This article looks at how Christians should be educated for prepolitical involvement in civil society. It does this by proposing a ‘summary grammar’ based on a reading of three theologians who have influenced Christian political thought (Augustine of Hippo, Gustavo Gutiérrez and Dietrich Bonhoeffer). The summary grammar is expressed in the form of three inter-related tensions on which all prepolitical education must rest if it is to be properly Christian. The first tension concerns the nature of God's kingdom; the second relates to the idea that that the church should be in the world but not of it; and the third is based on how the church relates to that world. I then look at how this prepolitical education could have helped the recent debate over war with Iraq.
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