Working Out Conflict

For the most part, Christians have accepted the integrating role of the state on the assumption that the state is ’secular’ and therefore neutral apparatus for the working out of conflict among different interests. To see the state as an alternative soteriology; and civil society as inseparable from the state, is to begin to notice the inherent conflict between state practices and the practices such as the Eucharist which Christians take for granted. True peace depends not on the subsumption of this conflict, but on the recovered sense of its urgency.” William T. Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination (New York: T&T Clark, 2002), 52.