27 March 2024. By Nigel Biggar.

The issue of how the moral principles stemming from the example and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth should be applied to political life has always been uncertain and controversial. This largely because, as the son of a village carpenter in 1st century Palestine, Jesus had no responsibility of any kind for government. How, then, should Christians with political responsibility, whether as electors or officials, seek to follow him? In particular, how should they—how can they—stay faithful to the principle of self-sacrificial love and realise it politically? Does it require the repudiation of all kinds of ‘interest’? Does it oblige the rejection of all kinds of ‘force’? And how can one ‘love’ the perpetrator and the victim equally?

Some Christians have taken a ‘purist’ line and sought to isolate themselves from wider political life and its grubby compromises with self-interest and the use of force, by creating self-contained communities. The medieval monastic and Reformation-era Anabaptist traditions are prime examples of such an attempt to maintain apolitical Christian purity.

Others have supposed that Christian love can find direct political expression, by downplaying the political contest of vying interests and the need for the use of force. Such was the view of the ‘Social Gospel’ tradition of late 19th and early 20th century liberal Protestantism.

Yet others, recognising the contested nature of political life, the unavoidable operation of interests, and the necessity of the use of various kinds of force, have nevertheless sought to work out how to bring Christian love to bear upon them. One such was the American Lutheran, Reinhold Niebuhr, who, as a pastor in Detroit during the First World War, realised that the pieties of the Social Gospel did not survive contact with the realities of economic conflict between the assembly-line workers in Henry Ford’s automobile factories and their bosses. This pastoral experience compelled Niebuhr to undertake a lifelong reevaluation of the political relevance and role of Christian love, the first results of which were published in his 1932 book, Moral Man and Immoral Society. Niebuhr’s attempts to marry Christian ethics with political realities subsequently attracted the label, ‘Christian Realism’.

However, although Christian Realism is now primarily associated with Niebuhr, it should not be confined to him. Others, both before and after him, have sought to do as he did. Therefore, Christian Realism needs to be understood more broadly. In my view, it is best understood in contrast to four different things . . . .