A. What my intent is not - Let me make clear that my goal this evening is not to discuss the narrow issue of a particular political platform or ideology. Indeed I will touch only lightly if at all on matters of current political controversy.

B. What my intent is – My hope instead is to take a step, or perhaps 10,000 steps back, from the political issues of the day to ask the question, “As Christians how are we to view the purpose of politics in relation to our fundamental obligation to give glory to God.”

I am the first to admit that this is no easy question and in fact I believe that there are a variety of appropriately orthodox answers to it. Furthermore, I would readily admit that the question itself invites a wide variety of interpretations as to what the question is really asking and the choice one makes about how to understand the question will dramatically impact the answer. For example is this a question for individual Christians or for the Church as an institution; or is this a question about what it means to be a Christian living in 2008 in a The United States; or a question about what is true for Christians in all places and at all times.

C. Bottom Line Up Front - Given our limited time and my limited abilities I am going to limit myself to one particular way of seeing the question and will only suggest one possible, tentative answer.

Before I frame the question any further let me go ahead and give you my suggested conclusion in the form a quote from Robert Kraynak in his important book, Christian Faith and Modern Democracy, “We must learn to manage the enduring tensions of the Two Cities, keeping our hearts open to the beauties of the heavenly city while seeking the best possible arrangements of the earthy city and recognizing that the two orders will not be reconciled until the end of time. Living with the tensions of dual citizenship is a more difficult task than assuming an inevitable convergence of Christian faith and modern democratic life, but it is the only honest course for the pilgrims of the earthly city.”

I hope to spend the remainder of my time hear fleshing out Kraynak’s point in the hope that by the end of the evening we will have a fuller understanding of at least one responsible way to answer the question set before us.

II. The Two Cities

A. “We must learn to manage the enduring tensions of the Two Cities”

1) What are the two cities?

The fundamental idea is well stated by Calvin (also influenced by Luther’s distinct Two Kingdom thehology) who wrote in his essay “On Christian Liberty”, “Man is under two kinds of government – one spiritual, by which the conscience is formed to piety and the service of God; the other political, by which man is instructed in the duties of humanity and civility, which are to be observed in an intercourse with mankind. They are generally, and not improperly, denominated the spiritual and the temporal jurisdiction…”

2) What are the enduring tensions?

a) The earthly city, the city of man, are those who live after flesh, whose affections are directed toward love of self and of glory, yet able through the imposition of power to impose temporal peace.

b) The heavenly city, those who live after the spirit, whose affections, by the grace of God, are directed toward God and his glory, and thus through God’s sovereign power able to obtain eternal spiritual peace.

The enduring tension between the two cities is founded then in contradictory affections.

B) So what is the relationship between these two cities in tension?

Back to Kraynak again “keeping our hearts open to the beauties of the heavenly city while seeking the best possible arrangements of the earthy city.”

Augustine himself in “The City of God” put it this way, “The earthly city, which does not live by faith, seeks an earthly peace … the well ordered concord of civic obedience … the combination of men’s wills to attain the things that are helpful to this life. The heavenly city …makes use of this peace only because it must, until this mortal condition which necessitates it shall pass away.”

The point of contact between the two cities is the ability/need for the city of God, operating as pilgrims in the temporal realm, to make use of the peace produced by sound administration of the city of man, to aid in the advancement of the ultimate goal of beatitude (enjoyment of God). In this limited sense the City of Man may act as an aid in the task of “keeping our hearts open to the beauties of the heavenly city.”

C) Now on to Kraynak’s next point “recognizing that the two orders will not be reconciled until the end of time.”

Here is a crucial recognition, that this beatitude that we seek, and to which the peace produced in a well ordered City of man can be an aid, will have its ultimate fulfillment in the age to come.

A proper understanding of this point teaches us a crucial lesson; the lesson that it is a great error to place too much hope in politics or politicians. We must avoid a politics that is utopian and Gnostic in the sense that it claims some secret or hidden knowledge that will lead to the perfect society via political action. We might say that a politics of this type suffers from an over-realized eschatology; the promise of heaven on earth. Conversely, when we set before ourselves a politics of limited ends it opens the way to the practice a politics of humility and prudence recognizing that regardless of the success of any particular political program we will still live in a world of sin and death, where the inaugurated Kingdom of God is not yet consummate.

With respect to this idea of practicing a politics of humility I would note, as a friend of mine Steve Samson from Liberty University recently reminded me, “We need to bring the talents of many people into focus to ward off the temptation to reach for godlike power.”

A politics of humility must acknowledge the complexity of human society. And in doing so must take into account the reality that prudent change may by the means of social preservation. Part of the role of the humble and prudent Christian in the political realm is to be a defender of tradition, while making allowance for social development. Along these lines author and intellectual historian Russell Kirk quotes approvingly from Burke as follows: “We must all obey the great law of change. It is the most powerful law of nature, and the means perhaps of its conservation.” He further notes that “Prudence and humility allow us to discern between salutary organic development and disruptive social mutation.” D) Kraynak’s next point is, “Living with the tensions of dual citizenship is a more difficult task than assuming an inevitable convergence of Christian faith and modern democratic life”

I’d like to consider here the question, “what is the nature of this tension in the modern western world?”

T.S. Eliot, in his 1939 book The Idea of A Christian Society said this about the “tension of dual citizenship.”

“The problem of leading a Christian life in a non-Christian society is now very present to us, and it is a very different problem from that of accommodation between an established church and dissenters. It is not merely the problem of a minority in a society of individuals holding an alien belief. It is the problem constituted by our implication in a network of institutions from which we cannot dissociate ourselves: institutions the operation of which appears no longer neutral, but non-Christian. And as for the Christian who is not conscious of his dilemma – and he is in the majority – he is becoming more and more de-Christianized by all sorts of unconscious pressure: paganism holds all the most valuable advertising space.”

Eliot goes on to suggest that, at least within the city of man, the Christian who does recognize his dilemma must not seek to use temporal authority to create “a society consisting exclusively of devout Christians.” But rather, “a society in which the natural end of man – virtue and well being in community – is acknowledged for all, and the supernatural end – beatitude – for those who have the eyes to see it.”

We can see Eliot here recognizing the basic two city dichotomy, and picking up quite directly on the Augustinian ideal (familiar to us from our own shorter catechism) of beatitude as the ultimate or supernatural end for the members of the city of God. And while his call to virtue in the temporal real may be more ambitious than Augustine’s own hopes for that order, his call for “well being in community” fits nicely within the more limited aspiration of a temporal realm where a community of affections is made possible by a well ordered civic life that preserves peace within the social realm.

III. With all of this in mind let me suggest the following:

A. The basis for our engagement in the public/political life of our community might be thought of as emerging from the Burkean notion that it is true to say both that God willed the State, and that he did so for limited ends.

It may be that an understanding of the vital yet limited role of politics is the great contribution that Christians can make to the political process. As those who do not believe that the temporal order is the only order, who do not believe that material needs are the only needs, and who do not believe that men may recklessly do as they wish with human patrimony we offer a distinctive voice.

We have no great reason to think that this voice will be oft headed, but as those who recognize the limited role of politics we can in one sense offer that voice all the more boldly, confident that the inevitable ebb and flow of political fortunes in the temporal realm is by no means the end of the story.

Returning to Eliot for a moment I think he was thinking along these lines when in his “Thoughts after Lambeth" he wrote, "The World is trying the experiment of attempting to form a civilized but non-Christian mentality. The experiment will fail; but we must be very patient in awaiting its collapse; meanwhile redeeming the time: so that the Faith may be preserved alive through the dark ages before us; to renew and rebuild civilization, and save the World from suicide."

Eliot here points us in a direction that Pope Benedict has frequently picked up on in his adaptation of historian Arnold Toynbee’s concept of “creative minorities.” Back when he was just a Cardinal he put it this way, “the fate of a society always depends on creative minorities, Christians should consider themselves a creative minority of this kind and contribute what they can so that Europe can recover the best of its inherited patrimony and thus be useful to the whole of humanity." The role of Christians in the political process is in many ways that of a “creative minority” preserving and developing the forgotten truths of our patrimony. Among these truths is the ability to see ourselves as members of the community of souls, joined in perpetuity by a moral bond between the living, the dead and those yet to be born.

A crucial aspect of our role as a ‘creative minority” is the exercise of the moral imagination. In his biography of T.S. Eliot, Kirk describes the moral imagination as “the power of ethical perception which strides beyond the barriers of private experience and events of the moment. The moral imagination aspires to the apprehending of right order in the soul and right order in the commonwealth.” Without moral imagination the exercise of prudence is an impossibility. It is the moral imagination that allows us to prudently apply eternal principles to contemporary realities; to find our way forward toward reform that develops organically from unchanging verities, rather than a rash effort to remake the world in our own image. I hope in what I have said so far I have given some sense of the limits and possibilities of Christian engagement in the political process. But I’d like to conclude by giving a bit more focused consideration to the notion of just what government is for.

Returning yet again to Kirk, I would join him in suggestion that for Plato the State was an association of wisdom and virtue, the focal point of human aspiration; for Aristotle a community of friendship reconciling private interests for the greater good.

But Augustine, who I think got it correct, rejected these notions on the sensible grounds that the State is ruled by men who are themselves subject to sinful appetites that lead inevitably to a corruption of the political order. Yet Augustine also taught that the State is necessary. Its necessity is grounded not in its ability to make men virtuous, but in its divinely ordained role as a restraint against vice that leads to social disorder or even anarchy.

The state exists to limit our natural propensity for violence against ourselves and others, for defrauding rather than loving our neighbor, for engaging in all manner of vice, some more public some less, but which all gnaw away at the social fabric necessary to make life tolerable in this world of sin and death. In short the State exists to keep the peace. When the State ventures beyond this role, however benevolent its intent, the result is not the preservation of peace but the imposition of tyranny. It is in this sense that Gerhardt Niemeyer can say "Augustine is the intellectual father of the concept of limited government." Of course, Augustine's limited view of the City of Man must be understood within the context of the City of God, which too must and (praise God) will fulfill its ultimate role of beatitude for those who have eyes to see.

In our own time political thinkers like Robert Kraynak, and even Alexander Solzhenitsyn have pointed a way forward along Augustinian lines. The State is legitimate, but it forfeits that legitimacy when it exceeds its limited ends by claiming all sovereignty for itself or when it refuses to perform its proper ends by wrongly ceding temporal authority to a theocratic Church. At either of these extremes the State ceases to be legitimate because it ceases to fulfill the role for which it has been ordained by God. Between these extremes of secular totalitarianism and religious theocracy there is a great deal of room for human prudence. That having been said it is neither foolish nor craven to develop from these sound principles the notion that the State is most legitimate when it acts to restrain men from their vices and is, if not illegitimate, at least less legitimate when it acts to venture beyond this boundary line, instead seeking to create a heaven on earth via the mechanisms of State direction and control.

With this framework in mind it is then a matter of prudence to determine what specific State action is legitimate in a particular place and time. And now, the light touch of contemporary politics I mentioned at the outset. While all of this may seem a bit removed from the life of practical politics in the State of Kansas; but I would suggest to you that it is not. Indeed these ideas stand at the center of what I take to be the most pressing issues confronting our state at this moment; preservation of the traditional family, restoration of respect for the sanctity of life, and reigning in a capricious judiciary bent of pursuing a political agenda in contravention of the rule of law.