More recently, Ronald Sider and others in the US have been writing about the ways evangelicals can engage with public policy. Across much of continental Europe, the Christian Democratic parties, built on a philosophy with Christian roots called 'Personalism', continue to exercise a significant and sometimes dominant political influence. The problem is that each of these approaches is producing very different policy agendas. Which should we follow?
The biblical foundation for action
There are two issues to consider. The first is the biblical foundation to be used. Those who follow Kingdom ethics find their authority and content in the teaching about the Kingdom of God in the New Testament.
In contrast, those who follow 'Creation ethics' base their ethics on the norms explicit and implicit in the early chapters of Genesis. The difficulty is that neither provides very much guidance about the agenda for political and social transformation. So is there anywhere else we can look?
The Jubilee Centre has argued that biblical law, rightly interpreted, provides both a framework and an agenda for social reform. Since God is a trinity of persons perfectly joined together in love, he is a God concerned above all else with the way we relate to him and to one another. This God took a nation, Israel, who had hard hearts (Matthew 19:8) and revealed to them in a particular historical and geographical context how they should order their political, social and economic lives.
Then, later, he sent his own Son to provide the possibility of forgiveness to heal broken relationships and to show what a perfect relational life would look like. This story of revelation, with all of its ups and downs on the way in Israel's history, provides the raw material for us as Christians today to work out a response to the political, economic and social issues which press upon us. It provides the basis for a political agenda.
From principle to policy
There is, then, the second difficulty to overcome. If Christians wade into the ocean of politics with their 'Christian solutions', when even the best policy prescriptions take us two steps forward and one step back, how will the public distinguish between the good news of the gospel and flawed political answers?
