoral one and not a question of the role of the ‘state.’ Indeed, “the fact that he did not think of this problem in terms of the state, but in terms of individual members of the Church who held secular office, disguised from Augustine the acute tension between his consent to coer-cion and the implications of his theology of history and society” (p. 152). In his last chapter (ch. 7), finally, Markus takes leave of the company of historians. He turns instead to a kind of theological exposition of Augustine’s thought on the relation of church to society, abstracted (in a way possible only for theology, not history) from the broader context of his life and work as a bishop. In theology, he says, continuity is found not by repetition but by loyalty to someone’s true doctrinal aims.

This last chapter provides the easiest access to everything wonderful and everything questionable about this book—though I will not do Markus the profound injustice of an overly brief critique, which, even if true, would be inadequate to the creative depth of his proposal. This entire exposition of Augustine’s social thought is justly famous and much discussed, and no short review could hope to say what needs to be said in response. It will suffice merely to indicate, instead, that I think such a response would need to pursue more earnestly than Markus does the outline of Augustine’s ecclesiology. It would need to be said that the church in history is in a special way already identical with the eschatological city of God because it is already organized around that love, the love of God, which will animate and illuminate that city forever. And it would need to be said, conversely, that every other earthly community is much more closely allied to the eschatological earthly city than Markus seems willing to admit, precisely because it is organized around some other love than the love of God—whose only real alternative, for Augustine, is the love of self. But again: whether such concerns be right or not, the debt we owe much to this magnificent work is one not quickly or easily to be repaid. Perhaps in another forty years.

“Where fleshly rule is still mixed with the kingdom of Christ, Christ’s death is to no avail. In his death on the cross Christ learned and taught the way of obedience, patience, and love toward all. Christ used no worldly force nor did he come to rule, contrary to what many try to prove with the scriptures. The closer one looks at how Christ handled property and government, the more one comes to realize that he did not have much to do with either of them (Mt 20).”

—Pilgram Marpeck, “The Uncovering of the Babylonian Whore”

Reversing the question, doesn’t it seem odd to require the state to do what the church requires, or to forbid what the church forbids? This would already admit that the way we live is in no serious way dependent on our having been remade, or washed clean, in baptism. It would say that the training required of new converts is not really necessary to live the saintly life, or it would say that the saintly life is just doing what everyone else is doing really well. It would it be an immediate confession against the quickening power of the Spirit in our lives, to require that those who have not received the Spirit live as we expect of those who have.

That’s not to deny, of course, that the Anabaptists resonated deeply with St Paul’s pronouncement, “We must obey God rather than any human authority.” But this resonance stemmed from a deep biblicism and evangelical spirit, not from any fundamental antagonism to institutions as such. Anabaptist anti-clericalism, historically rooted in a lay antipathy towards a socially and economically privileged class of clergy, found its main expression as a critique (itself medievally rooted) of the clergy’s unscrupulous example—not a critique of the need for shepherds, or institutional structure, or anything of that kind. Anabaptist political critique, as I’ve said, was not originally so drastic as complete disavowal, but rather grew more severe only in correlation with territorial banishment and violent persecution.

Personally, I’m quite theologically sympathetic with a deep-seated ‘separation unto God.’ But construing the movement as one most basically of ‘separation,’ or even most basically of dissent, misrepresents the evangelical aims of the early Anabaptists and casts a pall of decay over the whole Anabaptist tradition. The gradual development of institutions is not itself inimical to the early Anabaptist witness, whatever negative consequences we might see in it. Separation from the world always meant separation unto Christ, with all the political and economic and structural imperatives that came along with it. If systems have been left behind, it is in favor of a body.

(I know I’m ignoring the spiritualists.)

“Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom,” Paul says, “but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block for Jews and foolishness to Gentiles.” That is, the quests of Jews or Greeks and the quest of Christians are in some sense incommensurable—‘signs’ and ‘wisdom’ in Jewish or Greek imagination cannot finally describe Christ crucified, whom Paul calls “the wisdom of God.” Better said, perhaps: the good news of the resurrection confounds our quests and redefines our directions in a way that doesn’t in the first instance ‘make sense’ to other people living out other stories.

That the good news doesn’t make sense, however, implies for Paul not silence or compromise but proclamation. “For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe.” God’s foolishness is capable of astonishing and overwhelming—even saving—human wisdom. The church, then, can relinquish the urge to wrest control of history from ‘the wise,’ because the resurrection proves to us (and this is precisely the foolish part) that the wise don’t actually have control. Instead, the church must proclaim who really rules the world, and proclaim what that rule looks like in word and practice. In another’s words, the resurrection means that it is Christ on the cross who definitively reveals the true grain of the universe—this is the foolish good news that Christians preach.

Six Messiah students spent fall break (20-23 October) in New York City, across the street from the enormous headquarters of the United Nations, discussing policy, reform, and in short the future relevance of the United Nations to the violence and division that still threatens to envelope our world. We sat amidst other Christians, in the workplace of the Mennonite Central Committee’s liaison to the United Nations: a group committed to engaging the U.N. in conversation from the distinct perspective of the a church that refuses to participate in violence. It seems odd to hear of Christians (as Christians) sitting under the shadow of a primary world power, especially given Paul’s diatribe about the ‘foolishness’ of Christian conviction, but the MCC-UN office stands in the good company of other Quaker, Methodist, and Lutheran liaisons, to name just a few.

It does seem odd, at first, that a people well aware of their foolishness—even calling attention to it by maintaining the name church—would dare venture before the United Nations. But these Christians are engaging in exactly the sort of proclamation that Paul encouraged. These Christians embrace an alternative story (one of cross and resurrection rather than progress toward universal human rights) which, rather than hindering their work, makes it possible to astonish and overwhelm the U.N.‘s imagination with new possibilities. Most importantly, perhaps, these Christians understand themselves as extensions of a much larger church politics that not only engages the U.N. but also feeds the hungry and preaches the gospel—the church communicates not only in words, but by our missional existence. Our churches do not approach the U.N. intending to enforce their own vision in U.N. decisions, because the U.N. does not actually have the power to change history. Christ crucified does, they insist, so the U.N. can only understand its purpose rightly by understanding its place within God’s new kingdom. These church liaisons, then, demonstrate profoundly that relinquishing the control of history to God does not entail social irresponsibility, but rather redefines our task as fundamentally one of witness, not of control.

We at Messiah College would do well, I suggest, to learn from these Christians at the United Nations that our primarily responsibility to the world takes the form of testimony to the grain of the universe revealed in Christ. Christian education, then, is not about creating leaders capable of navigating the wiles of power politics, but about training us into a powerless people capable of coherent witness to our crucified Lord. This way of being carries the potential to transform not only the world but each other, as we strive together to embody the new kingdom that Jesus inaugurated. The church, unlike the United Nations, does not mistake the wisdom of the cross for foolishness—“but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, [we proclaim] Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.” May God grant us the grace to trust the foolish wisdom in the name of Christ our Lord.

The reason, succinctly and provocatively: I fear that the church is so determined to save the world that it is willing to compromise the Kingdom of God to do it. And only the Kingdom can save the world.

Many Christians at Messiah have expressed to me this concern, that if we don’t vote, we’ll have let the world be more effective than the church. The primary emphasis, it seems, falls on effectiveness. How faithful we are is measured by the number of lives we save. And in a sense that’s true. But the Church saves lives by being the Church, by living an alternative where death and violence and poverty and sickness have lost their power, by offering the world a taste of heaven. Christians are in danger of being convinced that the Church has no means of saving lives other than those the government can offer; Christians are in danger of becoming humanists, because they are in danger of forgetting the fierce particularity of the Christian witness and the awesome creativity of the Holy Spirit.

This in itself, of course, is not a reason not to vote. This is a reason to broaden our horizons, to push beyond catalogued methods of salvation, but we need not reject a way of helping the world simply because it did not originate in the Church. What we need to examine more closely, I believe, is not how effective voting is—for it is certainly quite effective, especially now—but how faithful to the kingdom.

(There would be cause, I think, for the church to refuse to vote not because it was wrong, but to make the statement that the Church can function outside of national politics because it is rooted in the politics of Jesus. Of course, this would demand enormous unity, and an incredibly creative act of agape to perform while the world voted to demonstrate our commitment. Not for now, but maybe for one day.)