I'm going to play around with this thought of politics for a bit. My current course deals with the book of Galatians, and we've been having a fun row discussion about what exactly the thrust of the book is and what Paul is arguing against. I raised the whole question of gospel and what implications are carried by understanding the gospel in a political sense, meaning that to proclaim the gospel is to proclaim Jesus as Lord. The more I think about it, the more I believe that this framing of the gospel cracks Galatians wide open as a radical political text - but that's going to be my next post. For now, I think I want to lay out what it is I mean when I speak of the gospel, Jesus, or Paul as political. It's not in the normal sense of the word, at least as it's used commonly in American English (one of my favorite oxymorons).

Typically when we think of politics, we think of governments, of parties, of voting and legislation and such - at least those of us whose contexts are first world democracies. Persons from other cultural contexts might think in various other frames of reference, some of which might also carry over into particular groups within democratic societies, namely those of oppression, of violence, of corruption or possibly even revolution. (I've heard it said, and I don't recall where, that democracies are governments that simply plan their revolutions. In America, we have the potential to overthrow our government every two, four, or six years, or at least we would if the candidates weren't always cut from the same cloth, no matter the label. But I digress.) My point is that the active frame of reference for the term "politics" is typically government - but that's not the sense in which I'm using the term, at least not broadly, although government is certainly subsumed in my larger reference.

There are two specific definitions identified at dictionary.com that I think are helpful for describing the terms in which I'm attempting to position the gospel (references available at the site). Politics can be thought of as the often internally conflicting interrelationships among people in a society or similarly as social relations involving authority or power. It should become immediately evident what I'm getting at by referring to the gospel as significantly, perhaps even fundamentally, political. It's my contention that the intent of Jesus as demonstrated repeatedly in the gospel was not only to face death on the cross - although his death and resurrection certainly provide the central event around which we can interpret the rest of his life and ministry. But my point is that the life and ministry of Jesus were not incidental to his purposes, that he wasn't simply biding time until the cross. I think that it's fairly self-evident by even the most cursory readings of the gospels that Jesus intended to create a new community, a new people, marked by a new approach to being people in community and characterized by a radical, subversive approach to authority and power. If this contention is true, and I am fairly confident in it, then what we must recognize is that the gospel calls us, as participants in and members of that very community, to follow in the footsteps of Christ in our relationships, in our approach to authority and power, and in our understandings of citizenship and politics in the more traditional sense.