Up To Our Steeples in Politics

by Will D. Campbell

In this book we are trying to confess that the goals of the contemporary Church - that is to say, the church of St. John's by the Gas Station, the Christian college, the denominational and interdenominational seminary - the 'goals' of these Christian communities are blasphemous. The reconciliation the Church is seeking to accomplish today by these subterfuges has already been wrought. The brotherhood - the one blood of Acts 17, 26 - that the Church makes its goal today is already a 'fact'. And because this is so, that very fact judges our goals and our efforts to achieve brotherhood by social action as blasphemous, as trying to 'be' God. Instead of witnessing to Christ, the social action of the Church lends support to the totalitarianism of wars and political systems of the 20th century. By its social action, the Church permits and encourages the State and culture to define all issues and rules and fields of battle. The Church then tries to do what the State, without the Church's support, had already decided to do to solve all human problems by politics. And this is specifically the political messianism of contemporary totalitarianism and of Revelation 13. Politics by definition can only adjust and rearrange. It cannot - as politics - solve anything. But the Church's social action encourages the very movements in the contemporary political processes which are moving us straightaway into 20th-century totalitarianism. from the Foreword

160 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2005

About the author

Will Davis Campbell was a Baptist minister, lecturer, and activist.

Reviews

[Stephen Hayes · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first learnt of Will Campbell when I got sick in Cape Town, and was taken in and nursed by a Methodist minister, Theo Kotze, and his wife Helen. That was over 40 years ago, in 1972, when the police were rioting in the Anglican cathedral in Cape Town, and there were student protests all over. We were talmking about all that, and the response of Christians to the growing repression. And Theo handed me a book and said "Read this. It's far more radical than anything I've ever heard of."

So I read it on my sick bed, and got about halfway through.

But there was something that jumped out at me on the first page, which struck me as very radical, and very orthodox, not to mention Orthodox.

Back in those days everyone was talking about Christians being activist, and saying that we should not be concerned about status but about function. Being a Christian was not enough, you needed to do something. You had to do theology.

The book was Up to our steeples in politics.