Tag: meaning

As Christians celebrate the Easter season, it is a good time to consider what (if any) political meaning can be found in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Christians should not over-politicize the Easter narrative, or Christian theology in general. On the extremes of the spectrum, the tendency to reduce Christianity to some kind of political or social principles for political activity results in two distinct mistakes: It tends to remove Christ from Christianity, making it just another social program, and it tends to subordinate the ends of Christianity to the ends of some political agenda. In other words, Christianity has no particular political agenda, or any program for a particular set of political arrangements. To the contrary, in fact: It means that the political meaning of Christianity is more profound and fundamental than any particular political agenda could ever be. The resurrection is not just Christ telling Caesar that he cannot triumph over this particular subversion at this particular time in Rome’s history. Instead, Christians believe, all politics is subordinated to, and relativized by, the death and resurrection of Christ. To do so always ends up defining what it means to be a Christian in purely political terms. That is not the political meaning of the Easter story. Easter teaches Christians that their politics must answer to their Christian faith, not the other way around.