Tony, you asked me for a bit of feedback on this before you put it out on the blog, and I failed dismally. Sorry about that.

But now it’s out there, I’m glad I failed dismally, because now I’m able to say that it’s entirely your own work, and I completely distance myself from any hand in its production.

I say that because it so completely expresses what I think that I have nothing to add.

Well, no. I always have something to add. I would add that as soon as we start doing good in the sphere of political endeavour, the risks of both misunderstanding (and so picking a really dopey cause) and being misunderstood (’how dare you take up such a typically left-wing/right wing/whatever wing cause!’) is magnified.

By way of illustration, previously when my hand slipped as I was writing with pen and paper, the greatest possible loss was the nice neat page I was working on. Now when my hand slips, I find I’ve pushed a button that says ‘Yes’ to deleting all my files!

In the same way, political action magnifies my chance of doing something sinful or stupid on a public, massive and even catastrophic scale.

For that reason, I respect greatly the wisdom of ministers of the gospel who hide their political affiliation and refuse to reveal which way their politics are aligned.

But I respect even more greatly ministers of the gospel who will prayerfully go out on a limb on certain political issues, because they have reached the conclusion that the gospel compels them to do this.

Maybe there is a fourth part to the series then, Tony? Political issues that you personally would pick, believing that the gospel compels us as a Christian community to take particular action on?

Go on buddy, you can do it.

My friendly feedback.

Gordon: “Go on buddy, you can do it.”

Translation: “You’ve gone out on a precarious limb, and managed not to fall so far. But why don’t you just go a little bit further and talk about your political views. You’ll be right, buddy. I’m right behind you!”

Tony, this has been an excellent series, and very O’Donovanesque...really!

Tony,

After reading your trinitarian-like blogfest on ‘Social Action’ , my view is that there is an important plank still missing.  And that is the role modelling of Jesus himself.

Yes there are important perspectives about evangelism/social justice (Part 1), and there are escatalogical issues (Part 2) and Part 3 seems a reasonable summary, but ...

Jesus presents very exciting material when it comes to the heart of social action - and that is to challenge the earthly powers that maintain power differentials and maintain inequity and injustice.  So many of the parables and stories of Jesus’ interactions were about challenging the dominant way of thinking (eg workers in the vineyard, blessed are the poor, eating with sinners etc etc).  So many of these stories point to the fact that an important part of his ministry was to challenge conventional thinking about power, distribution of resources and who has the right to influence peoples lives.  This is the stuff of social action.  And this is the stuff we need to reflect and pray on as we are lead by the Spirit into living out our Christian ethos.

(Can I even suggest another important tradition worthy of reflection on this topic - the work of the OT prophets in drawing attention to social inequity)

Cheers.