A Patient Politics
“I confess I often enjoy making liberal friends, particularly American liberal friends, nervous by acknowledging that I am of course a theocrat. ‘Jesus is Lord’ is not my personal opinion; I take it to be a determinative political claim. So I am ready to rule. The difficulty is that following a crucified Lord entails embodying a politics that cannot resort to coercion and violence; it is a politics of persuasion all the way down. It is a tiring business that is slow and time-consuming, but then we, that is, Christians, believe that by redeeming time Christ has given us all the time we need to pursue peace. Christ, through the Holy Spirit, bestows upon his disciples the longsuffering patience necessary to resist any politics whose impatience makes coercion and violence the only and inevitable response to conflict.”
– Stanley Hauerwas, Approaching the End: Eschatological Reflections on Church, Politics, and Life