Church's Antithesis to Political Unity

"In seeking to achieve peace without grace (a correlate of an original war without sin), the state not only pretends to be a church or soteriological institution but must also save us from the church. If the telos of the state's mission is a unity without difference, a peace without faction, then 'the Church is perhaps the primary thing from which the modern state is meant to save us' (RONT, 188), for the church, as a transnational body, must necessarily both transcend the boundaries of the state and also be a fractive force within the state precisely because it asserts difference - an antithesis."


James K.A. Smith, Introducing Radical Orthodoxy, p. 134