In these last three weeks a number of pieces in Chimes have argued about whether or not we, as Americans, should endorse the giving of foreign aid to other countries. I have no problem per se with the arguments of these pieces, but I take issue with the authors’ claims that these arguments portray a ‘Christian perspective’. That we see ourselves as Americans before Christians is exemplified in this kind of language; it is telling that we can only apply a ‘Christian perspective’ over an American worldview, but never an ‘American perspective’ over a Christian worldview.
That myself and the speakers I am in dialogue with are Americans is not a fact that escapes my notice, but I take it that for us to live as Christians in America is to live in constant tension with the ways that America is seeking to form us contrary to the formation of the Church. This means that to talk politics as a Christian requires disciplining our speech according to the politics of the Church, a discipline which my conversation partners have demonstrated they lack.
It is not my conversation partners’ fault that their speech about politics is undisciplined by the politics of the Church, for to do so chiefly requires training in how Christians speak. This training is a practice of the Church we call catechesis, a task that Protestants in America have almost wholly abandoned. I shall not get into the reasons for why this has occurred here. All that needs be said is that when the speech of Christians is not formed by the training catechism offers, it slips into sentimentalities, which can be simply defined as speech more determined by America than the Church.
The first lesson of a good catechism is to teach us who we are as speakers. In Reformed catechesis, this beginning sounds like this: “I am not my own. I belong, in body and soul, in life and in death, to my faithful savior Jesus Christ, who watches over me in such a way that not a hair can fall from my head without the will of my Father in heaven. Because I belong to him, Christ makes me wholeheartedly willing and ready from now on to live for him.”
I have indulged in extended quotation because these words provide us with a paramount example of disciplined Christian speech. Imagine a people deeply formed by such language. Is this a people who would use the rendering or restriction of AIDS relief as a means of coercion? Is this a people who sees the ending of such aid as an opportunity to expand a nuclear arsenal, or build weapons of war?
When we are reminded of what it is to ‘speak Christian’, the ‘Christian perspective’ of my conversation partners begins to break down. The nation-state is clearly not the subject of the parable of the good Samaritan, nor is it the subject of Paul’s chastisement of the Ephesians in the first epistle to Timothy. To put a finer point on it, anyone who uses Scripture in the way that my interlocutors have underwrites a fundamentalist mode of reading Scripture. Fundamentalists believe that when the Word is opened, the interpretation of its contents is immediately available to the reader. This is what allows Joe Toly to use 1 Timothy 5:8 to underwrite Christian nationalism. When we are taught by the Church to read scripture better, we can understand that Paul is chastising a group of Christians who have decided to sit and wait until the heavens and the earth are rolled up like a scroll. This reading does not just fall out of the verse; it requires a community holding us to read scripture not in the way we want, but in a way that will help the catechumen to understand the liturgy of the Church.
Having realized that a Christian answer to this question is not going to be given from my conversation partners, it is up to us to imagine what a catechized person might say about the rendering and restriction of foreign aid.
I referred above to the politics of the Church, and that they have something to do with Christians being able to say something about foreign aid. The politics of the Church understand the nature of power to be inverted from how the world knows it, an inversion made possible by and manifest in the cross. The world sees the grotesquery of the crucifixion and curls its lip in disgust, while the Church cries ‘Christus Victor’, ‘Christ Victorious!’ Christ’s victory on the cross has made possible the creation of a people who can bear witness to an alternative to the violence and coercion of the world.
For the purposes of this discussion, this means that the Christian’s first task is not to create public policy, even on foreign aid. For us to seek to shape public policy is to allow ourselves to be drawn into and shaped by conversations about whom the liberal democratic nation state should coerce. Let us thank God that the victory Christ won on the cross has made us free from being shaped by such conversations. In this freedom, God has given us interesting work to do, work that takes place in the gathering of his people around a table, eating a feast given to us in his sacrifice. Let us discipline our speech and learn to speak in the new grammar of power he has given us in his body and blood.
