The Golden Ass

FREEDOM

Do you take Free Will or the freedom of choice to be essential to relationships with God, a spouse, a local community, or a nation where said relationship would otherwise be dominated by manipulation, coercion, violence, or tyranny? Do you "believe in every American's right to have their own way of life, so long as it doesn't infringe upon the rights of others"? That sounds reasonable to me. If you're Christian, do you thus associate the coming of the kingdom with freedom, strength, and prosperity as compared to pressure, manipulation, and necessity? Do you most essentially imagine the establishing of the kingdom of God as a people destined to to be free to choose God and to love Him? Do you also then associate the repression or limiting of that freedom with the work of the Evil One and the facilitation of freedom with the coming of the Kingdom? I could see that.

After all, we don't know exactly what the Kingdom will look like in the end, right? But, we do know, if anything, that God isn't a tyrant! So, if you identify as Christian, do you get irritated, frustrated, angry, or even enraged if you imagine laws being passed by "liberals" that place limits around gun rights, increase taxes, or appear to police free speech in order to protect special interests? If God made us free, then He empowers us to forge our own destiny! I tend to get get pretty deeply irritated when people dictate to me how I'm going to live my life, particularly in ways that violate my values.

I was having a conversation recently with a Christian friend of mine who thinks, imagines, and feels exactly this way. He does not consider himself to be specifically anti- or pro- American. But, because of the above noted way of thinking, feeling, and imagining, he takes the U.S. Constitution - because it protects freedom - to be of vital importance to the Kingdom. He said this:

"I think Kingdom government is from within to without with Jesus Christ enthroned in our hearts and as that seed (Christ the Word) breaks through the husk into the soil (thoughts, emotions and imagination) and with the right nutrients, water and sunlight it grows into outward manifestation and bears fruit. This happens individually and collectively throughout the body. So it's initially an inward Kingdom but eventually grows into outward manifestation(abundant, overflowing life, the building of a new society). Government can't make this happen but can repress or facilitate it's growth."

I think he shares a common sentiment. He's not alone. He's articulating the way we commonly tend to imagine the initiation and spread of the kingdom in the world. The common problem, however, is that kingdom doesn't start "within our hears." So, it's not an initially "inward" kingdom that grows to "outward manifestation." Not only do you not find this idea in the scriptures, but it's not what actually happens.

PERSONHOOD

The kingdom starts, and started, with the person of Jesus. And, Jesus isn't an generalized, metaphysical abstraction that enters, unsensed, into the heart. Jesus is Jesus INCARNATE. And, speaking of "seeds," Jesus "planted" the church in the form of his band of disciples. All of this seeding and growth of the church is interwoven physical and spiritual all the way through. Spiritual and physical are not one separate from the other at any point in the coming or growth of the Kingdom.

As far as the question of "government" goes, this person Jesus who "planted" the church is King. And, he crowns us with his glory by, in his grace, giving us a share in his inheritance. That's "government." We're "a kingdom of priests." So, there is no EXTERIOR "government" that "can repress or facilitate...growth" of the kingdom that starts from within. The church IS the "government." And she has been all along, ever since Pentecost. Scripture is pretty explicit about this, too. John 1:

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was in the beginning with God. 3 All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being 4 in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it."

Of course, "the Word" referenced there IS (primarily, at least) THE PERSON OF JESUS. Not some internal seed in our hearts (at least not primarily). Also, notably, more to the direct point being addressed, some translations articulate verse 5 as:

"The light shines in the darkness,
and the darkness CAN NEVER extinguish it." (NLT)

Or, I have also seen it translated as, "cannot overcome it."

David Bentley Hart's transliteration reads: "And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not conquer it," so that kind of speaks both to the difference between the translations and the point directly being addressed in our conversation (that "there is no EXTERIOR 'government' that 'can repress or facilitate...growth' of the kingdom").

STORIES

The scriptures tell a story of the church in the midst of / "versus" the world rather than a story of government vs. humanity. Paul constantly speaks of the way of the kingdom in comparison to the way of the world. Jesus often tells his disciples, "You know that the Gentiles...but it shall not be so among you..." So, we have two different stories being told here:

1. Humanity vs. Government. We are citizens of a nation with a government, with or against which we have a relationship characterized by either freedom or tyranny. The kingdom of God is planted with invisible seeds in our hearts and grows outwardly to physical manifestation in the world. As such, it is coming in the future, and maintaining of freedom is essential to it. The limiting or tending to that freedom by the government is thus the repression or facilitation of the Kingdom of God.

2. Church vs. "the world." We, as Christians, ALREADY embody the Kingdom of God. We already know that "the world" and its powers are going to have problems with another authority that claims to rest on divinity. The Kingdom is the reign of the living person of Christ in and through his church. As such, embodying and enacting the Way of Christ in the midst of the way of the world is essential to making Christ and His kingdom known to those who don't know Christ and submit to His reign.

Here, it becomes important to note that the primacy of the narrative of government vs. humanity was EXPLICITLY "planted" by -and NOT UNTIL - the Enlightenment. There were lots of stories told prior to the Enlightenment, but they weren't of "government vs. humanity." And, that's because, prior to our modernity's "freedom" or "liberation" from their oppressive social bonds, people identified themselves in relation to their social bodies, the figureheads of whom served as their representatives, leaders, and guides. People may have had problems with particular unjust Kings, but that wasn't a question of government vs. humanity in the abstract.

OUTSIDE

In our minds and hearts, we may see ourselves as attached to the principle of freedom rather than to the particularity of the American social body and her Constitution, but this leaves a number of elements of the Enlightenment worldview embedded into our Christian kingdom, perhaps unawares.

For one, we tend to identify with principles that are unique to our (kind of) social body but, at the same time, imagine ourselves attached not to any said particular social body. Prior to the Enlightenment, this would have been not only unimaginable but undesirable:

"There is...the sharpest contrast between the emotivist self of modernity and the self of the heroic age. The self of the heroic age lacks precisely that characteristic which we have already seen that some modern moral philosophers take to be an essential characteristic of human self-hood: the capacity to detach oneself from any particular standpoint or point of view, to step backwards, as it were, and view and judge that standpoint or point of view from the outside. In heroic society there is no 'outside' except that of the stranger. A man who tried to withdraw himself from his given position in heroic society would be engaged in the enterprise of trying to make himself disappear...

The exercise of the heroic virtues thus requires both a particular kind of human being and a particular kind of social structure. Just because this is so, an inspection of the heroic virtues may at first sight appear irrelevant to any general enquiry into moral theory and practice. If the heroic virtues require for their exercise the presence of a kind of social structure which is irrevocably lost - as they do - what relevance can they possess for us? Nobody now can be a Hector or a Gisli. The answer is that perhaps what we have to learn from heroic societies is twofold: first that all morality is always to some degree socially local and particular and that the aspirations of the morality of modernity to a universality freed from all particularity is an illusion; and secondly that there is no way to possess the virtues except as part of a tradition in which we inherit them and our understanding of them from our predecessors...If this is so, the contrast between the freedom of choice of values of which modernity prides itself and the absence of such choice in heroic cultures would look very different. For freedom of choice of values would from the standpoint of a tradition ultimately rooted in heroic societies appear more like the freedom of ghosts - of those whose human substance approached vanishing point - than of men."

- Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (pp. 126-127)

"It is in this capacity of the self to evade any necessary identification with any particular contingent state of affairs that some modern philosophers, both analytical and existentialist, have seen the essence of moral agency. To be a moral agent is, on this view, precisely to be able to stand back from any and every situation in which one is involved, from any and every characteristic that one may possess, and to pass judgment on it from a purely universal and abstract point of view that is totally detached from all social particularity....This democratized self which has no necessary social content and no necessary social identity can then be anything, can assume any role or take any point of view, because it IS, in an for itself nothing....The self thus conceived, utterly distinct on the one hand from its social embodiments and lacking on the other any rational history of its own, may seem to have a certain abstract and ghostly character."

-Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

I don't think we really do stand outside ourselves the way our American, Enlightenment habits would have us imagine. As I see it, what instead functionally ends up happening is that that individual choice that is presumably made from outside the system ACTUALLY becomes the SOCIAL BINDING of our individual selves to figures and systems of thought of a particular social faction that exists within our larger system (democrat vs. republican, etc). Individual citizens believe they are freely and autonomously choosing a set of policies or beliefs, but then you have Trump conservatives aligning themselves with things and statement that are contradictory to that which they aligned themselves with 20 or 30 years ago - because they aren't actually freely choosing a system from outside of it but binding themselves to a particular social body. The most obvious example of this is the deep concern Christian conservatives had for the character of their political leaders then as compared to now. I suspect that "liberal" / democrat Christians wouldn't have tended to be on the Bernie train 20 years ago, either.

So, when we imagine that we are attached to the principles of a social body (principles such a freedom and economic growth) without attachment to the particular social body itself, the story we are telling ourselves about "humanity vs. the government" is embedded with an element of "outsidedness" or generality that is itself foreign to any elements of stories people told about themselves prior to the time when people started telling the PARTICULAR story of "humanity vs. government." That's a "modern" story.

As moderns who see things systematically from outside of them, our being is bifurcated between, on the one hand, the speculative eye doing the seeing and, on the other, the objects or systems being seen (whether objects of the human self and identity or objects in and of the world). When human history built this problem upon the well cultivated soil of humanity’s urge to grasp knowledge for ourselves rather than entrusting ourselves to our Master who knows and fashions us, God came to be imagined more readily, easily, and primarily as an external object of our speculative knowledge rather than as the One “in whom we live and move and have our being.” As G.K. Chesterton says: "For the moment we have a view of the universe, we possess it."

Modern modes of studying and teaching such as inductive bible studies and expository preaching can and should clearly be helpful. They have their place. But, they also tend to perpetuate this second modern element of the story of "humanity vs. government," which is that of dualism. From outside the text, we possess it. From outside our homes, the government threatens to take our guns.

We Romantically imagine the freedom and leisure of our inner spiritual or intellectual life, hopefully liberated from any particular social bonds. But, the freedom of our inner, spiritual seed is hopelessly constrained by suffocating, exterior, physical, and social forces of tyrannical coercion. Our very image of the growth of the kingdom is modeled not simply after the person of Jesus and the history of his church but, rather, after deeply symbolic, modern, psychological, theoretical models for individual human sexual repression of inward freedom by external constraints, out of which we seek and desire a liberated flourishing.

“In the ancient world, one read to be persuaded to live in a particular way, in contrast to modern practices of reading where one typically reads to be informed.” – K. Jo-Ann Badley and Ken Badley, Slow Reading, Reading Along Lectio Lines. In our dualism, the Word, our freedom, and "government" are all abstracted, conceptual principles about which we are informed in our mind or spirit. Once informed speculatively, we then, separately, apply them out into the physical world.

So, this reading “to be informed”, by which we commonly and habitually practice and are thus trained into our dualism, implies precisely the speculative distance discussed by Alisdair MacIntyre in After Virtue. Our modus operandi is predominantly from a kind of disenchanted and dispassionate disengagement, a place of fundamental dis-interest. Our detached outsidedness is thus inherently interwoven with our imagined dualistic structure of the universe that separates object viewed from viewer of object, inside from outside, spiritual from physical, heaven from earth, Word from heart, and Jesus from the globe.

Our particular American image of freedom thus depends on and necessitates our exile, our outsidedness. Imagining ourselves outside our particular kingdom here becomes essential to imagining ourselves inside the Kingdom of God. Keep in mind that, by contrast, I told another story where the Christians don't stand against the government but, instead, the church IS the government, where we actually embody the kingdom of God.

INSIDE

I find it a strange coincidence that we could possibly ever be inhabiting a story of the coming of the Kingdom while also, at the same time, inhabiting a story whose most essential elements - so essential that, without them, we would have an entirely different story - wasn't told until the very century in which the American Revolution just so happened to occur. The American Revolution has become a story of an interiority of angry colonists, against the odds, winning their freedom from a exterior, tyrannical empire. My deep irritation at people who don't live like me dictating to me how I'm going to do so typically comes with glorious imaginings of righteous victory against them. I might have been known in the past to have enacted this fantasy with something as simple as a "strongly worded email" at work. :P "How dare those external, physical, socially bound tyrants infringe on my righteous, internal, spiritual freedom!"

The story of Jesus, on the other hand, is that of a falsely accused criminal, who, in the entirety of his embodied person, had every right to fight, instead submitting to a tyrannical empire in order to hold a mirror up to it. Can you imagine King Jesus here demanding the freedom of his right to carry a gun? There is no interior Jesus and exterior empire. There is only God's flesh revealing how the empire's ways are not those of God in the same shared territory where the two crash together. The physical murder of God is the empire's claim on their territory, which, being an empire, is that of the whole world. The physical resurrection of God - the tomb was empty, after all - is God's flesh claiming that same territory with a victory that the imminently rational Second Amendment can't even begin to fathom.

The kingdom starts with the person of Jesus. And, Jesus isn't an interior, metaphysical abstraction that enters, unsensed, into the heart of man liberated from the social bonds of the exterior empire. Jesus is Jesus INCARNATE, establishing social bonds of his own. In fact, the love that constitutes those bonds is precisely how he said he would be known through us. In his love, by which we embody his person and enact his Way, he told us a parable of a small seed, known initially by a rogue band of young disciples who were passed over by other rabbis, victoriously growing into a glorious mustard tree. He didn't mention anything in that parable about the repression of that free growth by external forces. The whole point of the parable is that the tree grows to the size it does because that's the nature of the tree in the first place.

There is another parable of seeds that fall on different kinds of ground that can come across as though external socio-political forces can facilitate or repress the growth of internal, spiritual seed. The seed there, however, is the very person of Jesus speaking to his audience rather than a disembodied concept in their minds. Physical and spiritual are actually interwoven all the way through. There are other warning of "wolves" who will come among them and devour them, or of weeds that will choke out the growth of healthy crops, or of birds that come along the hard soil and pluck up the seeds, but these are questions of our competing allegiances, of our temptations to bond to the world's socio-poltical bodies in order to gain their particular version of freedom, power, prosperity, or opportunity. Those parables are not of a "spiritual" seed in planted in the free interiority of the heart; our dualism does not compute in the imagined world of Jesus' parables. Physical and spiritual are interwoven all the way through. The real threat to the kingdom of God we embody and enact isn't outside our homes but inside it.

God's particular image of freedom depends on and necessitates our belonging, our acceptance, not only of God's love and of one another, but of our whole personhood together, as an inextricably interwoven unity. Immersion inside the kingdom is essential to being inside kingdom.