O Holy Night is an indisputable Christmas classic. It is one of those songs which awakens a sense of peace, solemnity, and dozing by the fireplace. And like all pieces of great art, its lyrics and melody are better known than its story and meaning.
It feels like I experience Christmas differently each year. The Christian calendar seems to be designed that way. Our lives are constantly shaped by the Word and the world. This constant flux reorients and reforms the way we relate to these annual holidays.
This Christmas, as I suppose would be typical of a writer for a column on faith and politics, I have focused especially on the possibility of political theology. That is, how can a transcendent and eternal God care about an immanent and temporal world? It is the same question that the psalmist asks God, what are mere mortals that You care about them so? (Psalm 144:3) How can God lay claim on not only who we ought to be, but on how our relations, institutions, and systems should be structured?
Political philosopher Raymond Plant, Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Philosophy at King's College London, explores this question in Politics, Theology, and History. The main question Plant takes up is the place and role of religion (and Christianity in particular) in liberal society. ("Liberal" does not mean the cheap culture war sense of liberal versus conservative. Rather, it means a society that protects freedom of conscience, thought, and religion, and promises equality under rule of law, etc.)
To draw out the question of how political theology is possible, we draw out Plant's own concerns.
For Plant, the crucial conflict between politics and theology is that they belong to different realms. Politics deals with the nitty-gritty and ever-changing realities of human life. Humans struggle against each other, or with each other to deliberate about what to do and how to do it. Who will receive resources? Who will be excluded?
Theology on the other hand deals with universal truths about God, at least in its classical frames. God is eternal, meaning that He is outside of time. Because He is eternal, He is unchanging. God is perfect love, light, and goodness. This is markedly different from the realities that we live.
The separation between Creator and created has led to no lack of philosophical speculation. How can such a God coexist with such a world? There is the problem of evil at least as old as the philosopher Epicurus: how can an all-good, all-capable God create a world with such suffering? There is also the possibility of Deism: would not a perfect God remove Himself from imperfect affairs?
The French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau formulated a political critique of Christianity along these lines. Rousseau argued that before the universal theism of Christianity, gods were particular to each tribe. As Rousseau writes in The Social Contract, "The gods of the pagans were in no sense jealous gods; they divided the governance of the world between them. Even Moses and the Hebrew people sometimes lent themselves to the idea by speaking of the God of Israel." [1]
Indeed, we see these dynamics throughout the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament. Those familiar with the Hebrew Bible will remember that each nation had its god. And the military success or failure of that nation was proof of the greatness or falseness of their god.
Some scholars like Mark S. Smith in The Early History of God argue that Israel pre-exilic was polytheistic. Other streams of scholarship like the more conservative Michael S. Heiser's The Unseen Realm argue against this view. Regardless of where one falls on this issue, it is clear that passages like Deuteronomy 32:8-9 clearly refer to a tribalistic religious system where peoples are governed by their own more-than-human forces.
In contrast, Christian theology is not anchored in a nation, but in an assembly (Gk. ekklesia). The people of God are not a nation-state, but a universal, transnational and transtemporal Church. Christianity does not preach a god of a tribe, but a God of the universe. Can such a theology be political?
Plant directs us to the prophets as the clearest example of making political theology possible. Throughout the Hebrew Bible, the prophets consistently call Israel back to its covenantal obligations of welcoming the foreigner, caring for the orphan and widow, and doing justice in their land.
Plant argues that the covenant is the foundation of the common values that Israel shares. The prophets do not speak on their own authority or charisma (as scholars like Max Weber have often depicted prophetic authority). Rather, their authority and weight are wholly founded in the covenantal obligations that already exist which Israel always neglects. As Plant writes, "the prophets used their understanding of the relationship between Yahweh and Israel as the basis for an internal critique of Israel's moral and political performance." [2]
The problem here, though, is that prophets like Amos not only prophesy judgement against Israel, but also against the nations. Here, scholars like John Barton in Amos' Oracles Against the Nations argue that the prophets appeal not to Israel's covenant, but to a more universal higher law. This is what is often referred to throughout Christian tradition as "natural law."
Plant draws out the dilemma as such. Adhering to a particular view of prophesy, Plant writes, "would imply that a modern Christian political theology . . . would be addressed to those within the common understanding of the Christian faith community." However, if prophets draw from universal law, "a political prophetic office for the modern church would allow it to speak for what might be taken as an assumed moral order which all persons of good will might come to accept." [3]
The reader will immediately see the ways that these types of political engagement play out. The first way is held by those who believe that it is not the job of Christians to impose Christian values onto non-Christian people. They are less likely to legislate morals they agree with, as they recognize that true obedience comes not from coercion but from transformation of the heart.
Those who hold to the universal view may seek to legislate or normalize Christian morality. While only God can change the heart, perhaps it is better for society to have laws and norms based on Christian values.
Yet, we are only talking about prophecy. The advent of Christ changes the picture completely. He is the one that both the Law and the prophets pointed to (Matthew 5:17-20). We now return to O Holy Night.
This classic song was written not by Christians, but by an atheist named Placide Cappeau in 1843. Its music was composed by Adolphe Adams, a Jewish composer. Originating in France, it was imported to America by a universalist and staunch abolitionist named John Sullivan Dwight.
The third verse in Dwight's translation goes as such:
Truly He taught us to love one another;
His law is love and His Gospel is Peace
Chains shall He break, for the slave is our brother
And in His name, all oppression shall cease
For me, these lines brought clarity. Whether the prophets grounded their political criticism in the covenant or in a universal higher law, they all anticipated Christ, the rod of Jesse.
Christ's birth is the universal God entering our world of particularity. As scholars like Joachim Jeremias have shown so well, Jesus did not shirk His Jewish culture. Nor did He ignore the plights of the lower class that He was born into (He was a carpenter's son from a run-down village).
The Christmas story is powerful because the King of the Universe was born in a manger. It is no coincidence then that Christmas songs like O Holy Night are unabashedly political. Even songs like We Three Kings or O Come Emmanuel foreground Christ's Kingship. And it is this Kingship that calls to account every power under heaven, calling time on oppression. Christ's birth, which the despot Herod tried to stamp out in his massacre of the innocents, already made corrupt rulers fearful of the imminent victory of His rule.
When O Holy Night arrived in the US, it became an anthem among Christian abolitionists. They recognized the political implications of Christ's birth. May the politics of the Incarnation remain alive in us today. Christ is born!
Christ's birth bridges the gap between God and humanity. We evangelicals are used to thinking about this in individualistic terms. But we should also think about the Incarnation politically, too. Christ not only came to save you and I as individuals. He also came to be the nexus between the politics of heaven and the politics of earth.
Too often we reduce Christian political engagement to prophecy as if we are awaiting Christ's birth and not His second coming. We make ourselves out to be prophets of the court: established voices who should lead our nation's civil religion, enforcing Christian values culturally and politically over our civic neighbors. Or we make ourselves prophets of the wilderness. We are the conscience of the state and a critic of the people. Often times both of these approaches lead us into the false belief that our earthly home is in covenant with God, and we mistake our nation for biblical Israel.
We must remove ourselves from the prophetic paradigm. Although we can draw inspiration from the prophets, they belonged to a different age than we do. We live in-between the Incarnation and the second coming. The Church bears witness and remembrance to Christ's birth in Bethlehem even as it anticipates Christ's return and reign. What we are to do in the in-between is rather different from the job of the prophets.
If Christmas is the birth of Christ the King, it is also the birth of Christian political theology.