Article

Creed

General Election 24

Politics

3 July 2024

5 min read

Cross-check what matters when voting

Three perspectives to inform how we vote wisely.

Sam Rylands

Sam recently completed a doctorate in political theology and is the Vicar of St Andrew's, Fulham Fields.

A pen draws a cross in a box on a ballot form.

What principles will shape your vote this Thursday? What or who will primarily guide your decision in the ballot booth? Podcaster and former political advisor Alastair Campbell’s old adage “we don’t do God” suggests that religion and politics don’t mix. Yet some of the most important movements for social and political justice in modern history had Christians at their heart. Think Wilberforce, Fry, Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King Jr., Desmond Tutu, or the lesser-known but worth-a-google, Melanesian Brotherhood.

What wisdom might the Christian faith have to offer when thinking, not just about this election, but how to approach politics in general? Like lions on the England football shirt, all good things come in threes– so, here are three Christian perspectives that can inform political engagement.

First, earthly kingdoms are penultimate. God’s kingdom is ultimate.

Perhaps the moment that Jesus is drawn most explicitly to comment on the politics of his day, was when he was asked about paying taxes. “Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?” Given how frustrating it can be watching politicians avoid responding directly to any question posed, we might sympathise with those who wanted a direct answer here. But for Jesus, to say yes would position him as a traitor to the Jewish people who wanted to resist and subvert the authority of the Roman Empire. To say no, however, would be to signal revolutionary intentions to lead a rebellion against the occupying Roman force.

Set within this political trap, Jesus responds by asking for a coin and turns the tables by asking, “whose face is on this coin?” “Caesar’s,” comes the reply. “Then give to the emperor what belongs to him,” says Jesus. Yet, before we allow this response to justify opting out of political practice or hallow every existing ruling power, Jesus continues: “But give to God what belongs to God.” And what belongs to God, we ask? Well, as the writer of the ancient Psalms poetry put it, “the earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it.” Nothing short of the whole universe and beyond belongs to God, the creator of heaven and earth. So, in taking the coin, Jesus is not giving a blanket affirmation of Caesar’s rule, but challenges each and every earthly kingdom by relativising it in the light of God’s eternal kingdom. What has sustained so many Christians in challenging and renewing the political context of their day is the trust that before, behind, and beyond the rising and falling of each earthly authority stands God’s eternal kingdom. This kingdom is not in competition with the kingdoms of earth, vying to secure its own territory, but is a kingdom inaugurated by a king who wears a crown of thorns, forgives his executioners, and is raised from the dead to proclaim, “peace be with you!” The call to follow Christ within the political is to retain the perspective of this eternal life.

Second, politics needs a perspective beyond personal interest.

Holding an eternal perspective, however, is not to say this world or politics does not matter. In contrast, justice, compassion, and seeking a world as God intends it to be matters precisely because of eternity. How we live here and now has eternal significance. How we treat one another and care for all of creation has eternal significance. What belongs to God? We all do. Each person is made in God’s image. As a coin bears the image of its ruler, so we are marked by the image of God. When we consider our political responsibility, therefore, we must do so not with our own cares or concerns alone, or even primarily. Rather, we should ask what political responsibility we have towards others? How do my political decisions or actions impact my neighbour, both local and global– particularly those on the underside of the political power of the day? As the Archbishop of York, Stephen Cotterill, recently shared, “as a Christian, I’m hoping and I’m praying, that when I vote, when you vote, we won’t be placing our vote according to what’s best for us, but for what’s going to be best for God’s world.” If God’s power is displayed most fully in Christ who came, not to be served, but to serve, giving his life for the sake of the world, then political power cannot be a means for securing our own advantage over and against others. A Christian approach to politics recognises that my flourishing is bound up and inseparable from the flourishing of all others.

Third, let’s disagree well.

However, even if we could agree on the importance of politics beyond personal interest, we won’t all agree on what this looks like in practice. For instance, whilst two people might agree on the need to ensure a welfare safety net for the most deprived in society, their perspectives on how best to achieve this might differ greatly. Christians are not immune from such disagreements and (not that you would know it from the promises of each political party) no political system can deliver heaven on earth. How then are we to reconcile our political differences?

Returning to the theme of belonging and image bearing, the church bears the image of Christ. The church is the Body of Christ, comprised of many different members yet united, as one body. One of Jesus’ final acts on earth was to pray that the church would be one in the same way that God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are one. Unity in difference. This image offers a counterweight to how political differences are played out across the news and social media platforms. Here, to vote or think differently is often to become an enemy, or even to forfeit one’s belonging as a bearer of God’s image, another person worthy of inestimable dignity and value.

Belonging to Christ, however, is to know that belonging together runs deeper than divisions of race, gender, societal status, and political tribalism. It is to trust that my sister or brother in Christ, with whom I might strongly disagree politically, is a gift to me, a showing of Christ, that I would otherwise fail to see on my own. If Christ really is the way, the truth, and the life, then the truth is beyond my final possession of it. This does not mean indifference or relativism. As the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, writes, “unity is Christ-shaped, or it is empty.” But if we can recognise one another placing our penultimate political judgements under the same scrutiny of Christ’s coming kingdom, then even in our disagreements, the church, bearing together in costly communion, reveals a belonging together that anticipates the ultimate: a world where things can only get better.

Interview

Belief

Creed

18 September 2025

5 min read

Water from the well: a moment with Rowan Williams on Nicaea

A chance encounter with the former Archbishop led to a profound reflection

Hal St John

Hal is a theologian and writer based in London.

Students sit on the grass in front of a fountain.

Pontifical University garden.

Pontifical University.

The gardens of the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas near to the Vatican are a place of quiet reason, where the mind is trained to seek the fundamental truths of existence. But on a sweltering day approaching summer, the temperature was 31 degrees, and reason had given way to a more immediate need: a glass of water.

It was by the water-cooler, tucked behind a shade-giving tree, that I found him: Lord Rowan Williams of Oystermouth, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, a man whose theological depth is matched only by a palpable, gentle presence. Perhaps it was the heat, or a moment of recklessness, but I asked him for an interview. To my delight, he agreed.

The following day, we met. His recent keynote address, ‘Nicaea, the New Creation, and the Body of Christ,’ had laid the groundwork. What followed was not a simple Q&A, but a deep, meandering conversation—a drawing from the well of a tradition that is both ancient and startlingly immediate.

The grammar of divinity

How do you prepare to speak on a Council with 1,700 years of commentary? For Williams, the entry point is not the what, but the why.

“I started by asking - what was the question Nicaea was trying to answer?” he began. “This is the question Nicaea was trying to resolve: How do we say, at the same time, that Jesus really is the embodiment of the eternalism of God… and that he genuinely opens up for us a new relationship with the Father?”

This is what Williams calls the “deep grammar” of the Council—a phrase he embraces with enthusiasm. The Creed, he suggests, sketches a grammar for divinity itself. It asserts a belief in one God, “but the kind of oneness that God is, is a oneness that's always fertile or productive.”

This productive, self-giving life—kenosis—is not just who God is, but the kind of life we are called to participate in. “God is always reflecting itself in word and spirit… boiling over into creation - that's what God is!... a life that is both self-giving (kenotic) and productive… a life that brings others alive.”

The saints, in their radical openness to this “kenotic presence,” become conduits of this new creation. “Rather mysterious things happen,” Williams notes, “when you allow the act of God to go through you.”

The magnetic quiver

But how do we, in our everyday lives, tune into this deep grammar? Williams points not to the esoteric, but to the ordinary acts of faith that structure our existence.

“We’re called on, first of all, to wake up to the fact that in our ordinary lives we're in fact all the time making acts of faith - the faith that what I say to you and what you say to me can be more or less understood... the faith that human commitment and love are significant and worth investing in.”

This trust, this “connectedness,” is a slow “peeling open of human identity to its depths.” It is a universal experience, a “magnetic needle” in creation that “quivers northwards... quivers Godwards. We can't quite keep it quiet.”

He offers a wry, characteristically British illustration: “one of the great mysteries in British society is that British people are much nicer than the Daily Mail thinks they are!”

This inherent pull, this quiver, is what the doctrines of the Creed are meant to protect and describe. The dense, pub-unfriendly language of “consubstantial with the Father” is not an abstract puzzle but a map of a reality we are already, however faintly, experiencing. “The Holy Spirit draws us into the flow of life,” Williams says. “The Creed keeps us aware of it… it's the shape and form we’re growing into.”

The breath of the Spirit

This brings us to the ancient rift of the filioque clause—the Western addition to the Creed stating the Spirit proceeds from the Father “and the Son.” Is it a fatal block to unity or a matter of semantics?

For Williams, the scriptural reality is paramount. “Jesus says to his disciples I will send you the Holy Spirit who proceeds from the Father. Jesus is saying - you will be receiving a gift from me, which is given me by the Father, to give to you.”

The key, he suggests, is in the tangible action: in John’s Gospel, the resurrected Jesus breathes on his disciples. “Jesus brings the Spirit into action, into full tangible action in human history.” The Spirit proceeds through the Son into the world. At this point, theology reaches its limit. “I’m quite happy to grin feebly and shrug my shoulders...I dunno!” he laughs. “What matters is that the energy of new life and vision is given.”

And this energy, he insists, “goes with the grain of our humanity.” One can almost imagine a divine sigh: “For Heaven’s sake... just wake up to what you are.”

He finds the perfect image in the parable of the Prodigal Son, who, in the depths of his exile, “came to himself.” It is a “paradigm moment” of das Ereignis—a Heideggerian concept for an event of appropriating, of “coming into one’s own.” “There is a self to come to,” Williams affirms, “and a home to go to.”

A unity already given

Will the divided churches ever find structural unity? At times, he admits, we seem to be drifting further apart. But Williams’ focus is on a deeper, prior reality.

“It helps to be aware that there's a unity given already. We're not quite sure how to embody it. We're not quite sure how to organise it. But there's something there.”

Finally, reflecting on the Council itself, he dismisses any notion of Nicaea as a merely political project for a fractious empire, though Constantine’s desire for harmony was a factor. He paints a visceral picture of the attending bishops, as described by Eusebius: men with missing hands, gouged eyes, and the scars of persecution. When Constantine greeted them, “he kneels down and kisses their wounds.”

“They're not just purple cassocked prelates sitting in armchairs! Their faith has been through the fire!”

This is the well from which this Creed was drawn. It is a creed of the persecuted, a truth forged in fire. A truth, as Williams learned from Pakistani Christians this year who heard the story of Nicaea and simply said, “we know about that,” that is known in the bones before it is understood in the mind. It is the water that waits, cool and deep, for any who come thirsty.

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