One of the embarrassing problems for the early nineteenth-century champions of the Christian faith was that not one of the first six Presidents of the United States was an orthodox Christian.

Caesar's messengers didn't go round the world saying, 'Caesar is lord, so if you feel you need to have a Roman-empire kind of experience, you might want to submit to him'.

The day the church can no longer say, "We must obey God rather than human beings" (Acts 5:29), it ceases to be the church.

In fact, what we call "politics" and what we call "religion" (and for that matter what we call "culture," "philosophy," "theology," and lots of other things besides) were not experienced or thought of in the first century as separable entities. This was just as true, actually, for the Greeks and the Romans as it was for the Jews.

Caesar is only mentioned once in the gospels, and there Jesus says that there's a clear division between God and Caesar, a split of church and state, so that never the twain shall meet. Well, not so fast. We'll get to that. It sounds suspiciously modern. Did Jesus really anticipate post-Enlightenment Western ideology so exactly?

Jews may face martyrdom (not least because they refuse to privatize their faith), but they are committed to being good [162] citizens even under a regime at best penultimate and at worst blasphemous.

There is a danger in Christians supposing that they simply have to be flaky, awkward, against the government all the time, continually doing things upside down and inside out. Some people of course seem to be born that way, and use the gospel imperative as an excuse for foisting their own cussedness or arrogance on everyone else.

It is time, and long past time, to reread the gospels as what we can only call political theology—not because they are not after all about God and spirituality and new birth and holiness and all the rest, but precisely because they are.

The "word" did not "offer itself" in a take-it-or-leave-it fashion, any more than Caesar's heralds would have said, "If you'd like a new kind of imperial experience, you might like to try giving allegiance to the new emperor.

We are still in exile. "Exile" wasn't just geographical. It was a state of mind and heart, of politics and practicalities, of spirit and flesh. As long as pagans were ruling over the Jews, they were again in exile. As long as they were paying taxes to Caesar, they were in exile. As long as Roman soldiers could make obscene gestures at them while they were saying their prayers in the Holy Place, they were still in exile.

Religion is no longer considered the source of serious truth claims that could potentially conflict with public agendas. The private realm has been reduced to an "innocuous 'play area'", says Peter Berger, where religion is acceptable for people who need that kind of crutch- but where it won't upset any important applecarts in the larger world of politics and economics.

The common law is not a brooding omnipresence in the sky but the articulate voice of some sovereign or quasi sovereign that can be identified.