stanley hauerwas

you absolutely must go to this link, to see the most amazing painting ever. actually it makes me throw up a little in my mouth.

"'Communal allegiance to Christ and his Kingdom is the indispensable check upon the pretentions of the modern state. Because Christ is Lord, Caesar is not Lord. By humbling all secular claims to sovereignty, the Church makes its most important political contribution by being, fully and unapologetically the Church.' Yet it seems that universality should be qualified in the name of our service to democratic nation states as we can be called on to kill Christians from totalitarian states in the name of the relative goods of our 'open societies.' But then in what sense is the Church our first loyalty? Or, what kid of unity is it that would have us eat at the same table to which we have been invited by a crucified savior only to be told at the end of the meal that the peace of that table does not mean we cannot kill one another for the goods of the nations in which we find ourselves living?

"I do not see how loyalty to democracy in this sense is any less tyrannical. Rather it suggests that the democratic state is no less a state and it will respect the 'freedom' of the church only to the extent that it can count on that 'freedom' to underwrite its ends as a nation that knows not that Christ is in fact Lord."