Christ Stops Time: The Christian Origins of a True Politics (Or, Apparently I sound like a German guy I read in school)

I have been mulling over the relationship between the intervention of God on Earth and the effect it has on us human beings. For the sake of this conversation, I'm going to posit that we owe true politics to God. To put it another way, the origins of true political order are to be found in Christianity.

Now a person reading this may be thinking something like, "Wait a minute! Weren't there societies (like the Greeks and Romans) that existed before Christ? And didn't guys like Aristotle and Plato say a lot about politics?" Yes, to both of those. However, the experience was not as full (open to the truth) as it is for those who experience reality after Christ.

Christ's intervention into our world gave us something that we lacked prior to his coming. It gives us an anchor for our existence. It is the revelation of the Truth of Christ which provides our life with its meaning and purpose. Furthermore, it is this awareness of this meaning in the Truth of Christ which provides the possibility of an authentic politics.

Contrast the experiential openness to Truth and the subsequent anchor (or foundation) that is a result of the Incarnation with the closed or less aware experience of the Truth which was the experience of the pre-Christ(ian) communities and in this bifurcation of epochs or the rupture that was the experience of the Truth of Christ in the Incarnation, you are presented with a fullness of Being which permits a political community to emerge that is an expression of Truth. The Western Judeo-Christian tradition, then, is the humanly knowable interpretation of the ontological reality that is the Truth in Christ. Political communities and eras are inescapably manifestations of a fundamental religious Truth. We cannot escape that. Without the Incarnation, there is no full experience of politics. The communities prior to Christ are pre-political.

Evidently (according to one person I know), this kind of understanding and interpretation of the human world is similar to the approach of Eric Voegelin. That's cool.