蜜芽传媒

Good morning. During the days of the cold war I used to travel to the Soviet Union a certain amount and on one visit I asked a bright young priest how he had become a Christian. He had of course been brought up as an atheist. He said that it was first of all the music and icons of the church that had drawn him to find out more. So it was good on this programme yesterday to hear a little of that music. There are many in the West for whom the sound of a Russian choir has a spine tingling effect and for whom icons have a profound appeal at once spiritual and aesthetic. It is no accident that the music of Arvo P盲rt, and the late John Tavener, both devout Orthodox Christians, has such wide resonance today.

But this week Forbes magazine voted Vladimir Putin the most powerful man in the world today, above Donald Trump, and the item on this programme yesterday was about the closeness of the Russian Orthodox Church to President Putin鈥檚 regime. It is indeed very close. His mother was a devout Christian, one of those babushka who kept the faith alive during the years of persecution and though brought up as an atheist, now identifies strongly as a defender of the Orthodox Church, Christianity and Christian values.

Historically this closeness of Church and state goes back to the emperor Constantine in the 4th century when against all the odds he converted to the Christian faith and the church switched from being a persecuted sect to being hand in glove with the ruling powers. For some Christians this has always been the great betrayal, because the church should be the critic of the state, not its partner. For others it was the time when Christians grew up and took their fair share of political responsibility for ordering our common life. Moscow saw itself the inheritor of that tradition and, after power moved from Constantinople, thought of itself as the third Rome.

Many Christians have a proper concern that the relationship of church and state does not get too close, and the church of England has often been criticised on these grounds. When I was on the Royal Commission for the Reform of the House of Lords I certainly heard them from the non-conformist churches in this country.

For Christians who take politics seriously, as I think we ought, this is not an easy relationship to get right. We are human and we can go wrong. So I am driven back to some words of St Paul, that we who hold the treasure of the gospel, are very much earthen vessels, clay pots, fragile and indeed flawed. We can hug power for the advantages it brings rather than out of real service for the country.

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