When the body of Christ seeks to do mission and ministry and acts of mercy in the world, it finds out very quickly that it is confronted with all kinds of issues from the world itself, from its own organizational deficits, and from the devil who seeks to destroy the works of Christ. The world itself seeks the destruction of the missionary effort through political processes that seek to protect the State. Notice the action being taken all across Far East that are attempting to make the State the ultimate power in the lives of human beings. The philosophers and commentators on governing bodies origins and powers understood that Governance had relied in one form or another on a sense of trancendance. In other words their power came from God in whatever sense that was perceived. That has changed and the lack of a sense of responsibility to a higher power has been replaced by the belief that the State is the higher power. This brings the church into a bad situation. It respects the State as given by God and fears the State as corrupted by sin. Preachers get into a jam because they are walking the tightrope of Romans 13 and their task to preach in season and out. In reformed and evangelical churches the concern about politics and theology disappears and theologians get a new responsibility.
Emil Bruner was a reformed theologian and author. He wrote –
The State became completely autonomous in the sense of freedom from all transcendental connection, and this freedom has been its ruin. It is this process of disintegration and the reaction to this process which constitutes the crisis of the State. Thus this crisis is not due to outward events, as, for instance, in the dominance of the power of economic interest over the authority of the State. Reflection on the meaning of the State has, therefore, ceased to be merely an academic matter and has become the only means of escaping from the practical crisis. It has also become the duty of the theologians to reflect upon this question, for the Church, the community of believers, cannot understand itself and its task in the world without having its own view of the meaning and the function of the State.
