Resurrection and Poland's "anticipatory democracy"
Resurrection and Poland's "anticipatory democracy"
Finally, my first political devotion*
In the presence of God, the God who makes the dead live and calls into being things that are not, Abraham had faith. — Romans 4:17 REB
In 1964, Jacek Kuroń called for a new proletarian revolution against the Polish Communist Party. It landed him in jail.1
Soon after the church's birth, Saul of Tarsus worked with the authorities to imprison Jesus's followers. It landed him on his butt on the road to Damascus.2
We mostly don't hear from Kuroń again for almost a decade until his final release after a series of jail terms. We mostly don't hear from Saul again for almost a decade until Barnabas finds him and hits the road with him.3
When we finally hear again from both men, their approach to politics—even their working definitions of politics—has changed. Kuroń stopped working against Polish authorities. Saul (a.k.a. Paul) stopped working with the Jewish and Roman authorities. Both neither worked with nor worked against the existing authorities (for whom Paul coined the term "the powers that be") again.
For the released Kuroń, politics had become, by definition, something the authorities couldn’t contain. Kuroń gave up thinking of democracy as a desired form of government, redefining it as “the continual expansion of the scope for autonomous, no-coerced social activity,” according to historian David Ost.4 Democracy had become for Kuroń a political way of life for everyone.
Kuroń came to understand that public freedom must precede the transformation of government, and not the other way around.5 Consequently, the Polish lead-up to Solidarity and the fall of Communism involved getting “people to do things—anything—just as long as they did it on their own, with no official mediation.”6 In other words, Kuroń encouraged people to act as if they were already in power, and people did so.
Both Paul and Kuroń, however, would later be imprisoned. But they weren’t imprisoned for confronting the authorities, as Kuroń' had been in 1964. Instead, both men were imprisoned, generally speaking, for challenging the authorities' political monopolies. Kuroń’s program to have Polish citizens create public spaces as if they were already free encroached on the Communist monopoly on public spaces. Paul acted similarly, telling the Roman world that Jesus was king. Paul’s accusers wasted no time pointing out that this resurrected Jesus and his disciples were encroaching on Caesar’s turf.7
In the years since his Damascus Road encounter, Paul had broadened his notion of politics to involve a "kingdom of God" that didn't need the authorities' support to arrive or to thrive. Paul’s approach, of course, is contrary to the political approach of many Western Christians, who seek to take over existing power structures and use them to protect or to further God's kingdom.
Paul granted Caesar his space to rule, finding some overlap between the present evil age, ruled by Caesar, and the age to come, ruled by Messiah. But Paul also went about his public business in the overlap of this present age and the age to come because, somehow on his cross, Jesus had already humiliated those rulers and the spiritual forces behind them.8 Theologian N.T. Wright summarizes Paul’s understanding of Jesus’s victory and its effect on Roman rule:
In a world where many, not least many pious and zealous Jews, were eager for military revolution and rebellion against Rome, Paul insisted that the crucial victory had already been won, and that the victory in question was a victory won not by violence but over violence itself. . . .The power and pretensions of Rome are downgraded, outflanked, subverted and rendered impotent by the power of love: the love of the one God revealed in the crucified and risen Jesus, Israel’s Messiah and Caesar’s lord.9
Paul’s approach, therefore, differed from the other revolutionaries of his day. He realistically acknowledged Caeasr’s God-given but fading authority, but he acted publicly as if Jesus were already the world’s ruler and Caesar’s lord.
Jesus’s resurrection and our resurrection are literally heaven on earth. Our participation in God’s just rule on earth is the point of our resurrection from the dead.10
Jesus and Paul charted our public life between these two resurrections. The general resurrection of the dead was coming, Paul pointed out, but Jesus had already risen from the dead. In a sense, Paul says, we are also already "risen with Christ."11 Risen with Messiah, we don’t focus on the hierarchical, ruler-based politics of this age but on the politics of the age to come. When Jesus’s disciples talked about hierarchy in the age to come, Jesus corrected them: “it shall not be so among you.” When we practice the kinship and service politics that Jesus outlined, we practice in this overlap of ages the public life of the age to come.12
Jesus’s approach can be called anti-political if one relegates the word “politics” to what we understand as the plaything of today’s rulers. If one uses the word “politics” more broadly, one might say that Jesus and Paul’s anti-political approach is biblical politics.
Consistent with the earliest expressions of the church in the Book of Acts, Paul understood the churches he started as alternative political communities. Their unity and their action in public spaces, which he modeled, would serve as the chief praxis—the living, functioning sign—that Jesus had risen from the dead, that Jesus was the Messiah (the king), and that the age to come had, in a sense, come.13 In these communities and in public, we act in the present as if the future were here. This is what it means to walk by faith.
Paul's future-is-now approach was taken up again in Communist Poland as "anticipatory democracy," to use Ost's term. Even though the Communist Party was still firmly in power, Kuroń's disciple Adam Michnik urged citizens to act as if they were already powerful anyway. The rulers "could and should be ignored," Ost summarizes; "the people could act as citizens even without the state's permission."14
Kuroń and Michnik’s approach lead to Solidarity and to the famous Gdańsk and Szezecin shipyard strikes. After the strikes, the Polish citizens' "anti-politics" politics went into overdrive: leaflets, meetings, unions and other expressions of public life proliferated. It felt like an insurrection, Ost says, but citizens "did not seek to overthrow the state. They carefully refrained from demanding changes in the party or state structure, for that was 'politics.'"15
This Polish movement "rejected 'politics' . . . because it was interested in politics." It was, as Ost says, "post-ideological."16 It wasn't based on prepackaged ideas of what the state should do. It was based on citizens’ speech and action.
The kingdom of God rejects “politics”—the politics of this age—because God’s kingdom expresses true politics. Paul never tried to get out of his frequent trouble with the authorities by explaining that “kingdom” and “lord,” as in “kingdom of God” and “Jesus is Lord,” were merely religious metaphors. They weren’t. Paul and the Roman rulers both knew that those demonstrating the kingdom of God were demonstrating a new way of public life.
We don't set out to affect the state. Instead, we speak and act as if the kingdom of God and its liberty have already come. "So speak ye, and so do, as they that shall be judged by the law of liberty," James advises.17 Not trying to overturn the state doesn’t mean, though, that the state will be happy to have its domination of public space challenged.
But we can't wait on the state or depend on its permission to live our public lives. This is why we must “do things—anything,” creating public space through speech and action. The smaller, the better. Let the kingdom come as a small cloud shaped like a man’s hand.18 Then watch out.
*I call “Resurrection and Resistance” my first political devotion because, though I've written a manuscript full of political devotions, I now realize the ones I publish here on Substack should be different. Sarah Fay gave me good counsel: don't publish the book here. Instead, use my manuscript for inspiration, but write devotions here that are shorter and punchier. Thank you for your support as Political Devotions discovers itself.
Ost, Solidarity, 64. For this devotion’s references to events in Poland, see pages 64 through 76.
Acts 8:3, 9:1-8.
Acts 11:22-30.
Ost, 65.
Ost. 69.
Ost, 70.
Acts 17:5-7. Jesus’s accusers made the same argument: Luke 23:2; John 19:2.
Colossians 2:15. See also 1 Cor. 2:6-8.
Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness (Pts. 3 & 4), 1318-19.
N.T. Wright points out that the biblical concept of resurrection has nothing to do with going to heaven. Wright, Day the Revolution Began, 33-36. “Conservatives have said that Jesus was bodily raised, while liberals have denied it, but neither group has seen the bodily resurrection as the launching of God’s new creation within the present world order. And with that failure many other things have been lost as well.” Wright, 34. Two of those lost things are biblical politics and justice.
Colossians 3:1-3 KJV.
Matthew 20:20-28 KJV.
For the early churches as alternative political communities, see gen. Keesmaat, Citizenship and Empire; Horsley, You Shall Not Bow Down, 68-71. For the church as praxis, see gen. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness (Pts. 1 & 2), 384-450.
Ost, 71.
Ost, 75.
Ost, 71.
James 2:12 KJV.
1 Kings 18:44.