Both church and state are facing crises and this affects any application of past formulas:
 

The church's crisis is one of credibility.

The core teaching of all major religions supports human dignity and puts a special emphasis on defending the dignity of the poor and the outcasts, but ecclesiastical establishments (not only christian) seem to develop automatically to ape the power relations and trappings of the state.

As a simple example, we could ask why the Dalai Lama got a much better reception in Ireland a few years ago than the Pope did in Sri Lanka. In each case, a religious leader spoke of peace and reconciliation in a situation of communal conflict with religious overtones in the `parish' of the other. The man who travels around in a motorised bullet-proof glass box surrounded by flunkies and security guards was less credible than the simple monk, stripped of whatever political power his office may have carried in Tibet. They may have been saying the same thing, but the style in which it was presented made one much more credible than the other.

This raises the question of whether the church should adopt even the outward style of the state, let alone its repressive machinery.
 

The state's crisis affects its power.

This is being eroded by economic globalisation. As states have become more dependent on loans from the organisations that set out to organise the world economy: the World Bank, IMF and associated regional banks. They are subjected to the conditionality attached to those loans, which demands that they open up to market forces. But, as even Adam Smith pointed out, the state needs to regulate market forces. Since Smith's time, it has taken on much more responsibility for social services, which do not produce an immediate profit on the national balance sheet - at least the form of balance sheet used by bankers and by those who buy, sell and speculate in the capital markets. `Opening to the market' strikes at the root of the power of the state to serve the interests of its own citizens, although history shows that this was a major function of the state from its inception: cf. The earliest recorded law codes, such as that of Hammurabi in Mesopotamia. In fact this social welfare function is one exercised by the authorities in every human society, even before the emergence of what we call `the state'.

The burgeoning power of international finance capital threatens this function of human society. Margaret Thatcher, one of its strongest supporters, even went as far as to say `there is no such thing as society', but the threat is more than this ideological one. By the control of money, which states sometimes used for good purposes, the international financial institutions control states and they are not interested in social welfare or anything else that doesn't appear on their bottom line. Money can always be found for repressive purposes, especially where these serve the purposes of the `global market', but money for social services is much harder to come by. Controls on the market and taxation to redistribute wealth, which was so important in the 20^th century, are taboo.

Now, in the atmosphere created since 11^th September last and the subsequent `war against terrorism', states are tempted to react by taking measures and powers that amount to state terrorism. Many leaders of states must feel increasingly insecure if they believe their function is to rule. It was a acknowledged even before the abandonment of the Bretton Woods system of exchange rate control, that a drop in the exchange rate of the currency of a major democracy could induce a democratically-elected government to abandon a policy that had been a major plank in its election programme. That happened in Britain in the 1960s, when a run on the pound was the market's response to the people's choice of a Labour government. Since 1970, governments around the world have had even less power as `the market' has gained more of this kind of power. As following the prescriptions of `the market' has created greater inequalities between rich and poor and a resulting increase in social unrest, both within and between nations, we have seen governments reacting to the symptoms, over which they have some power, rather than the cause, over which they have very little power. In the rich countries, this has mainly been directed outward, against illegal immigrants who seek to share in the wealth of the rich countries and escape the increasing poverty and unrest at home. Thus we see a new `Iron Curtain' on the US-Mexico border and we hear more talk of a `Fortress Europe'. After 11^th September, it was easy to persuade the leaders of the rich countries to project their sense of insecurity on to the latest symptom, international terrorism. What they may not perceive so clearly is that by passing new repressive laws, for example those recently proposed for the European Union on tapping and recording of phone and e-mail communications, they would erode their own moral authority, reverse the gains of two centuries of struggle for human rights, and probably reduce state machinery to being enforcers of the power of the international financial institutions.

This raises two questions:

• How to defend the ages-old power of the state to do good, something which the church, if it true to its vision, should be well-placed to help?
• How to defend basic civil rights against the new threats from the state?

But how? Depending on your model of the church, you will give different answers.
 

Provide for welfare

If we consider the welfare functions of state and church, it could very plausibly be argued that the great 19^th century thrust of the church, with many new religious congregations dedicated to specific fields of work, laid the groundwork for the development of the Welfare State in the 20^th century. But there is more than one possible interpretation of how this happened. Two such possible explanations are:

• The church set up institutions which made it a sort of rival state-within-the-state, the state felt the need to compete and eventually took over the provision of many of these services, health care and education in particular.
• The church, by its emphasis on providing for the needs of the poor, especially the new poor created by industrial capitalism and colonialism (the urban working class, the rural communities in industrialising countries which were impoverished by the loss of their workforce to the towns and by the downward pressure on the prices of agricultural produce in order to feed the growing urban working class and the colonial populations, impoverished by the extraction of their resources and the accompanying disruption of their way of life), created an ethos that inspired the state to consider more seriously the needs of the poor.

In either case, when the state did take over the provision of these services, to varying extents in different countries, this created a problem for the church. It had lost a role and, in many cases, lost a large following among the people who had come to see it as primarily an organisation for providing these social services.

The first explanation accepts, implicitly at least, this interpretation of the church's function. Although nearly all churches took on the task of providing social services, including new ones such as the Methodists and the Salvation Army, some could argue that, from the standpoint of centrally-organised churches like the Roman Catholic, this thrust was an attempt to find a role and to either recover its following among the industrial working class or to find new adherents in the `mission' lands affected by colonialism.

But is it the job of the church to become a social service institution? Or is it the job of the church to inspire its members with a spirit of charity that will lead them to set up such institutions where necessary? Those 19^th century religious congregations were one way that expressed itself: they came from the initiative of founding individuals, not of the hierarchy. In the 20^th century, a different model emerged: lay organisations, such as the Catholic Worker movement, inspired by christian social principles, but with no canonical status. This looks like the best way to go.
 

Growing market power

In the face of the growing power of the market, church leaders have adverted to the danger in a few public statements. But their voice has been muted. People will not take papal encyclicals and statements like those in the US bishops' pastoral letter on the economy seriously as long as the church uses the market to finance its own operations. The Banco Ambrosiano scandal showed how deeply the institutional church is mortgaged to the market system. As long as this situation continues, the unelected managers of the market know that the church leadership is no threat to them. It provides, in some cases, `a cheap kind of spiritual vodka' (in the words of V.I.Lenin) and in others, it simply loses all credibility.

This brings us to the question of whether the church should use the methods of the state. It was a great temptation for the early church to do so when, after being persecuted for three centuries as a sign of a counter-culture, church leaders found themselves offered the position of the established religion in the Roman empire. We are still struggling with the results of the compromise on principle which was accepted then.

The church is a different sort of organisation. Jesus said you must not be like the leaders of the world (Mk 10,43; Mt 20,26) and the evolving doctrine of the Trinity offered us a model. Out of all the doctrinal disputes of the early centuries about the Trinity, only one thing is clear: the very essence of God is community, an equal partnership, not a hierarchy. And not a patriarchy: it is significant that when Jesus spoke of the Holy Spirit, He said she (will be your Comforter, or will teach you all things) because the word for Spirit is feminine in Hebrew, in the Aramaic which He spoke and in Greek, in which the New Testament is written. The church is meant to be the image of this relationship in human society. Daniel Berrigan, in a talk he gave in London and Dublin in January 1973, put it even more strongly. Trying to answer the question of the identity of the Beast of the Apocalypse, he said the Beast is the state -and the church in as far as it takes on the characteristics of the state.

We might need to modify this slightly. The nature of the Beast is to be found in the power relationships on which most state structures have always been built. But we now see the state's power to do good being eroded. Berrigan himself would probably recognise the changes that have occurred since the early 1970s: the characteristics of the Beast are shown most clearly today in the forces of international capitalism, setting up `the market' as the idol to which we must all bow down and even sacrifice the lives of our children, just as the state gods of ancient Canaan demanded sacrifices to Moloch, the state god. The market is the state god now, and it is not just a symbol like the flag, the national anthem and the trappings of state worship (I once had a button, which I hope I made good use of, with the slogan on it: `War is good business - invest your son'). The state cult of recent times demanded its human sacrifices too: the lives mostly of young men conscripted to fight its wars. This reached a horrifying scale in the holocausts in the trenches of the First World War and got out of control when aerial warfare and weapons of mass destruction claimed victims far beyond the ranks of traditional combatants. The real human sacrifices demanded by the new Moloch of the market are the lives of the weakest and most vulnerable: children in poor countries killed by IMF prescriptions that deny them basic health care and their mothers, poor women with no voice. This is a significant step worse than the state's most public ritual sacrifices, of young men sent off to war, who could, even if at great cost, always refuse to take part in the ritual.

It could be argued that the medieval church, by its doctrine of a just war and its power to impose rules based on this doctrine on the states of Europe, fell into the role of regulating the sacrifices demanded by state worship. A radical opposition to the cult of the state would have been more in line with the church's basic inspiration and vocation even then. The increased horrors of modern war have brought about a new questioning of the cult of the state. They have even led the US bishops to write a pastoral letter on war and peace in which they support the right of conscientious objection. This attacked one of the pillars on which the state cult is constructed, so, even though they did not challenge openly the absolute claims of the state, they were taking a step in that direction. After centuries in which churchmen (and of course, the leaders are all men) had seen the church as a sort of super-state, invoking images such as Christ the King, we could probably not expect them to jump to a totally different mind-set.
 

So is the state's job to regulate the churches or to respect them?

One of the positive roles of the state is to protect and respect the rights of all citizens, including the right to free association and the right to choose their own lifestyle. The christian community, the church, can claim this protection and respect, not as a state-within-the-state, but like any other free association of citizens. And, by doing so, we can advance the recognition of these rights for all.

(I must admit here to feeling a bit uncomfortable with using the language of `rights', a product of Europe, when it is becoming clearer how much peoples outside Europe have built on the foundation of a language of mutual responsibility. Medieval Europe spoke the language of complementary rights and duties, but even this typically European dualism falls short.)
 

Is it the church's job to regulate or even preach to the state?

If the church is not a state-within-the-state or state-above-the-state, it cannot choose to regulate those who do not choose freely to be its members. If it is not a state-within-the-state, preaching to the state, e.g. by pastoral letters of bishops or popes, is not the most credible way to achieve its aim, the establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth. If it negotiates for a special position, it once again becomes a state-within-the-state, denying its essential mission to bring the Kingdom of God to all people. If an unelected bishop-for-life claims a special right to speak, he cannot expect to be heard by unelected presidents like George W.Bush or Robert Mugabe. If, on the other hand, a bishop becomes really the servant of the servants of God and his church becomes a servant community to the wider society, the radical implications of its example would eventually shake not only the thrones of Bush and Mugabe but the very throne of Mammon.

But playing a state-like role, even if it is to provide social welfare, is a great temptation for churchmen.

Of course, the social welfare function of human society predates `the state'. Here in Zimbabwe we have the institution of the zunde raMambo, the chief's field which the community cultivated as a public service, to provide a stock of food for famine seasons. The Tswana chief had a special granary, where surplus crops were stored after a good season for the same purpose. This function of the chief, responsibility for the community's food security, was sacralised e.g. by Egyptian Pharaohs in order to boost their secular power. Control of the food reserves gave the Pharaoh power to dictate to the people (see Genesis 41,37-57) and the gods of the state were invoked to legitimise this power. The Pharaohs, like Roman emperors and other kings later, even became state gods. No wonder the strict spiritual monotheism of Akhnaton met with such resistance: it was a threat to all the established powers. Our history books when I was a boy said that his revolution failed because it met with resistance from the established power of the priesthood of the old gods, but more than a question of abstract theology or public liturgy was at stake here, and the officials vested with state power recognised that. He was doomed to failure when they combined with the priesthood against him.

It is significant that one of the symbols discarded after Vatican II was the papal sedia gestatoria, in which the Pope, like a Pharaoh, was carried shoulder-high and escorted by guards carrying ostrich plumes. But the survival of such a symbol for so long was a sign of how deep Caesaro-papalism had taken roots in the church.

Therefore sacralisation is one of the greatest temptations of the church, and kills the spirit. The early church was rich in martyrs, not for a doctrinal formulation, but for a way of life. The legal means by which a Roman martyr's marturia (witness) was tested was usually a formal request to formally perform a ritual of state worship, or worship of the state gods, custodians of the values of the state. The witness of their lives was a refusal to serve the state system, shown by the young men who refused military service or young women who refused to marry highly placed citizens and thus become a part of the exploitative system. The cult of virginity that developed later was an attempt to sacralise their social protest. Older christians, such as bishops, faced the ire of the state for encouraging this kind of behaviour.

If the church were to break with the system, becoming an example of an alternative way of organising human life, we would see more martyrs. Already the most significant martyrs of the 20^th century were churchmen and women who stood up for and identified with the poor: Rutilio Grande, Oscar Romero, the six jesuits of the Central American University in El Salvador, the less-known Sri Lankan priest Michael Rodrigo, priests who defended the dalits and tribal peoples in India and maybe even the Camerounian theologian Engelbert Mveng are just some examples.
 

What went wrong?

It could be argued that the failure of the Welfare State, which appeared as a failure to resist the state-like power of international speculative capital, was really a failure to use the means of the Spirit to achieve an aim of the Spirit: the welfare of all its citizens, especially the most vulnerable. In the crisis of our age, the challenge is to provide the material social security that church and state have vied to provide in the past two centuries and to provide structures which respect and protect citizens against the new onslaught of Mammon in the form of the institutions of international finance capital. The means of fighting Mammon cannot be the means of Mammon, which have been the means of the state. New methods of resistance and of building positively must be found. They will require more use of the resources of the Spirit and so the church is uniquely placed to help.

On the security issue, things have become complicated because since 1945, Western governments have been attacking the symptoms and have got themselves caught in a spiral of militarisation , threat and fear. Unlike the German scientists who did their best to hinder Hitler's nuclear ambitions, the British and Americans, with refugee German scientists to help them, created weapons of mass destruction and now fear enemies who may have them and are said to certainly be capable of manufacturing nuclear and biological bombs. Getting out of this situation will be difficult. A moral compromise was made in the 1940s, that is well summed up in JRR Tolkien's response when asked if `The Lord of the Rings' was an allegory of the Second World War. `Of course not.' he replied, `If it was, Frodo would have used the Ring. to defeat Sauron.' The end was judged to justify a dangerous means, nuclear armament, and that means now dictates to them.

Of course, there will be attempts to co-opt the leadership of the church, as there always have been, to co-opt every religion that proclaims that human beings are sons and daughters of God. (Cf the history, not only of christianity, but of Islam and Buddhism, which was a revolt against the caste system sacralised and legitimised by official Brahminism, respecting the spirit in us, even if it claims, like Marxism, to be non-theist.). Here in Zimbabwe, we see a shining example of resistance to co-option in Archbishop Pius Ncube, a simple, even conservative, man in the model of Oscar Romero, who rises to meet the challenge when the demands of the Spirit in God's poor are over-ridden by oppressive state power. His life has been threatened several times by agents of the state while other bishops (not only the Anglican Nolbert Kunonga, already named as a target of `smart sanctions' against supporters of the regime, but several Catholic bishops and leaders of other churches) betray their mission by seeking places in the councils of the state and of Mammon. Those are often advocates of a sacralising of their role which reduces them to functionaries of the religion of Mammon and consigns them, ultimately, to the sacristy. Both kinds of bishops will always be with us. We cannot sit and wait for the hierarchy to speak as a body with the voice of the Spirit, but one guarantee that the Spirit is always with the church is seen in the emergence in every age of leaders like Pius Ncube.

There is a chance that we will see a change as Christianity has in the past century become a world religion. The Caesaro-papalism of the past two millennia may become a historical relic, like many of the infantile stumblings we call tradition. The outcome depends, among other things, on whether we act as if we were the last generation (a temptation that has faced every christian generation), in which case two thousand years of history represent a formidable weight of tradition, or whether we see ourselves as `the early church', with thousands of years more ahead of us. We may be able to discard the baggage that impedes real progress, or we may not, because human nature is still `fallen', however we understand that. And we should not be surprised if the other world religions become much closer allies as they struggle with the same situation.

These world religions are now, like christianity, present all over the world: Islam, Buddhism and Judaism. We should probably add marxism to the list. They all arose out of a challenge to the religious establishments at the time of their founding, in answer to the call of the Spirit to defend the defend the value of the human spirit and the welfare of God's poor. In all cases, this led them to oppose the gods which sacralised and provided a specious justification for an unjust political and economic system.

Islam, by emphasising the otherness of God, placed the ultimate authority way above the level of the state gods of the nations around them and placed the demand for justice firmly on the shoulders of human beings. Its conception that a just state could be constructed on this basis might be criticised, but Islam is struggling with this problem. Even muslims who seek to create a just islamic state, such as Muammar Gaddafi of Libya and the Iranian ayatollahs, recognise that sacralising the corrupt Saudi Arabian monarchy and, to a lesser extent, the lesser kingdoms of Morocco, Jordan and the Gulf states, is a distortion of Islam.

Judaism had a similar origin, as a movement of all those excluded from power by the system of city states in Canaan and given direction by the demands represented by the law of the God of Moses. Its constant temptation has been to revert to being a national cult and we see this in the support given by international Jewry to the state of Israel. On the other hand, there are Jewish groups who reject the very claims of the state of Israel to legitimacy, and the record of Jews and Jewish communities as defenders of justice and human rights, for example in apartheid South Africa, is second to none. If the state of Israel could bring itself to accept the original programme of the PLO, which called for a secular multi-confessional state of Palestine, recognising that it included strong organised Jewish, Muslim and Christian communities, it could be a power-house for a new movement and a shining example to the world.

Jesus was crucified because he posed this kind of challenge to an established Judaism corrupted into a tribal/national cult. But this paper has dealt with the implications of that.

Buddhism faced the challenge of state gods sacralising and justifying the unjust caste system which still endures in India by refusing to talk about god or gods at all. The demand it placed on people was to attend to what they could change in themselves in order to create a world in which the Spirit active in each of us is respected and no-one does harm to anyone else. Of course there have been deviations, as when a Buddhist establishment obtained state power in Tibet or excessive influence over the state in Sri Lanka, but the Buddhism which is spreading in the West seems free of these and the Chinese, by breaking the political power of reincarnate Tibetan lamas have provided, perhaps unwittingly, a blessing with effects far beyond the Himalayas.

Marxism went one step further than Buddhism. It did not just refuse to talk about God or gods, but denied the existence of a higher power, in the name of liberating the human spirit. It fell deeper than Islam into the trap of seeking a solution in state institutions, but its founding texts do speak of the withering away of the state as its final aim. Marxists, even in power, show signs of learning from the experience of the 20^th century. Cuba today, like the Free Nicaragua of the 1980s under a christian-marxist alliance, is probably a more human place to live than any of the surrounding client states of the Great Satan of international finance enthroned in Washington, despite all that those states can do to make life physically difficult for Cubans.

Perhaps some of the proponents of the Welfare State in the 20^th century, by unravelling and decentralising state power, were beginning to pave the way for a withering of the state. They, too, are horrified that what emerged was a withering away of the state in favour of the more dangerous power of international finance capital. They too can be allies in a struggle for a more human world. And a more human world is what our God became human to effect.