BP, as we all know, is in big trouble as the oil continues to spill into the Gulf waters. But recently the company drew additional criticism when its board chair said that his company recognized the woes that this crisis was inflicting on the “small people.”

The angry response to his comment temporarily caught me up short. A week before reading about the controversy, I had sent off to the publisher my final draft of a short book manuscript on Abraham Kuyper’s theology of culture. At one point in my manuscript I mentioned the fact that the Dutch statesman-theologian was well known in his day for his affection for de kleine luyden—“the little people.” I had not felt the need, when I reported this in my study of Kuyper, to apologize on his behalf. Which makes me wonder whether there is a difference between Kuyper’s attitude and that of the BP leadership.

I think there is a difference. The “small people” comment by the BP leader came across as condescending. For Kuyper, on the other hand, the term “little” was an expression of affection, of deep concern. He worried much about political and economic systems in which the voices of “ordinary” people are not heard. Those who often appear to be “low” in the eyes of the powerful are “high” in God’s estimation.

To be sure, the line between affection and mere condescension can be a thin one. But it must be respected. In Isaiah’s prophecy, for example, two of the images of leadership employed are shepherd and father. The good shepherd “gently leads those who are with young.” And a godly king is a “nursing father.” While each of those can be taken in the wrong direction, properly understood they point to the need for leadership to be sustained by a genuine empathy for those the leader has been called to serve.

Sometimes people who regularly profess a concern for the poor do so in a condescending spirit. This comes through when “the oppressed” becomes an abstraction, or when a commitment to “the marginalized” is so heavily freighted with ideology that real people themselves get marginalized.

I once spoke to an ecumenical gathering where I held up John Perkins’ “Voice of Calvary” ministries in Mississippi as an admirable program for serving those in need. I described how Perkins had set up a health clinic and had organized food cooperatives for the poor. At a reception afterward, a person from a denominational agency berated me for advocating a “band-aid” approach for dealing with poverty. “These little measures do no good,” she said. “We need a revolution that redistributes wealth!”  But what about actual suffering people in Mississippi? I asked—surely the “band-aids” of medicine for the sick and food for hungry children can be a significant blessing. She smirked: “You do them no good by offering them false hope!”

A year later at a gathering of the same group, also at a wine-and-cheese reception, I heard her once again holding forth about the futility of band-aids. I offered up a silent prayer for what John Perkins had been doing for real human beings in the meantime.

Some of my warmest memories from childhood are of an adult lovingly applying a band-aid to a cut or a scrape. The line between affection and mere condescension can be a thin one, but most of us have experienced a real difference between the two.  And my clear sense is that the BP chairman and Abraham Kuyper were on different sides of the thin line.

There have been reports in a couple of different places about a 30-year study of the capacity of empathy in college students. Among other things, the researchers tested the ability to “read” another person’s facial expressions. Comparing the data between 1979 and 2009, the report concludes that there has been a 40 percent decline among folks in their late teens in the ability to empathize with others.

In the 1995 film “Clueless,” there was a scene where two high school girls walking side by side in a school hallway were talking to each other on their cell phones. I thought it was a funny caricature of teen culture at the time, but that kind of thing has become commonplace. Young people are communicating more than ever, but they are relying less these days on face-to-face encounters; instead they are texting, twittering, emailing, cell phoning, facebooking—sometimes while sitting in the same room with the folks with whom they are communicating.

A sermon that I have often held up as an example of a really bad use of Scripture was based on a Gospel phrase about Jesus: “and he looked at her.” The whole sermon was about the importance of making eye contact.  I’m still not ready to endorse the hermeneutic that the preacher employed. But maybe we need to find some more legitimate ways of issuing biblically based appeals for more face-to-face communication!

Shortly after the Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity early in the fourth century A.D., he issued the Edict of Milan (in 313), not only legalizing Christianity, but actually making it the official religion of the Roman Empire. This resulted in such a close relationship between church and state—the “Christendom” arrangement—that infant baptism was for all practical purposes the entry-point into citizenship. Thus, often these days when some religion is seen as being too closely linked to political power, the specter of “Constantinianism” is quickly raised.

The criticisms of the Constantinian arrangement are legitimate. When the church allies itself too closely with political power it loses the freedom to be the kind of church that God wants it to be. The late Lesslie Newbigin, who served for many years during the twentieth century as a missionary in India, made this case very effectively. When Newbigin returned to the British Isles after his retirement, he was shocked by the major cultural changes that had taken place there, as well as on the European continent and in North America. When he had begun his career he had seen himself as being sent out from a Christian culture—where Christianity was “the established religion”— to a mission field. But now he realized that his own homeland had become a mission field. Christians in the West, Newbigin observed, could no longer take a dominant Christian influence for granted. We are now, he said, “post-Christendom.” But that is not a thing to be regretted, he quickly added. The church should always see itself as “missional.” The Christendom arrangement lured the church into a sense of “owning” the culture that kept it from full faithfulness to the gospel.

All of that is good and important. The problem, though, is that sometimes the folks who make much of the dangers of Constantinianism and Christendom are placing too strict limits on how Christians can relate to public life. This was made clear to me in a conversation with someone who thought that my own views were dangerously close to Constantinianism. I pushed the person to explain why he interpreted my perspective in that manner. His response came in the form of two questions: Do I think that Christians can work effectively for Christian goals “within the American political system”? And do I believe that Christians can not only endorse the use of violence in law enforcement and military campaigns, but actually themselves serve as police and members of the military?

I responded to both questions in the affirmative, but also with the necessary qualifications. I believe that there are limits to the kinds of political compromises that a Christian can agree to. And I also believe that police action and military campaigns must be conducted within the kind of moral framework associated with “just war doctrine.” The person’s response was an “Aha! So you admit it. You really are a Constantinian!”

Actually, I do think Constantine had something right. And here I take an important clue from Lesslie Newbigin. As critical as he was of the Constantinian/Christendom arrangement, he insisted (in his Foolishness to the Greeks, 100-101) that we must be careful in our assessment of the errors of that arrangement.  “Much has been written,” he observed, “about the harm done to the cause of the gospel when Constantine accepted baptism, and it is not difficult to expatiate on this theme.” There can be no question, Newbigin said, that the church has regularly fallen “into the temptation of worldly power.” But he goes on: Should we conclude from this that the proper alternative was for the church simply to “have … washed its hands of responsibility for the political order?” Do we really think, Newbigin asks, that the cause of the gospel would have been better served “if the church had refused all political responsibility, if there had never been a ‘Christian’ Europe?”  The fact is, he notes, that the Constantinian project had its origins in a creative response to a significant cultural challenge. There was in Constantine’s day, he says, a spiritual crisis in the larger culture, and people “turned to the church as the one society that could hold a disintegrating world together.” And for all the mistakes that were made along the way, it was nonetheless a good thing that the church actively took up this challenge.

That is insightful. There is nothing wrong with working within the present political structures to serve the cause of righteousness in the world. But we must always do so with an awareness of the Constantinian danger of forming an unhealthy—and unfaithful!—alliance between the church and political power.