Politics and the First Commandment

Fourth Quarter 2004

A Book for Our Times

With all the talk of God and politics these days, it is a good time to go back to the basics—basics such as the Ten Commandments and in particular the first of the ten: "You shall have no other gods before me" (Ex. 20:3). That's what Patrick Miller has done in a wonderful little book of only 80 pages, titled The God You Have: Politics, Religion, and the First Commandment (Fortress Press, 2004).

The main title of the book, says Miller, is in one sense "nonsensical or wrongheaded," because one can never "have" God in the sense of having control or power over God. "It is vital to understand that the whole point of the First Commandment is that before you have God, God has you." From that point of departure, everything follows, as it did for Israel, after God led them out of Egypt and gave them the Commandments. Now that you have been "found, caught, constrained, led, and possessed, what now will you do with the God you have because that God has you?"

The most important thing that Israel had to understand from the First Commandment is that no other gods—nothing else that might be treated as a god—can stand before God. Nothing else that God has given us, nothing else that we have may take the place of God. And this has everything to do with politics and the economy, says Miller. "If the economy can enhance human flourishing without becoming a god—by trusting that what you have comes from the God you have and being willing to let one's focus be upon the God you have more than what you have—then the political order can enhance human community and the common good by being the context of our life with the neighbor as much as it is a potential threat to our proper life with God. Indeed, without a polity of some sort, a large common good with the neighbor is well nigh impossible either to achieve or to discover."

This is the point at which Miller makes an important distinction between "obedience" and "loyalty." "I find myself thinking more and more of the Commandments as having to do with obedience rather than loyalty. Loyalty, in the sense of allegiance to the government of one's country, is appropriate to being a citizen and to the protection and flourishing of the polis, the civic and political order." By contrast, "obedience belongs to God. There is a place for civil disobedience in the context of obedience to the only God you have. There is no place for the other gods, even if, indeed, especially when, they look like the leaders of the polis, the politicians, the powers that be."

Finding the right place and limits for political life before the face of the God who has taken hold of us amounts to more than simply a negative act of not having other gods. The positive implication of the First Commandment is to love and serve God with all that one has. Here is the way the positive meaning is elaborated in Deuteronomy, as Miller points out: "The Lord your God you shall follow, him alone you shall fear, his commandments you shall keep, his voice you shall obey, him you shall serve, and to him you shall hold fast. (Deut 13:4)."

The First Commandment, in all that it says and implies in the context of all the Commandments, defines who we are and the meaning of our life in this world, Miller concludes. The First Commandment "is not subject to malleability or occasional departures. If the Lord of Israel is the one who made us and the world of which we are a part; if the Lord of Israel is the only one who can take away our fear and save us in our trouble, if the Lord of Israel has alone brought us to this place and is alone our hope for the future, then all our trust and all our obedience and all our adoration are placed there and nowhere else. That, I think, is a piece of good news that serves to relativize all the other demands and claims on our life."

And if this is true, says Miller, then "it is a reality that we cannot walk in and out of, looking for some other cosmic system, some other ground on which to stand, some other deliverer. For one thing, there isn't any; and for the other, our very identity is established by the exclusive worship of this God who has loved us and redeemed us. You cannot walk two ways at the same time. You cannot live in two different worlds at the same time."

This has everything to do with politics and government, and one need only read the Psalms to understand how the First Commandment works its way out in the demand for justice and righteousness and the responsibility of kings to God. "In what are surely the most conspicuously and comprehensively political documents in all of Scripture," Miller writes, "the Psalter culminates in an extravagant, all-encompassing concert of praise in its final psalms, calling earth and heaven, all their creatures and all their peoples to the praise of God."

—The Editor