This is *Why* it Makes No Sense

‘I know why we’re having these floods and storms’, Mad Trevor told me seriously, ‘It’s because of gay marriage.’ We probably don’t need to spend much time on refuting this thesis, although it might be worth noting in passing that it is a poor explanation for extreme weather events being driven by the same global climate system in a variety of nations and cultures. But a day or so later I was invited to a prayer meeting for our local MP. I couldn’t have gone even had I wanted to, but I do wonder what the focus of such a meeting was. I first remember people from some of our congregations talking about this when said MP was in a bit of highly-publicised trouble a couple of years ago, with the suggestion that he be invited to a meeting at which he would be prayed for. The incumbent of Hornington, at whose church the Honourable Member occasionally turns up on a Sunday morning, did suggest he might not find this an entirely comfortable experience either on a personal level or considering the potential publicity that might result. We do pray for our MP, along with our local councillors and Council staff, and a variety of aspects of our community’s life, on a monthly cycle. But that clearly isn’t what a ‘prayer meeting for our MP’ means. I haven’t asked, but have a suspicion that at the back of people’s minds is the thought that God might be able to influence him in some way, or that he might even be converted and become a champion of Christian causes; perhaps, oh, just plucking one randomly out of the air, opposing gay marriage. This concern with the Christian content of our public policy-making did connect, in my mind, with Trevor’s statement about bad weather being caused by sexual minorities.

Does God view the law of the State in this way and behave accordingly? The Old Testament might lead one to answer very emphatically Yes. Vast swathes of the Books of the Prophets are precisely about that theme: Israel abandoning its wholehearted allegiance to YHWH and being thoroughly Smited as a result. In fact, the whole of what we call the Old Testament only exists in its current form because the Jews in exile were trying to work out where they’d gone wrong in their relationship with their God. Jesus suggests that the relationship between corporate sinfulness and dreadful events is by no means simply assignable to the intervention of God, but the idea is still there. I remember reading Archbishop Michael Ramsey’s insistence that it was possible for nations to apostasise and to suffer the withdrawal of God’s favour as a result, and wish I could recall the reference..

It is certainly the case that, as Christianity must insist on there being a spiritual realm to existence, and created beings having a foot in both the natural and the spiritual domains, so events in one may have repercussions in the other. Human sinfulness – a spiritual event – causes disturbance in the realm of nature. Isaiah the Prophet says that when people sin,

          The earth dries up and withers, the world languishes and withers,

          the exalted of the earth languish.

          The earth is defiled by its people:

          they have disobeyed the laws, violated the statutes

          And broken the everlasting covenant.

          Therefore a curse consumes the earth; its people must bear their guilt.

But there are distinctions between the accumulation of individual sin; the acts of governments; and God’s relationship with a nation as a whole, from which the nation may apostasise. Governments may enact good or bad legislation, but that doesn’t necessarily constitute a departure from a relationship with God, and in fact it’s hard to work out what might. None of this is very obvious. Lots of Christians are very, very concerned with the idea of Britain as ‘a Christian nation’, and it losing this identity, which is something different from how far its population is or isn’t actively Christian. For some of them, allowing same-sex couples to marry is the final point of rupture; others would draw the line in the sand elsewhere, although they may not be very clear about it.

I doubt the whole concept makes sense even in Christian terms. I found myself reflecting that God only ever created one nation, namely Israel. They were his people, chosen and in fact generated for the specific purpose of revealing his nature and preparing the ground for his incarnation. By the time of the collapse of the Israelite Kingdoms, that purpose was over. The building of the Second Temple and the events recorded in the Apocrypha, much as the Israelites read God’s purposes into them, were a futile effort to get it right a second time, to create a racially and ideologically pure Israel that would please God. But it was too late. The promises embedded in the writings of the Prophets applied to a different kind of Messiah, and to a New Israel, the Church that Messiah would create by his life, death and resurrection.

Israel aside, every other polity has nothing to do, per se, with God’s will and purposes. This is pretty clear from what St Paul says about human political authority in the 13^th chapter of the Letter to the Romans. Paul stresses that the secular authorities exercise God’s power, but he’s talking about the pagan Imperium Romanum, which obviously doesn’t have any kind of covenantal relationship with God. This is exactly the same authority which will, in time, lock Christians up and throw them to the lions; yet Paul sees it as having, nevertheless, its own legitimacy and autonomy. If the secular power does carry out God’s will, it’s unconsciously and not as a result of any special relationship with him. Even the confessional state, with an official Church embedded into its structures, is not a covenanted one – the relationship of Church and State in England, for instance, is accidental and historical, mediated through the person of the monarch. The initiative didn’t come from God.

God only ever created one nation, and that nation, as a political entity expressing a covenant, is gone. All other nations, states and peoples are human arrangements, historical accidents, and they can’t fall into apostasy, never having had that bound relationship with him. Mistaking our existing political arrangements for a divine covenant, reading the history of the present through the distorting filter of Israel’s concocted past, is to make a near-sacrilegious error. I think.