My Political History (1)

When I was young I was very interested in politics. I went to my first political meeting in my late teens. Many of the problems in the world are caused by politics. It seemed like solutions would be political.

When I went to university, I studied political science for a couple of years, but I found it was a dry well. There are a huge variety of political systems, but none seem to work well. The common answer was that we should persist with the government we have, because anything else would be worst. This was disappointing.

Once I became a Christian, I realised that the solution had to involve Jesus. Every society needs laws, so I spent a long time thinking about how a parliament could produce laws that were consistent with God’s will. The only way that seemed possible, if most of the members of the parliament were followers of Jesus. If that did happen, and it is not common, the people who were not Christians would hate having Christian laws imposes upon them. I realised that imposing Christian laws cannot work, but without them, society will deteriorate. There seemed to be no workable solution.

I committed to solving this conundrum. I went to theological college for three years to get a sound understanding of theology. I learned NT Greek. I read several histories of political thought to understand how we had got to where we are today. I worked for thirty years on the edge of the political system; close enough to see how it worked, but not close enough to be distracted by power. Over several decades God showed me the answers to the questions that were bugging me. I was totally surprised by where he led me.

Over many years of study, a few insights radically changed my thinking about politics.

1. The first thing I discovered was that the New Testament does not contain a political theology. There are a few relevant verses, but they only hint at what God wants. If you want a political theology you need to go back to the Torah in Exodus and Deuteronomy. If we want God’s political theology, if we have to study God’s law.

2. Secondly, I needed a change in attitude to the Torah. I read it, but I was quite ambivalent about it, because I assumed that Jesus had made it redundant (although point 1 means that is not the case). One time, I was reading Psalm 119, the penny dropped. I always understood it as applying to the whole of God’s law, but I suddenly realised it was a Psalm in honour of God’s law.

Oh, how I love your law!
I meditate on it all day long.
Your commands are always with me
and make me wiser than my enemies.
I have more insight than all my teachers,
for I meditate on your statutes.
I have more understanding than the elders,
for I obey your precepts.
I have kept my feet from every evil path
so that I might obey your word.
I have not departed from your laws,
for you yourself have taught me (Psalm 119:57-102).

These verses stunned me. I wanted to be wise in the political space. This Psalm explained that I would only get wisdom if I loved God’s law.

I resolved that I would love God’s law. I understand the love is not a feeling, but a decision, so I decided I would love God’s law and look for the good in it. I put all the laws into a spreadsheet, so that I could sort them by topic and theme to see how they fitted together and when they applied.

I would seek for the precious insights it contains. I believed that everything that had been put in the Torah by the Holy Spirit for a purpose. If I found something, I did not like, I would ask the Holy Spirit to show me what he was saying when he put the passage in the Torah. I did a three-year course in Old Testament Hebrew to understand the Torah better. Over a time, I began to understand God’s law in a totally different way. Loving it became natural. More important, the Holy Spirit gave me some amazing new insights. (I will describe them in my next post).