I found the article from Australian newspaper website the Age, it is called Christians have a biblical mandate: be political. It is quite interesting article, it was written to address the argument that christians should not interfere with world issues and politics and keep their religion to themselves.
Here is the slightly edited version of the article, I’ll keep this here, just in case someone asks me: “why don’t you christians do something about the world other than just telling people about God”.
Baptist minister Martin Luther King. He really should have kept his nose out of political issues and kept his dream to himself. Why is religion getting mixed up with human rights?
Then there were those interfering archbishops, such as Desmond Tutu in South Africa and Janani Luwum in Idi Amin’s Uganda. They should have left their political leaders alone to govern as they saw fit.
Cardinal Jaime Sin in the Philippines under the enlightened rule of Ferdinand Marcos, and church leaders who opposed Pol Pot in Cambodia.
As for the likes of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Niemoller in Nazi Germany, they should have stayed inside church cloisters instead of blundering into political activism.
Closer to Australia, meddlesome clerics such as Tim Costello and Ray Cleary shouldn’t be shooting off their mouths about gambling and other social issues. Don’t they realise gambling addicts have a democratic right to sacrifice their homes and families and commit suicide if they want to, without interference from religious do-gooders?
Look at all those religiously minded laymen and women who have meddled in matters that don’t concern them. Like William Wilberforce dragging his Christian faith into the slavery issue, or the Earl of Shaftesbury interfering in the politics of child labour and other forms of exploitation. Or William and Catherine Booth meddling in issues of social and economic inequality, and founding the Salvation Army.
Then there’s Elizabeth Fry interfering in the field of prison reform; Florence Nightingale who founded the modern nursing movement; Cicely Saunders who founded the modern hospice movement; Henri Dunant who founded the Red Cross; and other meddlesome religious zealots who founded Alcoholics Anonymous, Amnesty International, Habitat for Humanity, World Vision, TEAR Fund and a host of other enterprises that can be traced to a religious motivation.
Is a world without religious interference what we really need? The resultant welfare bill would send all governments flat broke. Expediency would be more likely to triumph over conscience, and brute force over moral persuasion. There would be less of a check on the excesses of genocidal tyrants, murderous despots and ruthless pragmatists.
New Testament Christians, as Karl Barth pointed out, faced the dilemma of relating to Nero’s Rome, which in Romans 13 is a divinely ordained institution to be obeyed, but in Revelation 13 is “the beast from the abyss”. When governments invoke order at the expense of freedom, tyranny usually results. But, yes, freedom without order is anarchy.
The Christian social philosopher Reinhold Niebuhr used to say: “There is no peace without power, and no justice with power.” So a Christian has two responsibilities: to support legitimate law and order, but also to promote social justice.
Did i read that ryt? Cardinal Jaime Sin is a Christian. I know he’s political, and a really devout Catholic but a Christian. I must have been born and lived in bizarro-Philippines for the past 18 years of my life @_@
Maybe he is a catholic, i guess the article doesn’t distinguish between catholic and christians, the bottom line the people of faith have done something for the world.