How the Gospel Changes Our Politics

An extended reflection on Augustine’s City of God, a look at a little-known spinoff from Augustine’s work, and a consideration of how the church might function as an alternative politic

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Does God favor particular nations or empires over others? Are political endeavors and military conquests more likely to succeed if a national leader appeals to the right deity? Can acknowledging a deity cause a particular nation to gain divine blessings above and beyond other nations?

Most likely, your answers to these questions land somewhere between, “Not exactly,” and, “No way.”

A few of you might answer in a way that recognizes the unique place of Israel in God’s plan, but you also recognize this favor doesn’t extend to any nation other than Israel.

If I’ve correctly described the range of your responses, the ways that you responded reveal the degree to which the advent of Christianity revolutionized the world.

At one time in history, the assumed answer to each of those questions would have been, “Of course!”

The gospel obliterated that assumption.

How the Gospel Changed Politics

The gospel of Jesus Christ produced an expression of faith that was different from anything that anyone had experienced before. The gospel led to a way of believing and acting that was not rooted in a common ethnicity or civic order, as other expressions of religiosity had been. A Roman soldier in the first century might have practiced a mystery religion such as Mithraism, but this same soldier would simultaneously have sacrificed to the civic gods whose goodwill sustained the Roman Empire. Although persons from other nations could convert to the ways of the Jewish synagogue and Jerusalem temple, these practices were inextricably entwined with an ethnic lineage that traced back to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

In contrast to these other expressions of religiosity, the way of Jesus was grounded in a common confession and shared sacraments that formed communities of faith which excluded allegiance to all other deities. What bound this community together was not allegiance to the same civic order or ancestral lineage. This new household was bound together by a common confession, baptism, and way of life. The church itself was both a political entity and a family, with practices of worship and faith that were untethered from shared allegiance to any common civic order or ancestry.

But old assumptions don’t die easily.

Particularly after Christians became recipients of imperial favor in the fourth century, it was easy to slip into the venerable assumption that—if the empire paid homage to a particular deity—that deity would bestow special favors on the empire. In the minds of many, imperial allegiance to Christ meant that Christ would prevent any harm from coming to the Roman Empire.

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Doubts about the Gospel after the Fall of Rome

The Visigoths put this assumption to the test when they sacked the city of Rome in the year 410. Only a quarter-century earlier, Christianity had been declared the religion of the Roman Empire. How could the Christian God allow the fall of the Eternal City, a calamity that the ancient deities seemed to have prevented?

Two different theologians in the early fifth century gave different answers to this question.

If you’ve read anything I’ve written before, you already know the name of one of these theologians: Augustine of Hippo. The other name—Paulus Orosius—is probably less familiar to you. What I intend to do in this post is to explore how the differences between these two theologians might help us to think more wisely about our own challenges today.

Orosius’s History against the Pagans

Paulus Orosius was born in the closing decades of the fourth century in western Europe—perhaps in the northern reaches of the region now known as Portugal or possibly on the peninsula of Brittany, no one knows for certain. Sometime after the Visigoths sacked Rome, Orosius traveled to North Africa to meet with Augustine while the great bishop of Hippo was still in the process of penning his apologetic masterpiece The City of God against the Pagans. By 415, Orosius was wending his way to Bethlehem to talk with Jerome about some pressing theological topics. Orosius planned to return to western Europe, but he stopped in North Africa on the way home and never left.

Around 417, Orosius published History against the Pagans. This sweeping and somewhat superficial seven-book survey of world history was produced in response to a comment that Augustine had made during a conversation with Orosius. Here’s how Orosius recalled his discussion with Augustine:

You asked me to reply to the empty chatter and perversity of those who—aliens to the city of God—are called pagans [pagani] because they come from the countryside [ex pagis] or heathens [gentiles]…. These people… charge that the present times are unusually beset with calamities for the sole reason that people trust Christ and worship God while the idols are increasingly neglected. (Praefatio, Historiae adversus paganos)

Orosius seems to have seen his own work of history as a sort of supplemental spinoff of Augustine’s The City of God against the Pagans.

To understand the relationship between these two works, think of Augustine’s undisputed masterwork as George Lucas’s undisputed masterwork, the original Star Wars trilogy from the 1970s and 1980s. Now, consider the History against the Pagans by Paulus Orosius as Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. In both instances, the spinoff is not nearly as epic as the work of the master and it’s probably not quite what the master envisioned, but it fills in some gaps and it’s definitely worth your time.

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To comprehend the distinctions I will describe between Augustine’s The City of God against the Pagans and Orosius’s History against the Pagans, it is necessary first to gain at least a rudimentary understanding of the function of religion among the Romans. For ancient Romans, the purpose of religion—religio—was to secure divine blessings for the established social order. Sacrificial propitiations increased the likelihood of health and victory while reducing incidences of plague and military defeats. The empire would only flourish, it was believed, when the deities of Rome remained rightly appeased according to the venerable temple rites.

When Christianity became the preferred practice of the empire near the end of the fourth century, many people seem to have transferred these assumptions to their worship of Christ. Once this perspective was transferred to Christ and to the empire that now gave him preferential treatment, it was unthinkable that Christ would allow Rome to fall. When the Visigoths plundered Rome, these individuals faced a crisis that was not only political but also theological. For centuries, the cultus deorum had secured the wellbeing of Roman state. Now, in the people’s time of need, Christ had failed to protect their political order or their beloved city. An illustrious lord named Volusian asked Augustine’s friend Marcellinus whether Christianity—with its insistence on forgiveness and turning the other cheek—might actually be incompatible with politics and statecraft.

Augustine’s The City of God against the Pagans

It was in response to this theological crisis that Augustine of Hippo described a possibility in The City of God against the Pagans that differed radically from the perspective that had been passed on through generations of pagans.

In Augustine’s thinking, Christ has secured and now sustains the wellbeing of a particular political order, but this Christ-sustained political order neither identified with nor bound to any human power or empire. It is “the City of God,” which has never been limited to any political system or structure beyond its own. Every human political system is simply one more manifestation of “the Earthly City,” and every expression of the Earthly City is doomed from its inception due to an infection from the universal disease known as libido dominandi (“lust for dominance”). This is as true of empires and systems that seem good as it is of those that appear evil, though libido dominandi may be more apparent in some than others.

To put it in terms of Star Wars, it’s not only the Galactic Empire and the First Order that are infected with libido dominandi; it’s the Rebels and the Galactic Republic too, though this lust may be more apparent and dominant in the Empire and the First Order than in the Rebels and the Republic.

Here’s how Augustine describes the difference between the City of God and the Earthly City:

Two cities have been formed by two loves: the earthly by the love of self, even to the contempt of God; the heavenly by the love of God, even to the contempt of self. The former, in a word, glories in itself, the latter in the Lord. For the one seeks human glory; but the greatest glory of the other is God, the witness of conscience. The one lifts up its head in its own glory; the other says to its God, “You are my glory, and the lifter up of mine head.” In the one, the princes and the nations it subdues are ruled by the love of ruling; in the other, the princes and the subjects serve one another in love, the latter obeying, while the former take thought for all. The one delights in its own strength, represented in the persons of its rulers; the other says to its God, “I will love you, Lord, my strength.” (De civitate Dei contra paganos, 14:28).

The City of God mingles with the infected systems of the Earthly City, but the divine city must neither be confused with nor wedded to any earthly order.

Christ cannot serve as the patron of any empire, nation, or state without distorting the message of the gospel and diminishing the nature of church. In this, Augustine was being faithful to the Scriptures and to the doctrine of the church that Christians had developed on the basis of Scripture throughout centuries of persecution. The kingdom of Christ is “not of this world” (John 18:35–36). Since Christ’s kingdom is not bound to any earthly realm, his followers are “strangers and exiles” on the earth (1 Peter 2:9–12), and the purpose of the civic state is to promote civic order, not to become the patron of any particular religion (1 Timothy 2:1–2).

The Curious Contradiction between Augustine and Orosius

Despite his close association with Augustine, Orosius did not share Augustine’s point of view. This is somewhat puzzling because Orosius sincerely seems to have seen what he produced as a supportive supplement to Augustine’s work, which leaves us with no fewer than three possibilities.

1. Did Orosius read the first ten books of The City of God against the Pagans—very recently published at that time—and misunderstand what Augustine was arguing?

2. Did Orosius develop his History against the Pagans on the basis of a conversation with Augustine, without having carefully studied Augustine’s written work?

3. Is it conceivable that our perspectives today have developed in such a way that we glimpse more space between Orosius and Augustine than they saw between themselves?

My inclination is that it’s a little bit of all three of these possibilities. In my view, Orosius did not thoroughly study Augustine’s work, and he interpreted the portions he did read in a manner that matched his own assumptions. At the same time, we exist on this side of the Peace of Westphalia and the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, and this historical perspective shades how we perceive what we read. The differences between Orosius and Augustine probably seem sharper and starker to us as heirs of classical liberalism than the differences did to either of these two men.

What Orosius attempted to argue was that Christ had, in fact, favored and sustained past political structures when they conformed to his will.

When Rome practiced righteousness in the past, God blessed the empire in a cause-and-effect manner, even before anyone declared the empire to be Christian. A second-century Roman skirmish with the Germanic tribes resulted in a miraculous victory, for example, because Christian soldiers “publicly called on the name of Christ” (Historiae 7:15)—an interpretation of the event that Tertullian and Apollinaris of Hierapolis had already promoted in the late second century.* Emperor Aurelius Severus Alexander won a decisive battle over the Persians because his mother Julia Mamaea had been a pupil of the Christian scholar Origen of Alexandria (7:18). Throughout Rome’s history from the advent of Christ to Orosius’s own day, whenever rulers conformed to God’s will and did not persecute Christians, God favored the empire and responded to righteous acts by causing “countless wars to be stilled, many usurpers to be destroyed, the most savage tribes to be checked, confined, incorporated, or annihilated with little bloodshed, no real struggle, and almost without loss” (8:43). Now, the Empire could still “enjoy success in all its fullness” if only Rome refused to “become corrupted through the stumbling block of her blasphemies” (7:6).

But civic victories due to an openness to Christianity weren’t the only cause-and-effect connections that Orosius articulated. Past tragedies in Rome had happened because its citizens and rulers had displeased God, according to Orosius. The year of the four emperors afflicted the Roman Empire because Nero crucified Peter and beheaded Paul; the chaos of that year was Rome’s atonement for “wrongs done to the Christians” (7:7). Orosius admitted that the persecution of Christians under Emperors Diocletian and Galerius had coincided with a time of relative prosperity and peace in the Roman Empire; nevertheless, he still manages to make a strained link between the persecution and later “wounds… which still cause pain” (8:26). And what about Alaric’s sack of Rome in 410? God empowered the Visigoths against the city of Rome because of the residue of pagan practices in the city and, specifically, because of those like Stilicho who were vying for power. Thus, “the storming of the City was due to the wrath of God rather than to the bravery of the enemy” (8:39). Victories in Orosius’s history are always tied—however tenuously—to Roman acts of affinity with Christianity, and every historical calamity is bound in a cause-and-effect sequence with preceding acts of persecution or injustice. At several points in Orosius’s work, it is difficult to avoid seeing a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy—the illogical assumption that, simply because one event happens after an earlier event, the earlier event must have caused the later event despite a lack of clear evidence for such causation.

In the end, History against the Pagans provides a very different perspective on history than Augustine’s The City of God against the Pagans. This distinction remains relevant still today. Although Augustine was far friendlier with the notion of a Christian empire than any Baptist can possibly be with any level of theological consistency, Augustine still clearly recognized the danger of binding Christianity to any human culture or political order. Christianity is not, after all, a religio in the Roman sense of a set of practices that can be expected to produce civic blessings. To identify any human empire, nation, or state with Christianity is to compromise the nature of the church and, ultimately, to dilute the gospel.

Orosius seemed to see Christianity, at some level, as a religio in the Roman sense. For Augustine, Christianity was closer to what earlier generations of apologists described as philosophia—as a way of believing and being in the world marked by coherence between what is professed and what is practiced, and as a superordinate identity that cannot be bound to any human culture or political power.

Echoes of Orosius Today

So what points of relevance might these reflections have for us today?

Despite the centuries separating us from Orosius’s History against the Pagans, I still hear echoes of Orosius from time to time.

To give one example, well-intended Christians have frequently made connections suggesting that the removal of prayer from American public schools in 1962 triggered a massive moral downgrade and a loss of divine favor in America. Typically, these claims are followed by a list of national tragedies that happened after the Supreme Court’s curtailing of prayer in public education. In the same way as Orosius’s retelling of Roman history, civic support of Christianity results in blessings for empires and nations, while withdrawals of such support bring civic calamities.

The first problem with these claims is the logical fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc. One might just as easily list every fortuitous event that’s happened since 1962–the collapse of Communism in Europe in 1989! the overthrow of Roe v. Wade in 2022! life expectancy is a decade longer in the United States now than it was in 1962!—and declare that these civic blessings happened because the Supreme Court shut down prayers in public schools. Clearly, this would be illogical, but it’s no less illogical than claiming that a litany of national tragedies since 1962 must have been caused by the termination of prayer in public education.

Yet the logical fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc isn’t the only problem.

This way of thinking also overlooks the moral failures that took place during the decades when children prayed in public schools and Protestant moral values prevailed in the United States. Hundreds of thousands of Africans were trafficked and treated as chattel throughout the nineteenth century in America, entire villages populated by Native Americans were slaughtered in the Westward expansion, hundreds of African Americans were lynched by lawless mobs in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, more than one hundred thousand Asian Americans were imprisoned and had their property confiscated during World War II—and all of this happened while prayers were still being offered in public schools. In many cases, professing Christians offered theological defenses for these heinous acts.

If we follow Orosius’s methodology, our goal is to tie everything good in the civic order to practices of Christian faith. As a result, we may end up downplaying the sinfulness of the iniquities that took place when Christianity dominated. Or we might try to draw distinctions between authentic Christianity and the faith of those who perpetrated these evil acts. Either way, we’re walking in the footsteps of Orosius.

The Church as Alternative Politic

Augustine’s The City of God against the Pagans provides us with a richer, deeper, and better possibility. Augustine was quick to recognize Christianity’s positive contributions to the social order, beginning in the opening chapters of The City of God against the Pagans. He also recognized that every human political effort includes authentic aspirations of justice and fragments of righteousness, splintered though they may be. At the same time, every human political endeavor is also infected incurably with libido dominandi.

By recognizing the incorrigible infectedness of every human political endeavor, Augustine extricates himself from the temptation to yoke the City of God with any empire or nation. The best ideals of empires and nations may point to the City of God by approximating authentic justice—and these approximations should be recognized—but they remain defective from their root. According to Augustine, “justice is found where the one supreme God rules an obedient city according to his grace, so that it sacrifices to none but him,” (De civitate Dei contra paganos, 19:23) and this cannot happen perfectly in any realm where the stain of Adam’s sin remains. At the same time, Augustine refuses to reduce the City of God to a spiritual ideal. The City of God is present in and among real human beings, and it is revealed through tangible ways of living that exemplify rightly-ordered loves. In this way, Augustine not only avoids otherworldliness but he also provides us with a bypass around every attempt to identify Christianity with human political systems.

Christianity was meant to produce a people whose primary framework for politics is not an empire but a church. The church is an alternative politic, and “the church’s most powerful political activity is being the church and proclaiming its unique message.” As an alternative people with identities grounded in an alternative political structure, Christians are defined by a different history than their neighbors. The Christian’s constitutive narrative is articulated not in the errant annals of any human empire but in the unerring words of Holy Scripture and in the story of a kingdom that is yet to come in its fullness.

Local churches… should make passersby wonder. People should see the flag of Christ raised high through the ordinances and find themselves intrigued by the strange ways of these people whose culture does not come from another place but from the power of a future age.

Since Christians are no longer defined by their nation’s history, they can be honest about the wrongs and the rights of their nation’s past, as Augustine made clear in the first ten books of The City of God against the Pagans. Christians are still called to do civic good for their neighbors in every political structure in which they find themselves, but Christians pursue civic good not as permanent citizens but as exiles, like the Israelites in Babylon (De civitate Dei contra paganos 19:26). The church—in the words of Stanley Hauerwas—“stands as a political alternative to every nation, witnessing to the kind of social life possible for those that have not been formed by the story of Christ.” As a Christian, your most powerful political statement isn’t your voter-registration card; it’s your baptism.

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Staying Counter-Cultural

The role of the people of God in every era is to live according to the mandates of the City of God, which entails the continual formation of an alternative politic.This formation is continual because the threats to the church’s political witness are always shifting. Faithfulness to the values of the City of God will always be counter-cultural, but the precise points at which the church must counter the Earthly City will continually change. That’s because, if the politics of the Earthly City shift but the emphases of the church’s political witness remain the same, the witness of the church may cease to be counter-cultural. The church may overlook certain aspects of the now-prevalent politics which threaten Christian faith while continuing to speak against holdovers from a previous politic, which have already faded.

In this present cultural moment, it is easy—and correct, in my view—to identify Christian nationalism as a threat to the church’s witness to the gospel. What is more difficult for many of us to recognize is that classical liberalism and pluralism and secularism are threats as well, and so is every power that is not grounded wholly and completely in love for the righteous rule of King Jesus.

I’m not convinced that secularization has shifted the relationship of the church to culture from positive to neutral to negative. I’m more inclined to think that the relationship has always been a combination of negatives and positives, but the church failed to notice the precise nature of the “negatives” and the corrosive effects of the supposed “positive” and “neutral” worlds. Every human political structure is infected with libido dominandi and thus poses a threat to the purity of the church’s witness. The threats of each political structure simply fall in different places. And so, part of the church’s task is to emphasize the aspects of its witness that preserve the purity of the church’s political and prophetic witness.

If Christian nationalism wins the day in a particular context, the church’s task will be to critique the ways in which the Earthly City uses coercive power to enforce conformity to Christian values. If pluralistic liberal democracy dominates in another time or place, the task will be to go to war against the foolish presumption that the values of the state or any other religion can ever produce the same degree of human flourishing as submission to the kingship of Jesus Christ. If a secular state prevails, the faithful church will reconfigure her political witness to maintain her freedom to proclaim and to practice her faith, continually calling secular rulers to account for their idolatrous exaltation of a godless state to a position of supremacy.

For the second part of this argument, read the post below:

* In A.D. 172 or 174, Roman military units fighting a Germanic tribe known as the Quadi along the Danube River experienced what was widely perceived as a miracle. The same thunderstorm that brought rain on the parched Romans struck their enemies with lightning. This event is depicted on the column of Marcus Aurelius in the Piazza Colonna in Rome. Roman historian Dio Cassius attributed the victory to Arnuphis, an Egyptian magician who invoked Hermes and other daimones. Apollinaris, however, saw the miraculous storm as a work of Christ, in response to the prayers of the soldiers of Legio XII who were—according to Apollinaris—Christians. Although a number of the soldiers in Legio XII may well have been Christians, it seems unlikely that most or all of the legion was Christian in the second century. Apollinaris also incorrectly claimed that Legio XII received the nickname “Fulminata” (“Thunderbolt”) because of this incident. In fact, Legio XII had been known as the Thunderbolt Legion at least since the reign of Caesar Augustus. In A.D. 66, Legio XII lost their eagle in a battle with Jewish revolutionaries at the walls of Jerusalem; the dishonored legion was sent to Syria and then to Cappadocia. In the late second century, the legion’s headquarters were still in Cappadocia, in Melitene.