No Nation Can Be the City of God | Faith & Politics #4

00:00:00
Speaker 1: Hey everyone, welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian.

00:00:02
Speaker 2: I'm Dr.

00:00:03
Speaker 3: James Spencer. I'm joined by Dr. Ashish Varma. And today we're going to be reflecting on the conversation that I had with Veronica Ogle. And I'm really excited to hear your thoughts on this, Ashish. You know, I've sort of played around in Augustine a bit. Her conversation, which you all can listen to in the previous episode, was really on Augustine and the city of God primarily. But we did get into a few other things in Augustine, but... I've read The City of God, I've read The Confessions, but I am by no way, shape, or form an Augustine scholar.

00:00:36
Speaker 1: And so this should be a fun conversation, man.

00:00:40
Speaker 2: Yeah, by no means am I a scholar of Augustine either. I may have just through my historical and theological work dabbled a little bit more than you, but not at Gogol's level. So I enjoyed listening to it. Fantastic. A lot of wonderful things to talk about.

00:00:56
Speaker 1: Yeah, and her book is really fantastic as well.

00:00:59
Speaker 3: And so I think she just does a really good job, I think, of synthesizing a lot of Augustine's ideas. And so I was really happy to have her on the podcast, and it was good to talk with her. But I think, you know, as we're dealing with faith and politics, Augustine's City of God comes up a fair amount. I've written on Josh Howley, who I believe is like a representative from Missouri or something like that. He's referenced Augustine. As I recall, he was at a conservatism forum or a conservatism conference and referenced Augustine's City of God. And part of what he did with it, and part of the reason I got interested in having Veronica on after hearing this, was that he talked about the United States as sort of the epitome of what Augustine meant by the City of God. He talked about, you know, the Christian nation sort of bit. Augustine is trying to advance this Christian nation. And as he does so, as Augustine does so in his work, he's advocating for this Christian nation. That then sort of for Howley and his audience comes together in the United States and those founding, you know, sort of Christian nation principles. Now, obviously, I don't love that uh i think i think there's more wrong with that than i can count um and i think it misses the point of augustine which is these two cities the city of god and the city of man have different loves and if you're going to love like the city of man does which is a love of self in augustine's sort of terminology you're never going to elevate.

00:02:52
Speaker 1: Beyond being the city of man.

00:02:55
Speaker 3: It requires the love of God in order to be the city of God. Now, that may be a little bit too stark. I'll trust you to nuance it a little bit, but maybe that's where we can start our conversation in this dichotomy that Veronica Ogle talks about, but then also that it seems like Josh Howley wants to collapse.

00:03:18
Speaker 2: So the mild word. That comes to my mind when I hear you say, Josh Howley saying that is concerning. That's the mild word. My harsher words I'll keep to myself. To my mind, if that's what he said, that just entirely misses the point of Augustine. I don't think we need Ogle's level of reading the work and understanding the context to get at its base level that this is precisely what actually Augustine's arguing against by positing two cities. Now, they're two overlapping cities, and those two overlapping cities are what make things interesting. But to conflate the one with the other, concerning, again, is the word I'll use. I think you're right, and I think Ogle, as I recall, spent a decent amount of time reflecting upon this as well, that the crux of the matter, and this is where the crux just is it's confusing to hear this from Howley, is the nature of love. What is one's love, right? And the nature of love, how it is fulfilled, even to the degree that we can speak of for those who are classicists and early church experts and Greek philosophical and Latin philosophical experts, we could speak of there's clear borrowing from these traditions by the early Christians in the way that they understand the virtues and the way they understand love and the way that they understand how these things go together in terms of thinking about early versions of civility. But to say that they're the same is actually to not read well, right? Because Augustine's point above anything else is precisely that they're not the same, that what one's love is directed towards and even how what shapes one's love is going to change everything in the most meaningful sense. So if one's love is not just directed towards the triune God as revealed in the Son Jesus incarnate and the Holy Spirit or breath of God giving forth from that Son, that changes not just the nature of what forms our love, not just the nature of what our love is directed towards, but also the very nature of what we perceive to be the goal of that love. So classicists we'll point out that ancient understandings of virtue, we'll talk about the importance of virtue being the love of something for its own sake. But as Ogle was drawing out, as noble as that would be to move us beyond the love of something for my sake, it still stops short in a significant way from the love of someone and something itself. For God's sake, which doesn't mean a used sake, right? Like to help them elevate me, but it means my love is so much for you that I want to help direct you to the source of love, the triune God, right? In whom all things consist and by whom all things were made and for whom all things find their completion. And that's a pretty significant difference then in terms of thinking about what the goals or the agendas are.

00:06:45
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I.

00:06:49
Speaker 3: Think one of the things I've sort of reflected on since I talked with her is the Old Testament studies, love and loyalty are really strongly connected.

00:07:00
Speaker 1: We see it particularly in Deuteronomy.

00:07:03
Speaker 3: This has been around, I think, since the 1970s is the earliest essay I can remember reading on it. What does love mean in Deuteronomy? Well, it has an awful lot to do with loyalty. It doesn't have to do with the sort of love that we see in modern day movies or something like that. This is about ordering one's life and aligning one's life with the suzerain or the superior entity in the treaty, the covenant.

00:07:30
Speaker 1: And you... agreeing to be the.

00:07:33
Speaker 3: Vassal in every way, shape, and form that you can possibly be that vassal. And so we read something like in Deuteronomy 6, 4, and 5, love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength. Those three things are really all encompassing, particularly when we understand strength, not as how much you can bench, but in terms of All of the resources that you have at your disposal, everything that you can muster, this is what you're to love God with. And in that context, that would have been your herds, your cattle, your household, everything was to be given in service and dedicated in loyalty to God. We see glimpses of this in the New Testament, I think, especially in 1 John. where we have this sort of melding together and correlation between love and obedience and even love of neighbor and obedience. That obedience language to me gestures back toward the loyalty angle of love. It is love working itself out on another's terms. And so it's always working itself out on God's terms. One thing I do like to sort of throw in here when we are talking about love in this way, because I think a lot of times this gets sort of misconstrued as well. Especially again, we got kind of a political example on this, but J.D. Vance at one point was explaining the order of loves. It kind of went quasi viral on the internet when he did it. But he talked about, you know, you love God and then you love family and then you love, you know, local society. Then, you know, you work your way out all the way to nation and the stranger. And he describes this order of love as sequential almost, that there are rings and in the fur, you know, there's a bull's eye, love of God. And then as you get further out on the dartboard, right, you might hit that outer rim at some point. I think that's the wrong way to conceptualize it. And I don't think that's the way Augustine conceptualizes it. Because that sort of sequential aspect is tears that I don't actually think are there. It's not that I want to say, yeah, there is something specific called the love of God. There's something specific about loving family. There's something specific about loving other people who aren't family. I think those can be distinguished. But I think ultimately what we are supposed to understand is that these things are all immersed within the love of God.

00:10:17
Speaker 1: So that now.

00:10:18
Speaker 3: We have no choice but to treat our neighbors differently because we are immersed in the love of God. We have no choice but to treat our family differently because we're immersed within the love of God. All of these things that are informed and shaped, to use your word, how does that love shape us? All of these things are shaped by a love of God. And even though we'll keep saying love throughout the episode, I think it's important to sort of nail down that loyalty aspect of love because it really is that notion of loving others on God's terms, I think is just crucial to what Augustine is saying and the way that we need to be thinking about love of God.

00:11:08
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is good stuff. Apparently I'm, I'm watching the wrong YouTube channels and listen to the wrong podcast. Cause I'm missing these political viral moments. Um, you don't get this when you're listening to a tennis podcast, I guess.

00:11:23
Speaker 3: Um, nevertheless, different sort of love in tennis, brother, different sort of love in tennis.

00:11:29
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:11:29
Speaker 2: Different sort of love. That's a love that doesn't make any sense to me still after 30 years of playing the game. Love means zero.

00:11:38
Speaker 1: What? Anyway.

00:11:39
Speaker 2: Um, so, As I hear you describe what Van said, what strikes me immediately is how, on the surface, that's immediately the opposite, actually, of Jesus' point when he tells the story of the Good Samaritan. That seems to me to be the thing that he's responding to with the question that's given to him of who should we love, who is our neighbor. And Jesus is making it abundantly clear that precisely the one who outside of your immediate context exists is the one that you're inclined to think belongs to an outer rung, is the one who's precisely the neighbor, right? Meaning everyone's your neighbor. The Jew's a neighbor, the Gentile's a neighbor, even that Samaritan is your neighbor, right? Love them all. So nerd moment. I've been reading a lot of Hans Urs von Balthasar lately. Mid-20th century Swiss theologian, of course, everyone knows. Now he... belongs, broadly speaking, to this Augustinian tradition. But some of the things I've been reading lately in him actually fit very well with some of the themes that both Ogle and you have brought up. So for instance, this idea of love connected to obedience is actually exactly what Balthazar is arguing with regard to a Pauline understanding of faith. But I think what Balthazar does to set things up So the context here is, I'm going to say it's beautiful. Balthazar's whole point is he's trying to give you a theology of beauty mattering, such that beauty ultimately ought to help us see the beautiful, which is made known in the revelation of the triune God in Christ. So he sees faith as beautiful precisely to the degree that he sees it as a resonance or an attunement, as he puts it. where the image he gives you is a violin. I love the violin, beautiful instrument, but I'll borrow that and change it to the sitar because I love the sitar even more. Even though I have no musical ability, the ability of it to resonate, right? So you think about the plucking of the strings of the sitar or the playing of the strings with the bow on the violin, its ability to echo those strings, and that's where music comes from, that resonance. such that the whole body of the instrument is involved in the making of the noise. But to take that a step further, Balthazar is wanting to take that instrument and equate that in some sense with us, where what we are doing when we resound in faith in this resonance with God is that we begin to, in our very selves, become attuned and to make that music present that God is already making. Now that sounds like it's devoid of agency, but Balthazar's point is not wanting to say that we are like inner pieces of wood or inner strings that are vibrating, but rather that it's the passive active. It's the passive reality of realizing that the fullness of who we are, the freedom of our lives comes from our attunement to God, but it's active in that We are deliberately posturing ourselves to be attuned in that sort of way. And he describes that in specifically the language of obedience, right? This isn't the obedience of, you must listen to me because I'm your overlord. This is the obedience of recognizing the beautiful. And that's what is, not to be redundant, beautiful about what Balthazar is explaining. That I see him as he's extending Augustine and very much working in line with what you were saying and what Ogle is saying. speaks to the nature of faith where now Balthazar can say the experience of faith isn't just some sort of subjective sense of I believe this and I hope for that and I love this, but it's rather the very love of God producing through our active obedience into attunement the kind of faith that allows us to have what I've previously loved to refer to in Gandalf's words as the fool's hope, which is itself the context within which love abounds to neighbor here, there, and everywhere, right? Where there are no boundaries now to what that love of neighbor is. And again, I want to say, I think that's beautiful, you know, and even as it's an extension of Augustine, it's the sort of spirit of Augustine that's getting at in the big, in the sense of big P politics, right? Politics as in the life of the city and the communal existing together. What he wants to say distinguishes the city of God from the the city of man, right? Because now our attentiveness to each other in love is to, for instance, what I would hope for you, James, is to help you become attuned to God. And reciprocally, your hope, ideally, is to help me become attuned to God. And in that, we become attuned in some ways to each other in our differences so that we can begin to actually be a functioning and harmonious body together in the way that you know, the New Testament language and even the Old Testament language speaks up in terms of bodies.

00:17:04
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's interesting. I, I, Balthazar's passive active, I think is really good and helpful. I had always wondered why he didn't just go with like a choral, like a chorale, right? Where you're singing.

00:17:19
Speaker 2: I have thoughts on that, but I'll wait.

00:17:21
Speaker 3: And I think it works better when you're together, like the image that comes to my mind, which is, So Goofy is like an acapella group where you're opting to make the sounds in line with everyone else. And to the extent that you could do that, that is attunement, essentially. To the extent that you do that, it sounds really good. And so then there's this sort of interesting extension of the analogy, which I haven't thought all the way through. But I often say I can't sing, which is really just shorthand for no one would want to hear me sing. it's not good, but you can actually sing. And so the idea would be, you know, everybody can sing. There's a sense in which all of us can carry some semblance of a tune, but it's the master singers, the one who can really sing on key and can sing with and can sing together with one another and are willing to follow sort of the plan for the song. The melody, the rhythm, but also the coming in and out together, right, in various ways.

00:18:30
Speaker 1: Those are the ones you really want to listen to. Those are the good singers.

00:18:35
Speaker 3: And I think there's something there to explore as we think through love, because I've often gotten the question, well, if you construe love in this manner, then non-Christians couldn't ever love. And what I want to say is, no, that's not what Augustine is saying. And that's not what I'm saying. Everybody has the capacity to love. It's the sort of love that we're talking about here. Not being rooted in God's love has deep implications and consequences.

00:19:08
Speaker 1: We could think of it.

00:19:09
Speaker 3: As because being rooted in the love of God carries with it certain constraints that enable us to love one another in ways that are on God's terms. not being constrained by that love of God, then loosens what we can do, right? It gives us more opportunities to do whatever it is that we want to do. And we can try to love one another on our own terms, and that doesn't work out well.

00:19:42
Speaker 1: But there's still love there.

00:19:44
Speaker 3: And there's just something I think helpful in thinking through the performative act of that, which Balthazar includes, obviously. But I think there's something crucial there because what we don't want to be conveying is that, well, if you're not a Christian, you just can't love anyone because that's just patently untrue. There's a finer distinction that Augustine is making, I think, that we need to maintain. And there's just something about the analogies that I don't recall Balthazar carrying it that far. But I think there's something in those analogies that we could carry that far.

00:20:23
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:20:25
Speaker 2: Like you, no one wants to hear me sing, and I shorthand that by I can't sing. Thankfully, my kids are not yet at the age where they balk when I try to sing.

00:20:37
Speaker 1: But it's coming.

00:20:38
Speaker 2: I know it's coming because I'm well aware of who I am. And yet at the same time, when I think about singing, I mean, I can think of a friend right now who has, she has the most beautiful voice I've ever heard in my life. And I could sit and listen to her sing all day.

00:20:54
Speaker 1: Right.

00:20:56
Speaker 2: Um, but I think to, to your question of why he doesn't use the choral analogy, um, I think it's because when we get, and I'm admittedly importing here a little bit, a conversation that's going on between Owen Barfield and Tolkien that's contemporaneous, but not necessarily something that Balthazar is aware of. But I think that they're resonant in the sense that they're talking about similar things, and there's clear at least influence of Balthazar upon Barfield and Tolkien. But in that other conversation, even Tolkien, who has this beautiful, Aino Lindele is what it's called. It's this introduction of sorts to the Silmarillion that gives you the whole tenor, musical term, of what's going on there and how the creative event is inherently tied to a musical speaking into being. For Tolkien, this is a narrative, poetic, literary gloss on how he seems to imagine Let There Be. But of course, Let There Be is words, and for us, they're English. Bible scholars, it's Hebrew, but they're still words that are confined to peoples and places that are limited, right? In the sense that they represent the limited imaginations of what speakers of language do with words and the buckets that they form in our conceptual categories. And so what Tolkien does in the Ainu Lindelays, he then speaks of this creative event in which it's the music of the Ainur, these angelic beings, And we can talk about this again at some future time, the full robustness of it. But what I think is significant is his description. He calls it, it's like unto a chorus. But the language of like unto I think is deliberate for him because he's trying to decouple. He's trying to invoke the image that we think of that you were alluding to with a chorus, but trying to decouple it from any sense of the specificity of language where for him, there's a movement away from the poetic the moment we move to words, right? So we tend to know of poetry with words, and the poetry of words is different than the prosaic use of words. And one can use prosaic discourse and use them poetically, and one can use a poetic structure but be speaking prosaically, right? But the idea is that the poetic, whichever form that it's in, can do more. And yet even that more is limited by the conceptual framework, categories, allusions that are contained within those words, right? Even at the fullest expanse, right? So chorus-like is meant to invoke the idea of the chorus, and it's meant to then draw us to, but it wasn't a chorus, because there's something that music is able to do that can transcend the specificity of language, right? So you think about this, I think of actually Arab music. I don't know a lick of Arab or Arabic, but when I hear good Arabic music, it resonates with me. Right. And I'd imagine you could say something similar with any number of languages because the music is able to speak in a certain way that transcends even our comprehension of particular linguistic frameworks. And I think that's why both what Balthazar is doing as well, the direction he's taking it, um, But I think this is all relevant to us here because I think as an extension at the very least of this idea of love, if we're seeing this as love as a resonance and as an obedience, it's going to potentially move us when we're thinking of the city of God in a direction that maybe Augustine never had reason to conceptualize and maybe the church following him didn't, not maybe, I think they didn't fully grasp the possibility here. But what we can do is say, The city of God as a resonance and as a resonance that for us is tied to places and languages and therefore the cultures formed within them has multiple versions within it, right? We're not limited to having to reimagine what does it look like for the Christians to live under a Roman situation. First as people on the margins, then in the case of Augustine as someone who's now having to write something of an apologetic as to why the sacking of Rome wasn't Christian's fault. but also for us now to be thinking about in a totally different context with a totally different set of agencies involved in our political life. To imagine still something like what we're seeing in biblical discourse and in different layers of historical church discourse, but be able to say, we have to imagine something different, but it's still the same, right? I'm thinking here of the difference that Kevin Van Hooser makes between Not important to think of the Latin terms, but he uses ips and adem, identity or sameness, right? The one kind of sameness is static. It's just repetition, rote repetition. But the other kind is an improvisational sameness. It's working through it, being able to pick up the patterns, as we've talked before, of what's going on. What does it mean to feel out the margins? What does it mean to be able to embody the spirit or the breath of what God is doing now in this particular environment? and to love accordingly, right? With different sets of challenges, different sets of situations. Does that make sense?

00:26:38
Speaker 1: It does.

00:26:38
Speaker 3: And I actually think that distinction that you're making and that Van Hooser makes in his book is in part what we see in Hebrews 11, the Hall of Faith, right? Where you have all these different people. This is all recognized as faithful action, right? They're very different actions across a very long time period. We see something of this in the letters to the seven churches in Revelation, where Jesus comes down and is calling balls and strikes and saying, you know, you've epitomized faithfulness.

00:27:15
Speaker 1: You haven't.

00:27:17
Speaker 3: And really sort of driving those churches to come back and exhibit the sort of faithfulness that is necessary and commensurate with you know, the broader witness of the church. And so I think that's a really important aspect of this that, again, I, you know, I spent a lot of time over the last couple of years thinking through the whole Christian nation shtick, I'll call it, because I'm not sure I would call it a theology. I find it to be problematic on these deeper layers of Because we're applying a name to something, describing a nation as something it simply can't be. It's paradoxical by its very nature. The two things just don't fit. And so where we find ourselves, I think, in this moment is in deep confusion about what it really means to pursue the city of God. in the way that Augustine was talking about, to create this sort of attunement with God, this resonance that you're talking about from Balthazar, to have this sort of similar identity, although extremely different and distinct within the modern era, where we have a relatively high degree of tolerance for Christianity. We're not being persecuted in I know some people would argue that, but we're not being persecuted at all. We may be being poked with a stick, but we're not being stabbed with a spear. I just don't find that the persecution, at least in the United States, is really happening. And so where I think we've gone wrong is we've done something akin to what Howley did, which we've accepted the notion that, yeah, the United States can be a Christian nation. yeah, we can collapse the city of man and the city of God to a large extent. Probably people would not say the whole way, but I think they would say to a large extent, we can collapse those two, right? They might keep a distinction for more of a utopian notion of the city of God when Jesus comes back and all that kind of good stuff, sort of an eschatological city. But within time, yeah, we can kind of emulate the city of God as a nation, right? I think those are fundamentally flawed simply because of the things that we're talking about. The nation doesn't start in a love for God, and it doesn't live on God's terms. It's not attempting to attune to what God is saying in his revelations. Part of what we lose when we accept that notion is that the church is supposed to be a prophetic voice. The church is supposed to remind the governing authorities that they sit under God and that they are supposed to be attuning to his justice, attuning to his mercy, attuning to his governmental sort of authority and judgment. These are things that every government is supposed to do, but because they don't acknowledge Jesus has authority over all things on earth and on heaven.

00:30:35
Speaker 1: They often don't.

00:30:38
Speaker 3: And so the church is there to remind the governing authorities that they are not the highest authority, that they are under authority. And part of the way that we love our nations is not just, hey, let's go along with everything that is good about our nation and ignore everything that is bad, or let's make sure that our nation is making everything healthier rather than sicker. Those things may not, you know, making your nation healthier rather than sicker isn't necessarily a bad thing. But I think for Christians, we also have to love our nation and recognizing that there are people here who just don't acknowledge.

00:31:15
Speaker 1: Jesus as Lord. And no matter how.

00:31:20
Speaker 3: Good we have it, settling for wholesomeness as a substitute for holiness is just never going to cut it.

00:31:30
Speaker 1: And I think that the.

00:31:31
Speaker 3: Way that Veronica Ogle talked through this, I think your stuff on von Balthasar, you know, the way we're discussing love should push us toward something different as an entity within the United States, a group of people within the United States that not toward one political spectrum or another, but toward a love for neighbor that refuses to allow people to sit in a wholesome environment and assume that that wholesome environment is good enough. I've often talked about this as not allowing people just to be less lost, right? We push them towards some sort of morality We get some law passed. We ensure that some aspect of our society is better ordered and better attuned toward God's justice or what have you. And then we're just, we stop there. And that's what I would call getting people less lost. They're still lost. They're just close. They're closer than they were before. But I just don't see that as being the place that we as the church and as Christians can actually stop when we understand what the love of God is, when we understand what love of neighbor really is, when we understand what love of nation really is. It requires something different of us than I see us doing today. So I'll let you respond to that.

00:33:07
Speaker 2: Yeah, my response, in terms of the substance of what you're saying, I'm with you. My response maybe is I want to push to say that those things that you're hesitant to call theologies, I understand why. But I want to push to say we should call them theologies.

00:33:25
Speaker 1: Good. Yeah.

00:33:28
Speaker 2: Not meaning that they're inherently good theologies.

00:33:31
Speaker 1: Right.

00:33:32
Speaker 2: But maybe in the way that J. Cameron Carter uses that term pseudo-theologies, right? By which he just means they're theologies, they're false theologies. But what makes them false and what makes them theologies in some sense are the same and that's they are movements to order our loves yeah and this in some sense is the rub of where there is a contrast that is a is a contrast that can't the gap can't fully be closed right to the degree that one might say ideally the government does the work of bringing about justice the work that the government does is meant to protect the voices of the least, right. Or whatever sorts of things we want to put within that. The thing that we can't fudge is that there, the formation, the shaping of our loves, there's a gap between those two cities.

00:34:31
Speaker 1: Right.

00:34:31
Speaker 2: And I think Augustine got that. I think that's what false theology is getting at. And to the degree that there's, there's a battle, I would agree. There's not, there's not a context of persecution of Christians in this country. And I think I might take you a step further and say it's not... I don't even know that Christians are being poked. I think Christians have, you know, sort of done what my kids like to do, right? Deliberately pester and then get smacked. Well, stop pestering. If you get smacked when you're pestering, then that's your own painful lesson that you just learned, you know?

00:35:04
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:35:05
Speaker 2: And that's maybe a little harsh, right? There's sometimes... might be good reasons to quote pester but i think the mechanisms the ways of going about it the motivations are often less jesus inclined less city of god inclined and more um control the city of man force the city of man into the mold of making it into the sort of ways you represented senator howley's motivations you know but back to the pseudo theology let me say this real quick that Insofar as its attempt to shape our loves, there's a major difference in terms of the nature of the cities. The nature of the modern nation-state has a sacred function, a pseudo-sacred function. And it's an exclusionary sacred function. You cannot have a nation-state that's completely inclusively abounding. Conversely, the message of Jesus is open to all. And I don't mean that in some sense of anyone who says whatever they want is part of the kingdom that Jesus is proclaiming. I mean this in the sense of there does not need to be a remainder. Every single person, according to the strictures and structures of the ways in which Jesus is reorganizing creation around his own flesh, and doing so in this notion of weakness being the counterintuitive place in which we we find inclusion and love because weakness is the place in which we, we delegate. Is that a word? The opposite of elevate ourselves. And we begin to see ourselves as articulated in and through the other, right? Which means an elevation of those around us. The nation state can't do that because it's not its purpose. It is, it is exclusionary. So there's going to be inherent tensions that creates that necessary gap between the two. Now, again, it doesn't mean that those who see themselves as working towards the formation and shaping of loves for the city of God can't be involved in the city of man, but it does mean there's an inherent conflict of interest that creates a tension. And it's a sacred tension, right?

00:37:27
Speaker 1: Yeah, I agree.

00:37:29
Speaker 3: And I like you drawing in the false theologies. I mean, we've interviewed William Kavanaugh on the show, he wrote The Uses of Idolatry. He tends to sort of read these as false theologies, and I don't disagree with that. I think that as soon as we decide that the way our country is ordered is good enough, and I'll just use those terms, we're setting ourselves up to adopt portions of a false theology that that don't do us any favor as Christians. So let me unpack that a little bit. When I talk about it, I usually just shorthand it and say, we can't settle for wholesomeness when only holiness will do. Juergen Moltmann in Theology of Hope talks about sin in terms of complacency, of passivity, not an overt rebellion necessarily, but the way he phrases it is something like, an unwillingness to.

00:38:35
Speaker 1: Be what God requires.

00:38:38
Speaker 3: And I think that at times what we've done is we've accepted and adopted a false theology that then breeds this complacency because we're no longer shooting for what we should be shooting for, that sort of beatific vision at the end of time where we're standing in God's presence. What we've done is we've said, no, no, no, God would want us to be here. And God will be here with us. not because he's determined it, but because we've determined it. And I think that we get very comfortable and that comfort, that comfort and complacency then keeps us from really recognizing this as a false theology and breaking through to that sort of prophetic witness that we should be having within our nations. All that said, I, wanted to kind of key in on a little bit of what you said, like when you think about Jesus being available to all, yes, agreed. Then you think of nations as being inherently constrained by resources, by just sheer space, right?

00:39:48
Speaker 1: Special concerns. Right.

00:39:50
Speaker 3: You just, you know, sometimes you just can't fit more people in a room. And that's just all there is. There's a max capacity. And I think that as Christians navigate those lines, we have to be very careful to understand that for a civilization to continue running, there have to be hard choices made. At the same time, we should be pushing to make sure that those we encounter who are about to be displaced, we're being kind to. And I don't know exactly how to, I don't think there is a solution to that, but I think this is where sort of city of man and city of God wedge.

00:40:35
Speaker 1: Right.

00:40:35
Speaker 2: Right. I think that's the chasm that you can't, you can't conflate.

00:40:39
Speaker 3: You can't because to your point, and I think it's a really important one. That's why I'm coming back to it is, There's always room in the kingdom for more. It's not like Jesus had room for the 12 and not 13 or 14 or 15 and so on. He has infinite room. And so he just adds additions as people come on. Your nations, none of them can do that. They simply do not have the resources and capacity to care for an infinite number of beings. And so this is where we start to see that hard wedge. I think it's a crucial point in part because as we look at the Old Testament again, when we see the formation of Israel, so much about the Israelite law that was revealed, in my reading of it anyway, it's divinely empowered practice. This isn't wisdom that you can just pick up and move, right? God working within that setting makes so much of that possible. We can see it very clearly in things like the sabbatical year where God promises to give Israel, you know, two years or three years worth of crops in order for them to take one year off. We see it clearly there. I don't think we should look at that and say, that's the exception. The rest of this is just good everyday wisdom that we could execute without God.

00:42:09
Speaker 1: I think that's the wrong way to understand it.

00:42:12
Speaker 3: And so again, As we look at that context and we understand how integral God is as a sociological actor within the life of Israel, where he's actually present, where he's actually empowering these practices, where he's actually giving Israel the ability to carry out the law, not simply from a heart perspective, but from a practical perspective.

00:42:33
Speaker 1: He's going to make all of this work.

00:42:38
Speaker 3: I don't think there's another nation that has that potential. That was a covenant relationship with Israel. That was something special that he was doing with them to demonstrate to the rest of the nations that Israel had this wisdom and that their wisdom involved fearing the Lord, obeying his commandments. And that was going to make the nations curious. As we carry that into the New Testament and the formation of the church, I think what the church has now is.

00:43:08
Speaker 3: That same sort of capacity on a non-national level. We're a different sort of entity. And so we have always the capacity to welcome more people in, to care for more people, to do the things that would be commensurate with the city of God, whereas our nation simply doesn't. And I think that's, I don't know how to tease all that out in like the next 20 minutes, but I do think this is where the wedge sits. The church has capacity that the world doesn't, that the nation doesn't, because we have the Holy Spirit, because God is actually present with us in a way that he's not present with the United States.

00:43:57
Speaker 1: For the church to be.

00:43:57
Speaker 3: That distinct and that entity that knows God, that participates with God, that obeys God, that loves God in this way, opens up opportunities for us.

00:44:08
Speaker 1: It doesn't close them down.

00:44:09
Speaker 3: I think this is commensurate with a lot of our narrowing conversation with a lot of our assimilation and, you know, the diagnosis that we've sort of talked through, because what you begin to realize is that, you know, the God who can do abundantly more than we could ever ask or think is actually the God that Christians have accepted and embraced and are attempting to live according.

00:44:33
Speaker 1: To his rule.

00:44:35
Speaker 3: And when we do that, interesting things happen. We have different decisions that we can make because we're not dependent on the resources that we just have sitting in front of us.

00:44:48
Speaker 2: So it's worth dwelling on that wedge for a moment. And I hope that it leads us into... Ogle talked a lot about this notion of pilgrim or wayfarer, because I think these are significantly tied and one of the most powerful parts of understanding City of God logic, if you will. This idea of the wedge, as we're discussing this here, doesn't create an easy solution, right? And that might be probably one of the big takeaways, because I think we might be inclined to hear the way you're describing it just on an informational basis and say, well, then obviously the solution is fill in the blank, right? But I don't think it's that simple one way or the other, right? It requires the development of a theological imagination to say, what is it that the church, if we have infinite possibilities, and I agree, we have infinite possibilities, obviously within the realm of possible actions, right? Like the church isn't going to quite literally build a church on a cloud or something like that. But there's a possibility at play here. And that possibility, is the capacity by the very holy breath of God proceeding from the mouth of Jesus and filling our lungs and hopefully proceeding from our lungs to be able to do things that show that there's no remainder. So, while there might be limitations for a variety of reasons of the balance of the state, again, there's no limitations of the population possibility of inclusion at the feet of Jesus.

00:46:37
Speaker 1: So what is it that.

00:46:37
Speaker 2: We're called to do that might not align with what the state is able to do, or that might not align with certain senses, I'll call them little p politics, right, in the sense of what we strictly think of as politics these days, that might be within our balance in terms of big P politics, the ability to act in polity that doesn't have to register the kinds of barriers and and borders that little P politics does. And how might that influence that aspect of our big P politics as we engage with little P politics, right? Perhaps part of it is that we can put pressure on the state not to do things for us, though maybe sometimes that might be the case, but to empower us to be able to do what we know we should do, right? You know, a simple example of this might be what you've described before of There's a lot of attempts to make legislation regarding abortion, but very little attempts by the church to actually help women in need. Very little attempts to help children that are overflowing from orphanage situations and foster situations. That's a church problem, right? Why is it that we're not doing it? Is the work just advocacy, or is there actually a responsibility upon us? Or I think of, as we've mentioned before on this podcast, this often forgotten part of Galatians, right, where right after he talks about the Jerusalem council, James and Peter have sent him to be a minister to the Gentiles, he adds on that forgotten element of, and to help the needy, the poor, which I already do, right? We not only forget the, to help the needy and the poor, we probably often can't say, which I already do, right? And why don't we tag that onto Paul as something that ought to be imitated? Or, When we think about the deep racial divisions that are quite frankly geographic, right? We think about my beloved city of Chicago, right? As I just look out the eastern window of my home, it's one of the most segregated spaces on earth. And there's quite literally roads and highways that are built in order to maintain that segregation historically. Why does the church honor those boundaries? Why is the church building in spaces and buying in spaces historically? that's meant to reaffirm that kind of racial geography. These are the sorts of things that church has the capacity to overcome, right? And I think two of the sorts of things that William Kavanaugh, he mentioned things that his church is up to that are trying to reimagine these sorts of things. But there are possibilities even amid the chasm to be able to say the role of politics isn't to recreate the work of the church necessarily, though there might be things that they can do to help, right? Perhaps there are social nets that can be formed. But at the end of the day, perhaps Christians should be thinking less about legislating their ways and more of how the government or how little-p politics can help the larger polity Of what is actually the church's, not just responsibility, but blessed hope that they ought to be breathing forth into the world. And I guess what concerns me is that we don't often think of politics, little p politics, in terms of that big p polity of church's responsibility, church's mission, church's loves as the extension of the very love of God in Christ.

00:50:08
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:50:09
Speaker 3: Been sort of captivated by Oliver O'Donovan's, he makes this statement in The Ways of Judgment, I believe it is. And he says that the governing authorities don't lose their identity once Christ is crowned king, but that once Christ is crowned king, their identity shifts and changes. It's resituated under that new authority. And so what he talks about is the governing authorities are a secondary witness to to the judgment primarily of God. And so they are gesturing toward reflecting in some way, shape, or form the justice that God is to bring. But they're doing it as a secondary theater. And the implication is the primary theater is what?

00:51:00
Speaker 1: It's the church. We're supposed to be exercising these things.

00:51:05
Speaker 3: But I love that notion of And I don't think he would necessarily construe it this way. But the idea of the church is first. We're Christian first. We're whatever nation we happen to live in second. And so we need to be thinking, to your point, little p polity, the politics of the nation, who's going to represent us, who are we electing as president, you know, who gets to be a senator, who gets to be a judge, whatever that is. Those really are secondary issues to a big P polity that Christians are to coordinate around within the boundaries of a given national setting. And so we can properly speak of the church in the United States and the way that that polity, that big P polity is coordinated together in order to influence public life, thus politics. The politics of who gets elected, what laws are passed, what policies are passed, that's not trivial. But we have to put it in its proper place and scope it appropriately. Because if we continue to lean on it as heavily as we are, it's going to break. I love the image. I believe it's in Isaiah, and I can't remember exactly the verse, but there's this warning not to lean on the bent reed of Egypt because it will break.

00:52:39
Speaker 1: And pierce your hand.

00:52:41
Speaker 3: And I feel like that is being patterned right now on a lot of what we're seeing in dependency of politics and even the importation or importing of notions like Christian nation onto the United States. You know, Christian nationalism does this an awful lot. And I think it's wrongheaded maneuvers like that that are gesturing toward the fact that we're leaning too heavily on the broken reed and eventually is going to pierce our hand. When the strategy really should be coordinating with one another, becoming a churchly polity within the United States that now has a shared sense and understanding of the way that the world works and and can begin influencing the rest of society from the standpoint of Christ, from the standpoint of discipleship.

00:53:43
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:53:44
Speaker 2: And I think that actually, in this remaining time, maybe gives us an opportunity to then reflect on the wayfarer idea or the pilgrim idea. I've largely come to the significance of that in Augustinian thought through Aquinas, who was deeply But this notion of pilgrim then sets forth, I think through Kavanaugh, he does a wonderful job again of describing this, that the pilgrim is not the same as the tourist. The tourist goes somewhere and the goal of that something is to take my experience and have my experience enriched.

00:54:26
Speaker 3: I go to.

00:54:29
Speaker 2: In my case, I prefer to go to a wonderful historic site or a place of natural beauty. Maybe someone else prefers the sunny beach, right? And just relax on the beach. Whatever it is that you're thinking of for a vacation, as a tourist, your goal is not to go and integrate with a place and to receive that place into yourself as having been open to it and then to bring that experience back. Your goal is to take yourself there and to have yourself enriched in order that you might come home more yourself. The pilgrim, by contrast, as Kavanaugh points out, is on a pilgrimage, is entering into a space not for one's own enrichment, though in fact gets enriched because the place that the pilgrim goes to is about opening oneself up to the significance of that place and allowing that place to change you from the inside so that you might then be able to enrich the places around you because you have been changed by it, right? Rather than what you are going to a place to impose yourself. Now, I'm not saying don't go on vacation and don't be tourists, though maybe Kavanaugh is. Maybe we should have asked him that. But what I am saying is that as we think about this chasm again, to begin to think less in terms of citizenship, right? You and I are citizens of the United States. We have certain rights that come with that, certain privileges that come with that. We have certain baggage that comes with that. But the goal is less to think in terms of what are my rights and what are my privileges and what are my baggages with that citizenship. It's more to think in terms of as I also have that citizenship, what might my ultimate polity of seeking to further and be formed by the loves of the city of God be? What might that enable me to enter in as a pilgrim into another space in order to be able to see this space as a place ripe for transformation? In this case, not because I'm transformed, hopefully, by Washington, D.C. Let's just give a little peapolitics name to it. But rather that I might be able to enter into that place carrying back with me what I've already received on this pilgrimage into this hope of the blessed assurance of something better, right? That that's more, that's eternal, that, that reflects the loves that are ordered for the thriving of all with no exclusion, with all possible inclusory, right? Possibilities. Does that make sense?

00:57:12
Speaker 1: It does.

00:57:12
Speaker 3: And I'll, I'll throw this in and I know we're getting close to time, so we won't be able to delve into this necessarily, but I wrote a piece a while back on, and I, I compared, I talked about Las Vegas and I said, Las Vegas is probably the most honest place in the United States because it's not giving any, it's not giving any artifice, right? Um, come to Las Vegas and you get to see the New York, New York, the fake New York, New York, the fake Paris, the fake, you know, you get to, you get to eat food from around the world. That's all sourced right there from Vegas. Um, um, You know, it's a place of excess. It bills itself as a place of excess, and it's not pretending to be anything but a place of excess was.

00:57:59
Speaker 1: Sort of my point.

00:58:01
Speaker 3: I think the, and it's not like, oh, Vegas is full of virtue then, and we should all just gravitate there.

00:58:07
Speaker 1: No, that's not what I'm saying.

00:58:09
Speaker 3: What I'm saying is that if we look at Vegas and we say, okay, that's the most honest place in the United States, what we have to admit is that all these other cities, all these other places that we go, We need that pilgrim mentality because they're deceptive.

00:58:26
Speaker 1: They're going to try to pull us into.

00:58:29
Speaker 3: Something that we shouldn't be pulled into and that we really don't want to be pulled into. We want to be there as a blessing to that place, as opposed to having the experience of that place and allowing the experience of that place to just form us with no governors around it. As the pilgrim, we go in and we are looking to benefit that place. And as we do that, as we go out on this pilgrimage, it seems to me that being a pilgrim, that analogy that you're drawing out, is a much.

00:59:10
Speaker 3: I'll use this term, although I'm not sure I really mean it, safer way to travel. Because we have a clarity of vision about what it means to be a pilgrim and what we're trying to do in a given place. it gives us additional resources to resist what that place is trying to do to us that would turn us from being pilgrims into citizens or turn us from being pilgrims into tourists.

00:59:39
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's the sort of thing I was trying to say. I think you said it much more succinctly. Thanks for that. I think one final thought from me that relates to this. I've been thinking a lot about the provision of God and you mentioned piqued it again in my mind when you mentioned just the reality that what the church has is the inexhaustible reality of the Holy Spirit that we draw from and that enables us. This Holy Spirit, this Holy God that gives us of His own abundance, that speaks in Psalm 23 of filling our cups to overflow, though we have walked through the valley of the shadow of death. This is a promise that's amazing. And I think we're very ill equipped to see it. So I was talking to a friend the other day and I was expressing how through certain trials in my own life, I've actually come to a place in which I have less anxiety over things like finances. Right. Um, then I once had, and I was relaying some experiences in which, um, I have no recourse to explain provision, but by saying God did this, right? Some pretty incredible things that were just blew me away and that set you at ease. But what's remarkable to me in this notion of provision is that while it's easy to gravitate towards the financial element of it, the nature of provision in scripture is is rarely actually straight financial. Now, we live in a world of this technology of the financial that's meant to carry within it the potential energy of what we can then use it for for a variety of things. And in that sense, it makes sense to think of provision in some sense like that. But it's really much richer and deeper, right? You think about the sheer absurdity of Elijah in the midst of a famine, a famine that's been brought about by the unfaithfulness of Israel, being led by God to this secret brook that he's able to drink from, while crows bring him food.

01:01:45
Speaker 1: What?

01:01:47
Speaker 2: And that comes right before he goes to the woman of Zarephath, and God then blesses that woman by allowing her jars of oil and grain, not to overflow, but just to never run out until the harvest comes. There's a provision in there that I think we have not enough audacity to expect from God, and that I think that speaks to the atrophy of our own resonance with God, that faith muscle, right? Our understanding of the sheer abundance of the love of God. We're too worried about minimizing the chasms and playing by certain rules because we're worried about, will we have enough? Will we have enough money for our church doors to stay open, for institutions to stay open? Will we have enough on my own individual play? Will I have the relationships be fulfilling to me in the way that I want them to be? And arguably, and so this gets back to that conversation with a friend, one of the things he said to me was, you know, it's interesting to see that when he works with an organization in what many people think of as the developing world, which I don't love that language, but that's maybe for another time and place. But what he said is that Christians there he find far less anxious, even though they quite literally every day are thinking about what's the next thing they'll get. But there's been such a development of that faith muscle that the Lord does, in fact, provide, regularly provides. And it's not this occasional thing. And as a result, the anxiety just isn't there. And there's a joyfulness there, right? And he said that to me. And I just thought, to a certain degree, through the things that I've had to deal with, I can understand that. And I haven't even had to understand it to that degree. How much more can this faith muscle be developed? where it's not just simply let go and let God, that sort of thing, Jesus take the wheel. It's that I'm active and faithful and present with the things that are before me today, not anxious, knowing that the Lord will be faithful. And I think that pilgrim's mentality can be deeply enriching then as we think about how to operate with that big peapolity and not reduce it all to the little peapolity while still being engaged. This isn't a call to Amishness.

01:04:04
Speaker 1: Right, right. No, there is something....

01:04:08
Speaker 3: I wrote a little piece on the Lord's Prayer, you know, give us this day our daily bread. There's something freeing about just asking for what you need that day.

01:04:19
Speaker 1: And I think it would produce.

01:04:25
Speaker 3: That mentality, maybe not that reality all the time, because I realized that people do lack, right? So I don't want to be flippant with that. But I think the mentality of saying God will give me what I need for the day would really draw us away from the sort of anxieties we tend to exhibit around little P politics. It would just change the way we think about it. And that is, again, sort of to draw us back and close this out. I think that's what Augustine is talking about when he's talking about the city of God. It's those sort of ideas, that deeply enmeshed sort of notion where we are immersed within the love of God and learn to think and act and respond in the world differently than a love of self could ever cultivate. And I think Veronica Ogle pulled that out beautifully in her episode. I think we've talked around it and to it today. And I'd just encourage listeners, if you didn't listen to the episode with Veronica Ogle, I'd just encourage you to do so.

01:05:34
Speaker 1: Pick up her book. The link to that is in the show description. And I think you'll really enjoy it.

01:05:39
Speaker 3: It is an academically written book, but I found it sufficiently accessible as a non-Augustinian expert. You may have to Google a few Latin terms, but you'll get there. Nothing wrong with Googling Latin. But this has been a great conversation and I think a fitting one as we continue our Faith and Politics series. So thanks, Ashish. Appreciate the conversation. Thanks, everybody, for listening. And we'll catch you on the next episode of Thinking Christian.

01:06:08
Speaker 1: Take care.