Editorial: Thinking about the common good?
Anna Rankin

From the director: Untold stories
David W Porter

Faith and Politics After Christendom
Jonathan Bartley

Comment: Doing the Right Thing
Karen Jardine

Give Generously and Change the World?
Alwyn Thomson

Economics and the Common Good
Esmond Birnie

Interview with Jim Wells (MLA): Polishing our Cars
Anna Rankin

Review: No Longer Strangers
Mercia Malcolm

Division and Diversity: Churches in a plural society
Fran Porter

Buying in - Opting out
Sean Mullan

Interview with Fr Mariusz Dabrowski: Meet the neighbours
Anna Rankin

Questions & Answers: Reader survey responses
Anna Rankin

Review: Mark: Gospel of Action
Allen Sleith

Bible Study: The Common Good
Donal McKeown

Difficult Conversations: Let's talk about tax...
Lynda Gould

New Resource
Out of the Depths

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Not long ago, I was staying in a small cottage in rural Wales with some friends and family. In the absence of a television before which to throw ourselves of an evening, we dug out an old board game of Monopoly. I am quite a competitive person, and soon found myself setting aside any ideas of the common good. I attempted to drive my friends, and even my wife and children, out of business. But as the game progressed, I began to realise that this was not going to be easy. For every time someone looked as if they were about to go under, my best friend would slip the potential bankrupt a small loan or a property at a greatly discounted rate. And then of course when my friend himself looked as if he was going to lose his own money, those he had helped were only too happy to reciprocate.

Faith and Politics After Christendom

WHEN I HAD RECOVERED from the frustration of seeing my plans for urban domination thwarted, I realised what a wonderful illustration this was of how Christians are called to engage in the world around us, but often with a different set of values. We are called to play the games. But we don’t always have to play by the norms – or even by the rules.

The theologian Walter Wink has pointed out that when the New Testament talks about being “in the world, but not of the world”, “world” (kosmos in the Greek) is better translated “system”. We are to be in the system, but not of the system. This is not a call to opt-out of our work for the common good. But nor is it a call to simply follow the techniques, patterns and approaches of everyone else to the welfare of society. It is a call to get stuck in to the world around us in new, creative and sometimes subversive ways.

A common history
The challenge that Christians have wrestled with for the last two thousand years is how to do that effectively. How can churches participate in society and contribute to the common good, while being faithful to their vocation as communities of faith that challenge the values and assumptions of that same society?

But while the central question has been the same, the context in which it has been asked has changed drastically down the ages. Scholars have pointed out how many early Christians saw themselves challenging and subverting the norms of society and its institutions. What the system implicitly presented as “the common good”, was not necessarily what Christians believed it to be. Despite the importance of Pax Romana, many Christians could not, for example, join the army because they would have to take part in idolatrous practices. Jesus too had told them to love their enemies, not kill them. Their views on children, slavery and gender divisions sometimes overturned family norms, not to mention patterns of inheritance, which were seen as fundamental to a stable society. It is little wonder that many early Christians were seen as a threat to society – rather than contributing to its wellbeing.

All this was soon to change, however. Following Constantine’s conversion to Christianity, and the subsequent Edict of Milan, the Christian faith was brought to the heart of the Empire. In the words of Stuart Murray, Augustine and others had to do some pretty “nifty theological footwork”. The church was now aligned with the same empire that put its saviour to death. It now had to justify its part in the waging of war, imprisonment, slavery and torture. It found itself defending the social order as much as challenging it. What the church saw as the common good became much more closely aligned with the empire’s understanding of it.

Of course, this was all long before Thomas Aquinas took Augustine’s, (and before him, Aristotle’s) conception of the term. But it is vital to note that the Christian conception of the common good has been profoundly shaped by its Christendom context. It is a concept shaped by power and privilege. It has often implied a paternalist approach. It implies that Christians have control and influence. Often it has been synonymous with social engineering.

A common future?
But now that is all changing. The churches find themselves in a time of seismic social transition. And this means that old assumptions underlying the tension between being in the world but not of it are being questioned by both churches and state.

For the first time in perhaps 1700 years in Western Europe, Christians are losing their positions of privilege and power in the context of religious plurality. The Christian story is moving from its place at the centre of society to the margins. The churches are a minority rather than the majority. They are feeling far more like sojourners in a foreign land, than the settlers of Christendom. Old assumptions are being challenged and we are entering as yet uncharted territory. Indeed, the churches are returning to a place which resembles far more the situation of the early Christians.

The recent row over gay adoption, in the context of the Government’s Sexual Orientation Regulations, made it clear that whilst society is still willing to accept the involvement of church in public life, it is no longer happy to accept special conditions that churches have so often sought to negotiate for themselves. Society is saying to churches that their vision of the common good is no longer the overriding one. And if Christians want their work for social welfare to be funded by the taxpayer, they must adhere to democratically derived values and norms determined by a society beyond the church doors.

Some have suggested that this means that the churches are being excluded from public life and their ability to contribute to the common good is diminishing. It is argued that churches cannot subscribe to the equal opportunities policies and practices which would enable them to continue to receive taxpayers’ money, without compromising their consciences.

This may be true for some. But Christians down the ages have certainly worked out ways of addressing such difficult issues. “Just War Theory”, for example, was an attempt to square the Christian idea that taking another life is always evil, with the fact that Christians have taken control of armies, and indeed were members of them. The church has always had to deal with the problems of how to work with states that are at odds with Christian values. These problems are, at one level, nothing new.

But what is new is the awareness of the problems of trying to align the church’s ideas of the common good with those of states and empires. And indeed, this could be seen as a very healthy development.

As already highlighted, within Christendom Christians had to deal with the dilemma of how to square the radical teachings and example of Jesus with their new alignment with governments. They did this in a number of ways. Some appealed to the Hebrew Scriptures for political models and ethical standards, rather than the Gospels, which were too hard to handle. Some privatised Jesus’ teachings saying that they could only apply to the personal, not the political. Others applied Jesus’ ethics to clergy only, saying that laity did not have to live up to them and could therefore be the ones getting their hands dirty. Others suggested that Jesus’ teachings applied only to the world to come, not to the here and now.

But, of course, none of these approaches satisfactorily resolved the dilemma posed to a church committed to following Jesus which was aligned with privilege, power, war-making, imprisonment and torture – practices that always have been thoroughly alien to the gospel of Christ. The new context, however, provides opportunities for the church to pursue a conception of the common good based far more on the radical ethics and example of Jesus and the Kingdom he proclaimed.

But in order to take that opportunity, Christians will also need to let go of their desire to control, and embrace the glorious freedom that the gospel brings. And this is a challenge which many as yet, seem unwilling to accept.

Another example that cropped up during the recent debates over the government’s Sexual Orientation Regulations was the claim that Christian owners of guesthouses would be unable to refuse accommodation and hospitality to gay couples. It was said that Christians should be able to refuse goods and services to people whose behaviour they felt was sinful. Such a perspective clearly rests on old ideas of the common good which say that Christians should be able to call the shots, and impose a blueprint of “the good society” on others.

An alternative vision of the common good, however, is to look to how Jesus engaged with the society around him, and addressed similar issues. When Jesus ate with the immoral and unjust was he endorsing sin? When he turned water into wine did he consider that people might get drunk? When he fed the 5,000 did he do a quick survey to make sure that there were no gay or lesbian people there to whom he might be offering hospitality? Did Jesus perhaps qualify the parable of the banquet by compelling only those whom he considered moral in the highways and byways to come to his table?

The answer to all these questions, of course, is a resounding “no”. Whatever our views on homosexuality, or for that matter peace and war, Christians can be united in the belief that the Kingdom of God is about glorious hospitality, about abundant grace, about freedom and love which makes the first move and invites a response. But it also means recognising that these things are political and public values as well as private ones.

This, inevitably, means risk-taking, and requires the church to move from a mentality of control to the liberation of witness. But only then will the churches be able to square the apparent tensions between working for the common good and being faithful to their vocation.

But while churches hold onto a desire to impose a morality on a population, albeit for the best of motives, they will continue in their frustration. Indeed, they will shut themselves out of public life. The challenge for the churches is to reimagine how to play the game of public life in a new, subversive way – not walk off in a huff because they don’t like the new rules.

JONATHAN BARTLEY is the founder and co-director of Ekklesia, http://www.ekklesia.co.uk, a Christian think-tank based in London, and is a regular writer, public speaker and commentator on television and radio.

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