Christ And Caesar

"Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's" (Mark 12:17).

Our Lord's timeless precept was uttered during His last visit to the Temple. Three days before He was crucified as a seditionist, emissaries of the Pharisees and Herodians attempt to silence Him by the thorny question: "Is it lawful to pay tribute to Caesar?" They had themselves accepted the emperor's money, and by so doing, acknowledged his political authority. To him the tribute belonged; to him it should be paid. But Jesus seized the opening his opponents made to emphasize man's indebtedness to God's dominion. If the coinage stamped with Caesar's image and circulated in his name registered Caesar's claims, infinitely more did God's likeness engraved on human souls entitle him to every service they could pay. His supremacy was embedded in the moral consciousness of the race. It comprehended all realms of thought and being. To Him persons and peoples alike owed their first allegiance. Therefore every other legitimate loyalty, whether to the home, to the state, or to the nation of which the state is the organ of expression, had its source and completion in the loyalty due to the living God and Father of all men.

History testifies that God demands truth and justice, cost what these may; that nations cooperating with Him have no need to fear, while those refusing cooperation ought to fear. Indisputably states bent on carving their own way, heedless of "the things of God," wound themselves with forbidden weapons. Tragic facts which surpass the limits of tragedy repeatedly admonish us that if his rule is ignored, self wrought ruin follows swift and sure. Our Lord's utterance is the rock on which nations either build or split; and upon whomsoever that rock falls, it grinds him to powder.

Reflective minds, aware of the sources of national catastrophe and achievement, are naturally solicitous for the state's further moralization. Because the state is ethically responsible for its behavior, if it is to live and prosper, it must "do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with God."

Assuredly Jesus gave the state a dignity and standing which his Apostles seconded. When temporal rule was exercised by Nero, whose emperorship was the negation of God, St. Paul wrote the Romans: "Let every soul be in subjection to the higher powers; for there is no power but of God." Later Christian thinkers, among whom St. Thomas was preeminent, rightly argued that when the power thus derived was abused it was forfeited, and that tyrants could be deposed. In any case, as an organization the state has no earthly superior, and "will recognize no check to its sovereignty unless the people uphold the higher authority of God, whose servants all states and nations are."

A generously disposed and well governed nation has in it formative elements of worthy personal character. Through its channels runs the secret river of God's purpose, bringing:

Its outward relations with human life cannot be unduly depreciated without injury to their inward aspects. But the individual citizen is always the responsible agent of the state's progress. By him its collective good is preserved; upon him its general welfare depends. So we are morally bound to elevate the state by ennobling our political activities, and this can only be done by subordinating them to a higher spiritual control. No sentimental patriotism, however profuse, can avoid this duty. It searches the souls of men today with the candle of the Lord.

It is the more imperative because the state is the most venerable existing institution except the home. It arose out of prehistoric voids through tribalism to its present eminence. Its growth resembles that of a primeval forest - always living, dying and renewing its life. It awaits us at birth, commandeers our resources, inspires us to spend and be spent in its behalf and to die in its defense. Our love for it is deeply rooted. We toil for it like gods. Severed from it we could not cultivate the social faculties, nor properly qualify our habits and occupations. Our well being is inconceivable apart from the state's partnership and discipline. The passion for one's country is the germinal weed of one's finer passion for humanity. Both blended in Jesus, who wept over the city which sent Him to the Cross before He ascended it for the salvation of the world. So long, then, as nation building is the enterprise of statesmen, and history's halfway house, like minded groups having a common language and kindred interests rightly insist on substantial ethnic unity, territorial integrity, relative security and economic independence. We may mourn with Dante the rebellion of temporal rule against God's lordship. Yet with the poet we uphold that rule as the pledge of better things to come. Those who would outpace Providence by abrogating the state's control and protection invoke havoc and undoing. In all normal affairs, we are bound to obey the powers that be, "for they are ordained of God."

But while Christ gave the state an authority commensurate with its inestimable service and responsibility, He also restricted its functions. It could no longer claim the monopoly of allegiance assigned it by the political ideas of Greece, and confirmed by Rome's genius for their administration. The Church, as Christianity's most characteristic creation, entered the scene, and injected moral considerations into politics as their abiding factor. For this reason, the new organization became the rival of the state, or else its uncongenial associate in earthly affairs. They afterward combined in this medieval Church state only to fall apart into schism and nationalism.

The question whether the national state was absolute in itself pressed heavily upon the best minds of the past. They realized that the things of Caesar and of God were one in Christ: indeed, that the race was one in Him, one flesh and blood, with one struggle, one defeat or one victory. They were solicitous that the Church should be what she has not yet been; Christ's clearing house for national and international fellowships. They understood that her life and being were created by the will of God, not by the opinions and consent of men. Therefore, she should not debase His moral currency to profit Caesarism, nor abstain from its circulation at the behest of princes and kings.

If the individual is permanent and the state is transient, it is the height of unwisdom to sacrifice the individual's spiritual interests at the demand of the state. For this reason the history of civil and religious liberty is a history of resistance; of limitation of earthly government, not of its increase. Freedom to become whatever God purposes us to be imposes boundaries on civic authority beyond which sagacious rulers will not trespass.

I stress these fundamental truths because whether or not the national state is inherently supreme is now warmly debated. The late war was fought upon the issue, and the pacification of the nations has been delayed by it. Aggressive coteries in nearly every country postulate the deification of the state, and while the majority do not openly defend this theory, they quietly acquiesce in its practice. Here are two conflicting loyalties. If the state is absolute, what becomes of God's sovereignty and of Christ's universal gospel? If it is not absolute to what does it owe allegiance? For seven thousand years hostilities traceable to the Socratic idea of state supremacy have filled the world with inflammable stuff. For five thousand of those years the fighting male symbolized that supremacy and its defense. Rome's legions practiced the theory that war was the weapon of a virile breed chosen for dominion. But at the top of their conquests Christ's edict canceled that theory for Christians, and its cancellation was confirmed by his solemn injunction that "they who take the sword shall perish by the sword." Then began the irrepressible conflict between the religion Rome despised as congenitally weak, and the Caesarism she worshiped as the impersonation of the all powerful state.

As it was in the beginning, so it is now. Christianity is still at odds with the remnants of a once worldwide paganism which reasserted itself in Machiavelli and the philosophers of the Renaissance. Its modern adherents adulate national sovereignty as though history were made by force, not by righteousness. Super patriotism submerges for them the spiritual values of society, and makes the citizen the acolyte of the state. Ethics and religion are subjected to national dominance and prosperity. Cavour's axiom, "a free Church in a free state," is logically discarded by zealous nationalists whose reliance in the last resort is on physical might. They ask that Christianity shall furnish apologies for temporal policies, regardless of their nature. The dictum that liberty is the assurance that "every man shall be protected in doing what he believes to be his duty against the influence of majorities, their customs and opinions," is anathema to these extremists. They would silence minorities if they could, despite the fact that the minority mind is conducive to a public intelligence otherwise impossible. So much for protagonists of state absolutism, and of its maintenance by the abuse of force in wars which have no more virtue in them than the medieval trial by fire.

Christians have bowed in this house of Rimmon long enough. Toleration of principles and practices which flatly contradict the mind which was in Christ Jesus should end for His disciples here and now. The obdurate paganism fed by tradition, temperament, education and collective sentiment has to be stoutly opposed as the most formidable obstacle to the extension of God's kingdom, to the safety of the nations, and to the welfare of mankind. Whatever else is uncertain, this is certitude itself, that if there is no restriction on national absolutism, Christ's governance ceases to be universal. We cannot plead ignorance of the precise difference between the nationalistic and Christian viewpoints of temporal power, or of the citizen's obligations thereto. The nationalistic viewpoint deems the state self controlling, isolated and supreme; the custodian of its own affairs, beyond which its interests fade away unless those affairs are in question. The Christian viewpoint deems the state free and independent in its own sphere, but obligated by that freedom and independence to exist, not solely for itself, but for humanity at large.

Our Lord bid a measureless enthusiasm for humanity as a whole, and for its dissemination He created the Church as a Divine society for the dissemination of His measureless enthusiasm for humanity as a whole. He insisted that the interest of the whole Body should be set above all personal interests. That society conceived men as one Man in Christ, the Man of the Mount of Transfiguration and the Cross, not of the cave and the gladiatorial arena. All were sons of God, brethren beloved, suffering and rejoicing together. Their sonship was the basis and the inspiration of human brotherhood.

We are often asked why the faithful presentation of Christ as the Lord of all good life has not done away with the heartless use of force for vainglory and illicit gain. The answer is that heretofore man's inherited instincts of greed and violence have proved too strong for institutional Christianity's control. Yet one wonders how it could so long divert its energies from the field of human suffering and wrong to matters of secondary moment. The Church now mobilizes against war and its causes because their hour of judgment has arrived. They can no longer escape Him who neither hastes nor rests.

What can we as Christians offer to God in behalf of world peace? The first thing needful is our utter sincerity of purpose to labor for it without stint. Many watch the Churches with mingled expectancy and distrust, not to say scorn and derision. Some accuse them of shuffling on this question. They upbraid their pious platitudes, their trifling with a vital issue, their lack of definiteness, their still serviency to mundane patronage and influence. We must convince friend and foe that we will enter into no conspiracy to be blind to our obligations in this matter, nor imitate Balaam, who was neither a false nor a true prophet.

Again, there is a non sacerdotal sense in which nations either remit or retain the sins of nations. Unforgiven sins are prone to persist. Forgiven sins are prone to perish in their shame. I make no apology for offenses. These will come and woe be to those by whom they come! Surely the peoples have drunk to the dregs the cup of that woe! Yet they cannot escape drinking it again unless they pardon others as they would be pardoned themselves. Common repentance for a common guilt leading to mutual reconciliation is our undischarged obligation to the Father of all mercies. Moreover, if the legal machinery's for securing justice and peace are to operate effectively, Christ's Gospel of pardoning Grace must first sanitate the world's heart.

The Church as the mediating agent of that Gospel has to realign her scattered remnants that she may pay to God the oneness she owes Him and the race. For if the revolt against the unconditioned state has happened, the revolt against the divided Church has begun. Men will not always endure in her the cults of incompleteness and sectarian assertiveness. The Fabian tactics of ecclesiastics and their undue sensitiveness about origins and priorities will not always be allowed to interfere with her efforts to win the consent of nations to their own good. The time may not be ripe for her organic union, but it is over ripe for her federalized action. Since her forces must still march in separate columns, at least they should mass for attack on open iniquities. The super nationalism without which her catholicity is impossible is her New Testament heritage.

Public opinion has recently crystallized in marvelous ways; none of which is more impressive than the League of Nations, the World Court, the Locarno compacts, the various peace treaties and the Kellogg pact. We dedicate them with thanksgiving to the Author of Righteousness as an implicit avowal of His sovereignty. But there is far more in these institutions and instruments than brilliant statesmanship. The whole movement for peace which they express springs from a recreated ethic in men. The plain folk of every land are its projectors. Their determination for peace produced the Peace Treaty of Paris, better known as the Kellogg pact, which, with the voluntary consent of fifty signatory powers, outlaws war; thus renouncing the most ancient and potent weapon of political action.

The names of M. Briand, ex-President Coolidge, ex-secretary Kellogg, and President Hoover are inseparably associated with this treaty. But it was born in the brain of Mr. Salmon O. Levinson, a private citizen of the United States, who enforces afresh Emerson's observation that "the only thing in the world of value is the active soul which every man contains within him." Mr. Levinson overcame formidable obstacles against the admission of his discovery, that war has hitherto been the supreme legality, nurtured by and entrenched in the legal system of the world. The fundamental task of its abolition is to expel it from that system. Peace has been accelerated by this discovery, which, after much labor and pains, was finally ratified in the pact signed at Paris, officially approved and proclaimed at Washington on June the twenty fourth of this year, the date of an act unparalleled in international annals.

The pact is criticized as purely declaratory in that it does not specify any physical means for its enforcement. In these respects it is not merely the highest statesmanship but it also resembles Christ's adventure for mankind. It relies upon the moralized intelligence of the nations it protects. It substitutes their achievements in life's real values for their military prowess. It places them upon their honor to scrupulously avoid provocative measures; and adopt those of justice and right. It provides for changes in the existing relations of states to be brought about solely by pacific means, and as the result of orderly process. No political instrument yet framed is more conducive to the integrity of nations, the unification of the peace consciousness of the race, or the understanding of our Lord's command in the text.

The publication of the peace pact gave to right minded men and women of every land one of those rare moments when it was bliss to be alive, and every breath drawn was a delight. They could scarcely believe that the spell of war was broken by a gigantic blow for which their children will bless its originator. The Kellogg pact releases the energies of the League of Nations in the political field, and of the World Court in the judicial field - institutions which have rendered incomparably the best service to international lawfulness known to history.

Shall they continue to do so? The people who created them are the final court of appeal on that question. Advocates of the philosophy of force reply in the negative. The great tribunals set up by the nations mean little to them. They insist on armies and navies for combative use as the safeguards of the state. Progressive patriots maintain with equal sincerity that nations have reached a social and moral development in which their quarrels can be composed by judicial decisions. Treaties to this end are for them far more than amiable gestures. They constitute obligations to God, man and posterity which have to be fulfilled, or destruction will follow.

It should be understood that the actual cost of armaments does not include the losses sustained by their diversion of natural and acquired resources to uneconomic and fugitive purposes. The world's standards of living, specifically those of the poor, are lowered by expenditures for military preparedness! The theory that it avoids conflict is confuted by the fact that until now it has only postponed it. The plea that war is inevitable, since man is a fighting animal, is a hang over from ages of savagery when violence was the natural feature of an anarchistic society. War is therefore incompatible with the economic necessities, the moral stability and the religious interests of humanity. These demonstrate the need for a steady reduction of armaments with a view to their ultimate extinction.

Disarmament is by no means an independent question, however, to be solved by itself. It is but one aspect of an enormously complex problem involving the mental and moral disarmaments which must precede the reduction of armies and navies, the negative phase of a positive program of mutual regard and cooperation among nations which can so easily drift into war, but can never drift into peace. Peace must be won by our repeated efforts, organized for the purpose of rendering to God the things that are His. Men who have no lust of battle in their souls, yet who are the bravest of the brave in their love of love and their hate of hate, are summoned to this noble cause. Women whose constant struggle with death to perpetuate the race gives them the initial right to be heard on the issue, must exercise that right. Let us unite in building a more spacious dwelling place for the world's brotherhood. Let us found it on the basis of that fear of God which is the beginning of wisdom, and complete it in that love of God, and for man, which is wisdom's crown.