What is a shepherd to do, when the sheep are oppressed?

Some thoughts on clergy and politics from Ulrich Zwingli

I have found myself thinking lately about how the church, and especially my own Episcopal Church, should respond to the current political situation in the United States. I, of course, have the luxury of treating this question somewhat divorced from the immediate exercise of my pastoral ministry. I don’t have to decide what to say, or what not to say, from the pulpit to my congregation at St Whoever’s, USA this Sunday. But I hope that this will be helpful to those of you who are more in the thick of it.

On one hand, as I repeat ad nauseum, I’m deeply concerned with the tendency in the North American mainline to replace the content of the Gospel with center-left politics, and the urgency of the current American political scene does not erase that concern. It is wrong to replace announcement of the good news of the free forgiveness of sins by faith in Christ Jesus with an injunction to action in the world. It is also wrong to bind consciences on matters that Christ has not, to make holding a particular political line a necessary part of Christian discipleship. The Kingdom of Heaven simply must not be made equivalent to any earthly political project, no matter how worthy. And this is all the more the case because both dominant political parties in the United States embrace sins that cry out to heaven for vengeance. Choosing one over the other will always involve prudential questions of harm-minimization and the like.

But on the other hand, Christian faith of course has political implications. Those of us who are both Christians and citizens are called to exercise our duties as citizens with those demands in mind. And, frankly, we self-consciously orthodox mainline clergy do our people a disservice if, in the interest of not sounding like an embarrassing, theologically vapid lib, we are unwilling to speak forthrightly about those implications. This is especially so in the present moment, I think. I’m not going to turn this post into a litany of the appalling things that Trump and his administration have done, and I want to be clear that I affirm that there are many political questions that Christians can reasonably disagree about. But for a vast and phenomenally wealthy country to shut its doors to people in need, slash its foreign aid budget to near-nothing with no notice and thus imperil the lives of (at least) thousands, threaten territorial expansion against neighboring states with no provocation, snatch people off the street and throw them into foreign jails without due process, gleefully break its word and turn its back on its alliances — it is tremendously hard for me to reconcile these actions with a Christian politics.

The question, of course, is how to address these issues in a way that is pastorally helpful and theologically responsible, that doesn’t reduce our preaching to a vaguely spiritual gloss on the anti-Trump opinion commentary on the day, that keeps Christ and him crucified at the center of what we do. I recently spoke with the Rev. Fleming Rutledge for an interview for Plough, and she had some very helpful things to say about it — but you’ll have to wait for it to come out to learn more. My wife Sarah Killam Crosby has recently written a piece for Earth & Altar examining alarming resonances between the rhetoric of some American ‘Christian Nationalists’ and that of the German Christian movement and pointing to the ways that Barth and the Confessing Church might help us formulate an orthodox Christian response to such errors.

I, for my part, want to talk about the sixteenth century (surprise!). It is worth remembering that the reformers of the sixteenth century were aiming not only at theological change but also at a sort of sociopolitical transformation. When pilgrimages or indulgences or mendicant orders were criticized, it wasn’t only on the grounds that they were theologically wrong. Rather, reforming pamphlets thundered that these were means by which the church fleeced the people, taking money that should instead have been used to support the poor. The establishment of Protestant ecclesiastical structures typically involved new forms of provision for the poor, elderly, and infirm.¹ Indeed, the Reformation as a whole saw an increased sense that the responsibility for the care for the poor was not to be left to individual charitable acts or the church alone but ought to be a matter of collective activity.² While the specter of peasant revolt and other forms of violent (or indeed nonviolent) radicalism, especially after 1525, caused many leaders of the magisterial Reformation to somewhat moderate their rhetoric, this idea that embracing the Gospel meant a new attention to matters of communal righteousness and what one might anachronistically call social justice remained.

With this context in mind, I want to turn to a 1524 writing by the Zurich reformer Ulrich Zwingli, Der Hirt (which means “The Shepherd”). In this work, in which Zwingli distinguishes between true and false pastors, he defends in very strong terms the right and duty of pastors to criticize the magistrates over ‘political’ questions. For Zwingli, the model for the pastoral office is that of the Old Testament prophet, and like the Old Testament prophet, the true shepherd must be unafraid to call the wealthy and powerful to account. For, according to Zwingli, “the majority of those in power who hold the sword administer justice more out of avarice, arbitrariness, wantonness, and only for self-elevation and lust rather than out of love or fear of God", mistreating their subjects and foreigners and sinning among themselves. They thus need to be reproved by faithful and true pastors. To be sure, contradicting the authorities may result in your death at their hands — but the alternative, if you keep silent, is that “the blood of the perishing will be demanded from you.” Therefore if you want to be a true shepherd, Zwingli thinks, you must "not withhold the word, but publicly speak it forth without fear of those who can injure us."

Zwingli sums it up this way:

Therefore every shepherd, insofar as he is a shepherd among the sheep of Christ, should stand forth against all those who persecute him for the sake of God and his true word and also for the loyalty he has to his sheep, unmindful as to whether he must speak against the great Alexander, Julius, pope, king, princes or authority. This he should also do, not only when they contradict the word of God, but even if they overload their good folk too much and unreasonably with temporal burdens.

That is to say, Zwingli thinks that the clergy have a duty to reprove the magistrate, not only in matters of clear contradiction of God’s Word, but even when they overly burden and oppress the people they serve. They have to do so, because of their responsibility for the people placed under their care. He goes on to provide a catena of Scriptural examples: Moses leading the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt; Samuel condemning Saul for disobeying God’s instructions about putting to death the Amalekites; Samuel condemning David for his adultery with Bathsheba; the Judean prophet condemning Jeroboam for setting up idolatrous shrines; and so on. “If the shepherd would read the prophets then he would find nothing other than an eternal battle with the powerful and the vices of this world,” Zwingli writes.

Now, to be fair, Zwingli’s own example might reasonably be held up as a cautionary tale for clerical meddling in politics. He died in battle during the Second Kappel War, a war between Catholic and Protestant Swiss Confederates which Zwingli was largely blamed for instigating. After his death, the magistrates in Zurich and other Swiss regions like Bern decided that the clergy had arrogated too much political power and influence to themselves and restricted the freedom of the clergy to intervene in politics or criticize the magistrate. It’s hard to entirely blame them for so doing.

But I do think that this work of Zwingli’s is nonetheless interesting for us. I think Zwingli is right that the Old Testament prophets do shed light on the meaning of Christian ministry — and therefore that a willingness to confront even rulers is sometimes necessary, as the prophets did. I also think that the grounds upon which Zwingli allows criticism of the magistrate are worth reflection: he thinks that pastors should be willing to criticize the magistrate for the sake of God’s Word and for his loyalty to the sheep placed under his care. It is fundamentally out of love for the Word and love for the sheep that the true pastor is moved to act. It is not (at least in principle) about his policy preferences or personal political ideology or what have you: when the shepherd sees God’s Word besmirched or God’s people harmed, he has to speak up. This strikes me as something different, and at least potentially more edifying and helpful, than the parroting of Democratic Party talking points that is the more common fare of American mainline political preaching.

Of course, we exist in a very different system of organizing church and state than 1520s Zurich. The President and Congress do not hear regular sermons like the ones that Zurich clergy regularly preached to the Zurich city council. Given President Trump’s evident dislike of the Rt. Rev. Mariann Budde’s sermon at his inauguration, I doubt we can expect that many more Episcopal clerics will be invited to preach publicly to him. And none of this really answers the question of what one should preach not to the magistrate but to one’s fellow citizens, of how to address political matters helpfully while still pointing people towards the eternal and avoiding any form of political idolatry. But if nothing else, Zwingli’s work here reminds us of the antiquity of the idea that when their people are oppressed by wrongdoing even at the highest levels, clergy have a particular duty to speak up, even at great cost.

1. Of course, part of why these structures needed to be created is that the old structures were largely torn down. Early evangelicalism was clearly rhetorically and ideologically committed to care for the poor. Whether or not in actual fact Protestant polities provided better support to the poor than before they embraced Protestantism is a complicated and contested question.

2. It is a bit too much to talk about this as the ‘secularization’ of care for the poor; the structures of civil and ecclesial governance were too closely tied together for this to make much sense. But I think it is not unreasonable to see in the Wittenberg poor chest the distant antecedent of the social welfare state. Certainly the idea so often advanced by conservative Protestants in North America today that care for the poor should be the duty of the church rather than the state would have been illegible and bizarre to the Reformers.