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The ( hureh and Liberal Democracy
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know Iluil (he story of God is the truthful account of our existence, and thus
we can he a community formed on trust rather than distrust. The hallmark of
such a community, unlike the power of the nation-states, is its refusal to resort
to violence to secure its own existence or to insure internal obedience. For as a
community convinced of the truth, we refuse to trust any other power to
compel than the truth itself.
It is in that connection that the church is in a certain sense “demo
cratic,” for it believes that through the story of Christ it best charts its future.
We rejoice in the difference and diversity of gifts among those in the church,
as that very diversity is the necessary condition for our faithfulness. Discussion
becomes the hallmark of such a society, since recognition and listening to the
other is the way our community finds the way of obedience.40 But the church
is radically not democratic if by democratic we mean that no one knows the
truth and therefore everyone’s opinion counts equally. Christians do not be
lieve that there is no truth; rather truth can only be known through struggle.
That is exactly why authority in the church is vested in those we have learned
to call saints in recognition of their more complete appropriation of that truth.
Put starkly, the way the church must always respond to the challenge of
our polity is to be herself. This does not involve a rejection of the world, or a
withdrawal from the world; rather it is a reminder that the church must serve
the world on her own terms. We must be faithful in our own way, even if the
world understands such faithfulness as disloyalty. But the first task of the
church is not to supply theories of governmental legitimacy or even to suggest
strategies for social betterment. The first task of the church is to exhibit in our
common life the kind of community possible when trust, and not fear, rules
our lives.
Such a view of the political task of the church should not sound strange
to Christians, whose very existence was secured by people who were willing
to die rather than conform to the pretentious claims of government. And we
must remember that the demand that religion be freed from state control was
not simply an attempt to gain toleration, but to make clear that the church
represented a polity truer and more just than the state can ever embody.
Simply because we live in a society that has institutionalized “ freedom of
religion” does not mean the church’s political task has thereby been accom
plished.
This kind of challenge is all the more needed in a society like ours that is
living under the illusion that justice can be based on the assumption that man
rather than God controls the world. As John Howard Yoder has suggested, “ it
is more important to know with what kind of language we criticize the struc
tures of oppression than to suggest that we have the capacity to provide an
alternative which would not also be a structure of oppression.”41 As Chris
tians we have a language to describe the problems of liberalism, but we have