Prudence and Politics

I recently retired from teaching at one of the finest evangelical seminaries in North America. When students asked me for counsel on politics, I cited St. Augustine’s City of God, written after the fall of Rome when pagans blamed the fall on Christians, and Arian Visigoths had raped Christian women and murdered Christian men and children.

Augustine said no state can ever achieve true justice, but that the state is God’s gift for order in a fallen world. Christians are pilgrims in the City of God intermingled with the City of Man. So we have to avoid the utopianism that refuses to support any leader or party that is not ideal. And we should think critically of political promises too good to be true.

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