CHRISTIANS DO NOT RULE AND RULERS ARE NOT CHRISTIAN

A beautiful post considering the role of "Christians" in government and politics on The Shining Wire blog:

Much of the outrage has been focused on Rev. Chandler's position, or implicit suggestion at any event, that one party is more godly than another, or that it is more godly to support President Bush than the Democrats, and that true Christians will be found in one camp and not the other. Democrats have seen this as yet another example of the ongoing conservative assault on them as "godless Libs" and a growing "American Taliban" or "Jesus jihad." The critics' main thrust has been to maintain, and argue for, a separation between religion and party affiliation, to uphold the view that one can be a good Christian and be either a Democrat or a Republican.

However, there is another view that is, well, more extreme, and that is that a "Christian" does not participate in, or uphold, the state at all - either as politician, soldier, policeman, member of a jury or as a voter. This view is based on Christ’s teachings, and has support in writings of the early Church fathers. In somewhat more recent times this view was passionately advanced by the Russian novelist, Leo Tolstoy. His argument why a Christian does not rule, and why rulers are not Christian, is excerpted below.

In what follows it is important to recognize that what Tolstoy means by "Christian" is one who acts in accordance with Christ's teachings, not one who knows or believes that he has been saved by the blood of the Lamb, the latter apparently (judging by the phenomenon of warmongering "Christians") being a solipsistic, perhaps narcissistic, pre-occupation that appears to have little, if not an inverse, correlation to the actual practice of Christ's teachings. I can only surmise that Luke 6: 46 is not much propounded from the pulpit, or read for self-instruction.

Read the rest and read Tolstoy's The Kingdom of God Is Within You.International Phone Cards