The Former Sword and the Ploughshare

On the Lighter Side...

2010-08-22T18:35:00.000+01:00

August 22, 2010
So, this blog shall not perish from the earth after all. I have decided to use it, for the time being, for my more casual, random posts on strange topics that interest me, like hurricanes and box office statistics, while the main action of informal theologizing will happen over at the new Sword and Ploughshare. Hopefully this sideshow, however, will not be entirely without interest.
So, here is the first lightened-up post here, on hurricanes, heat waves, and climate change (some form of this is likely to appear in the 4th issue of Fermentations.)

For years, we have all heard the increasingly hysterical rhetoric about how a warming climate will lead to more hurricanes and more powerful ones. Hyperactive seasons like 2005 and 2008, and superstorms like Hurricane Katrina have been chalked up without further ado to climate change, and used as poster children for the dangers of a warming world. As usual, the rhetoric has outrun the science, since the studies on the subject have generally been fairly inconclusive and ambiguous, although there has been enough evidence to establish a tentative consensus for a correlation between a warming planet and increased hurricane activity. Our ever-surprising planet, however, has stubbornly resisted this correlation through the blistering summer of 2010.

The hurricane season dawned on June 1, accompanied by much fanfare and predictions from all reputable prediction bodies that 2010 would take its place as one of the top five Atlantic hurricane seasons on record, due largely to the record-hot temperatures across the tropical Atlantic. The usually inactive month of June showed early promise, spawning the remarkably intense Hurricane Alex, which struck northeastern Mexico on June 30th as the 2nd most intense June hurricane recorded. However, as July and the first half of August slid by, the tropics languished in doldrums of inactivity. Two tiny and short-lived tropical storms, Bonnie and Colin, came and went, unnoticed by all but full-time tropics watchers. Over the same period, the eastern Pacific hurricane season, the western Pacific typhoon season, and the Indian Ocean tropical cyclone season were all non-events, resulting in the least active Northern Hemisphere tropical cyclone season on record.

Meanwhile, most of the Northern Hemisphere’s landmasses blistered under temperatures nothing short of astounding. Seventeen countries broke their all-time heat records this year (more than ever before), from Pakistan (128) to Finland (99). Worst-hit of all was western Russia, where tens of thousands died in a seemingly endless heat wave that kept Moscow’s temperature above average for 65 consecutive days, 16F above average for 35 consecutive days, and at or above the previous all-time record (99F) for 7 days. Meteorologist Jeff Masters called it “one of the most intense, widespread, and long-lasting heat waves in world history.”

As climatologists reached for an explanation of the unexpected inactivity of the tropical hurricane season, the massive heat waves emerged as the likeliest villains. Jeff Masters explains: “since Northern Hemisphere land areas have heated up to record temperatures this summer, this has created strong rising motion over the continents. This rising motion must be compensated by strong sinking motion over the adjacent oceans in order to conserve mass. Sinking air causes drying and an increase in stability.” Greater atmospheric stability means fewer clouds form, and without clouds, no tropical cyclones form.
In other words, an extraordinarily hot globe may actually be responsible for suppressing tropical cyclone activity, contrary to tentative scientific predictions and hysterical media prognostications--highlighting once again just how puny our efforts to predict our vast and complex planet remain.

Moving Announcement!

2010-07-15T12:00:00.003+01:00

July 15, 2010

Well, ladies and gentlemen, the long-awaited day has come. There have been many delays, and it's still not nearly where I want it to be, but it's ready for use--my new website! Henceforth all this theological and political blogging, in a much more organized and useful form, will be happening over there. Plus, all the archives from this blog are there now, so you've no need to loiter around here. Perhaps this blog shall live on as an outlet for more casual hobby-writing--hurricanes and poems and that sort of thing. We shall see.

But for now, please join me over at The Sword and the Ploughshare.

Force Becomes Structure: David Bentley Hart on the Cause of Controversy

2010-07-14T21:58:00.000+01:00

July 14, 2010

More pressing matters have delayed me from saying more about the controversy conference, but I do want to return to it and say a bit about some of the other lectures while the memory is still fresh. The afternoon of the first day of the conference was graced by the presence (via videoconference) of David Bentley Hart and Robert Jenson, both titans of the American theological landscape and both known as well for their colorful personalities, which came through even from 5,000 miles away.

Hart’s lecture was entitled a “Penitential Approach to Controversy,” though that was not really its main focus. The penitence referred to was his own, coming to us as he did with a legendary reputation for bombastic theological rhetoric. We can, he said, invoke the prophets as a model for dramatic controversial pronouncements, but we must acknowledge that most of us are not called to be prophets in this way, and that went for him as well.

Hart proposed in his lecture to offer us not so much an argument as an intuition of why it is that ferocious controversy has been such a perennial feature of the Christian Church’s life, despite the New Testament’s clear calls for peace and unity. His suggestion was provocative and intriguing, disturbingly similar to liberal reconstructions of the early Church of the von Harnack variety, and yet refusing to grant their apostate conclusions.

There is a deep tension at the heart of the Christian faith, he suggested, between its apocalyptic other-worldiness and its need to become assimilated to history, to life in this world. Dogma and cult were the means by which the Church had to tame, as it were, the apocalyptic inbreaking of the Gospel and make it suitable for millenia of waiting for the consummation. Christianity entered history not as a set of doctrines, but as an apocalypse; it constituted an overturning of history and nature as we know them, or as we think we know them. There could be no simple return to the sacred as formerly understood, and there didn’t have to be, because history was coming to an end. Christianity thus accords ill with any purely cultic rationality.

It would take some time, and some adjustment of expectations, for so singular an interruption of the eschatological into the temporal to be recuperated into a stable institution of words and practices. Christianity had to become historical again, cultural again, cultic again. Christianity was forced to take on the morphology of the religions which it had replaced, without compromising its content. What began as force had to become structure--the event had to crystallize.

Now thus far, this has a great deal of similarity to certain liberal narratives, but Hart does not take all this to mean that the assimilation to history was wrong, or something that we need to undo. It is necessary and valuable--dogma and cult and all the rest. Nonetheless, there is a tragic element to this accomodation between apocalypse and cult. The apocalyptic force of the Christian revelation, its newness and power, its difference from all that came before, is too volatile to permanently and comfortably sit at ease within its own institutional boundaries. It is for this reason, suggests Hart, that Christianity has proved so uniquely fissile, and creative even of a militant atheism and nihilism. There is an ungovernable destructive energy at the heart of Christianity that is always at tension with its constructive impulses.

Dogma, therefore, the Christian event’s assumption of a fixed, historical, and institutional form, although it can be the poetic discovery of language for speaking about God, is also in some sense the language of disenchantment. It wants to recuperate the force of a cosmic disruption in the form of institutional formulae. This is not something to be lamented--we must accept the workings of providence. But dogma always has some quality of disappointment about it. We speak in these formal terms because we have not yet seen with our eyes and felt with our hands. And with this disappointment comes an impulse to anger.

It is this anger, this spiritual discontentment, and not merely the mixing of the Church with politics, that explains part of the violence of the controversy witnessed in the early Church. Theological hatred, Hart suggested, may be at some level a reflex of fear, fear that the Gospel, exposed to the corrosion of ordinary time, may be reduced only into history.

Another phenomenon might also be going on: there is something in the pursuit of theology that is a constant frustration of human pride, and thus calls forth ever more assertive expressions of human pride. We are thwarted by the surfeit of truth over the limits of human language. But even more importantly, all our attempts to speak about God are overwhelmed by God’s speaking of Himself in time. It challenges and cancels our customary attempts at meaning, and destroys the human ambition to ascend unaided to the summits of truth. Theology thus carries with it a certain measure of resentment, a resentment toward grace.

It is from this resentment, our unspoken recognition of our inability to gain a true grasp of that of which we speak, that leads to the anger that bursts forth so intemperately in the midst of theological controversy. Controversy must therefore always be carried on in penitence, penitence for our resentment against God.

-----

I have nothing to add to this fascinating and powerful thesis, except the objection that was voiced by several in the Q&A afterward--namely, that Hart’s thesis is perhaps better seen as a paradigm for understanding what is always true about the Christian revelation, than as a historical explanation of how the Church evolved. Indeed, that is more how I have presented it here. But, although he was counseling no return to primitivism, he did seem to claim that the Church was in the beginning characterized by this apocalyptic otherworldiness, in constant expectation of the end of the world, and then only after a century or so realized that it had to settle down and develop doctrine. This obscures the fact that controversy over doctrine and the institutional shape of the Church is present already in the New Testament itself. Nonetheless, with this caveat, I find that Hart’s intuition seems to ring true, and promises to perhaps shed a lot of light on the theological experience.

Barth's Christological Corrective (VanDrunen Review VIII)

2010-07-12T22:19:00.000+01:00

July 12, 2010

There is, I’m afraid, very little to say about this chapter. Actually, I’m not afraid--that is rather a relief, given how much there has been to say about the previous seven chapters. This chapter marks a dramatic shift from the chapters thus far, because heretofore, VanDrunen has been attempting to claim a certain tradition--to say, “Here’s what X said, and here’s why it’s part of the Reformed tradition, and (implicitly) that’s why I’m all for it.” But now, all of a sudden, he isn’t. Finally, our narrative has a solid villain. Barth is the fellow who decisively rejected the Reformed consensus, as VanDrunen sees it, who rejected the notion of natural law, who substituted one kingdom of Christ for two kingdoms, and who insisted on a unified Christology, rather than one bifurcated into two mediatorships.

Now, there is little to say here because I don’t really disagree with this picture; Barth did reject the Reformed consensus, or at least, how VanDrunen has portrayed that consensus, and I have already argued with where I think that portrayal is flawed, so there’s not much point in rehashing it here. I simply think that those points at which Barth does disagree with this consensus are generally healthy correctives, whereas I’m sure VanDrunen thinks the opposite. Moreover, in saying that Barth is the “villain” of VanDrunen’s narrative, I don’t mean to imply that VanDrunen is harsh or unfair to him; he is quite objective and even-handed, so there is not a great deal for me to say in terms of contesting his portrait of Barth. This is especially so as I am, despite spasmodic attempts to reconcile this shortcoming, woefully inadequate in my knowledge of Barth. So there were a few points at which VanDrunen’s summary didn’t entirely make sense to me, but that was probably my fault, not his.

My only big question about his portrayal of Barth is that he sees Barth as rejecting the “commonality amidst antithesis” of the Reformers in favor of much greater commonality between believers and unbelievers. However, my understanding of Barth has always been that he highlighted the antithesis; others that I know have seen his antipathy toward natural law and his Christocentrism to have the result of implying that outside of specifically Christian truth, there is very little discovery of truth, and so as having a sort of “fundamentalist” edge. But perhaps I am mistaken here.

In any case, given that there is little need for extended interaction, I shall just return, like a dog to his vomit, to the question of Christology, for it is Barth, of course, who makes precisely the objection to the dual mediatorship doctrine that I have been making, and it is worth attending to VanDrunen’s comments at this point, given that this is the theological fulcrum underlying this book.

On page 342, VanDrunen says, “For Barth, affirming that God, but not God in Jesus Christ the redeemer, is the creator is tantamount to ascribing creation to a false God.” That is precisely right, I think. Unless the God who creates is the God who is revealed truly and fully in Jesus Christ the Redeemer, unless this work of creation aims toward the same end as the work of redemption and manifests the same gracious character of God in Christ, then the Creator God is not the Biblical God. Another way of saying all this is that for Barth, God is defined by his telos, and all God’s works may be read, nay, must be read, in light of the final end of his works--redemption in Jesus Christ. This endpoint provides the full meaning of all the earlier works, and so it cannot be abstracted out of them. This seems to me to ring absolutely true, and I’d be interested to hear why, for VanDrunen, it does not.

Now, let’s hear how VanDrunen contrasts Barth and the Reformed tradition on the “two reigns of God.” He begins by recapitulating the “Reformed tradition”:

“For the earlier tradition, the two kingdoms doctrine consisted in a distinction between two reigns of God, one a redemptive reign over his church and the other a providential, non-redemptive reign over civil society and the broader cultural realm. This distinction often involved the corresponding distinction between the Son as eternal God (and, as such, the creator and sustainer of all things) and the Son as the incarnate mediator, the Lord Jesus Christ (and, as such, the redeemer of his people). As the eternal Son of God he reigns over the civil kingdom and as the incarnate mediator of redemption he reigns over the spiritual kingdom. Connected to this basic theological framework was the conviction that creation was an act of God, and therefore an act of the Son, but not a redemptive act of the mediator Christ. The older Reformed perspective viewed creation as well as redemptive ‘christologically’ or ‘christocentricially’ in this sense.”

First, I must protest against the continued hypocrisy here. You may recall that at the end of the previous chapter, VanDrunen berated Kuyper for his terminological confusion in using the name “Christ” to refer to the Logos the Creator and Jesus the Redeemer, when in fact the name only applies to the latter. I pointed out, with a bit of annoyance, that VanDrunen himself (like pretty much every other theologian in history, I might add), had used “Christ” and “Christology” to refer to both, earlier in the book. And now we see him again indulging in the same ambiguity: early Reformed thought, we are told, had a “christological” or “christocentric” doctrine of Creation, because it taught that the second person of the Trinity was involved in creation. But, if VanDrunen is to be believed, it taught that, although the second person of the Trinity was involved, He was involved precisely not as Christ, but merely as “Son” or “Logos.” He wants to have his cake and eat it too. And this is not a minor point. VanDrunen seeks to rest a great deal of theological weight on the fact that it was not “Christ” who created, since “Christ” is the Son’s title as king of the mediatorial kingdom, and that kingship has nothing to do with his kingship over creation. The Son creates, and rules over creation, only insofar as he is “eternal God”--he does not rule as the God-man, but only as God. Therefore, what we have is a theological account of creation, and the civil kingdom, and a Christological account of redemption, and the spiritual kingdom. Exactly what we do not have is a Christological account of creation.

Now, I don’t think this is for a moment theologically coherent, because it effectively treats the Logos asarkos and the Logos insarkos as separate persons, but if you’re going to opt for something theologically incoherent, at least don’t make things worse by making it inconsistent too. And it is, so far as I can tell, inconsistent for VanDrunen to claim that the Reformed teach that God did not create as Christ, and then to claim for them a “christological” doctrine of creation.

Second, what is at issue here is not a “distinction” between the Son as eternal God and the Son as incarnate mediator, nor a “distinction” between the two kingships this entails. Distinctions are fine. Distinctions are useful. Not always, of course; often they are harmful. But in principle, there’s nothing wrong with this distinction. The question is: what kind of distinction is this? Is this a heuristic distinction, useful for limited conceptualizing, or is it an ontological distinction, positing separate realities in the life of the Logos? And if it is the latter, then just how separate are these? This, you see, is the problem--not that VanDrunen (or the Reformed) perceives a distinction here, but how much they want to rest on the distinction. VanDrunen at least wishes to use the distinction as the argument for the complete autonomy of the two kingships from one another, so that neither has any effect on the other or any dependence on the other. This is not the same as just making a distinction. For instance, we might want to distinguish between me as writer of my book on the Mercersburg Theology and me as writer of this review. These are two separate works I have done at different points in time, for different purposes, in different manners, etc. And so we can draw some useful distinctions, rather than blurring them together. But you would be foolish to pretend that the one work couldn’t tell you anything about the other, or that they didn’t depend on certain common assumptions or manifest a common set of goals and a common personality. Of course, I might’ve changed my mind a lot in between, but this doesn’t happen to Jesus; he is the same yesterday and today. But, of course, the connection between creation and redemption is much closer than that, because, if Scripture is to be believed, the latter is the restoring and bringing to fulfillment of the former. So the analogy would be more like the distinction between my writing this initial rambly review and my final refined review of VanDrunen.

But with that remark about ramblyness, I should perhaps stop rambling and move on.

Now, I don’t really think that VanDrunen thinks that redemption is the restoring and bringing to fulfillment of creation; but if that isn’t the case, then I can’t really guess what redemption is for him. In summarizing the “Reformed tradition,” he says.” “After the fall, God not only initiated the covenant of grace for the purpose of establishing the spiritual kingdom but also preserved the creation order through the establishment of the civil kingdom” (344). Now, notice this language: God “initiated the covenant of grace for the purpose of establishing the spiritual kingdom.” See, I’d always been under the impression that God initiated the covenant of grace in order to redeem creation, and in particular mankind its head, from the sin and death into which it had fallen, implying a certain measure of continuity with the original creation. But now we learn that actually, God decided to whip up some Plan B--this new thing called a “spiritual kingdom,” having decided, apparently, that creation wasn’t really the best place for man after all. I’m probably distorting things here, but I really don’t know how to make sense of this narrative that VanDrunen is giving me--what is redemption, if not new creation?

To move on, VanDrunen says that, in contrast,

“Barth distinguished God’s work of creation from his work of redemption, but he did so only while insisting that they are both Christological in a way such that they can never be separated. The orders of creation and redemption are united in Christ and to know God as creator is also to know him as redeemer. To deny this, according to Barth, is to speak of two gods, to combine Yahweh and Baal.” (344)

Exactly! Thank you, Barth! Yahweh and Baal--I couldn’t have said it better! Distinguishing without separating--exactly! Now, what part of this does VanDrunen disagree with? I want to understand, but I don’t.

Perhaps this is what he didn’t like: “Barth himself understood that the older Reformed ideas about a pre-incarnate Son (the so-called logos insarkos), the distinction between a protological covenant of works and a subsequent covenant of grace, and the natural law were intertwined and to be rejected together” (345). Now, if Barth really had rejected the idea of a pre-incarnate Son (who, by the way, is the logos asarkos--the logos insarkos is the incarnate Son...this faux pas does not reassure me about VanDrunen’s grasp of Christology), then we should have serious objections. But of course Barth did no such thing, and I’m not sure where VanDrunen got that from. Perhaps all he is saying is that Barth rejected the particular things that the older Reformed said about the work of the pre-incarnate Son, but, if so, the phrasing was rather too ambiguous.

In any case, that pretty much wraps up the Barth chapter. I apologize that this review was not very well-structured, but at this point, I’m just in a hurry to get on to the end of the book. And we’re almost there. Two chapters on the neo-Calvinists, an epilogue on the recovery of a Reformed two kingdoms theory, and then I can go back to the beginning and write the concise review.

The "Christian" vs. "The Secular Person" (Sermon on the Mount IV)

2010-07-10T12:39:00.000+01:00

July 10, 2010

In Luther's later treatise, entitled “The Sermon on the Mount,” we see an unfortunate shift from the promising (if somewhat disorganized) start of “On Temporal Authority.”

Having started with the Beatitudes, he asks,

“What does it mean, then, to be meek? From the outset here you must realize that Christ is not speaking at all about the government and its work, whose property it is not to be meek, as we use the word in German, but to bear the sword (Rom. 13:4) for the punishment of those who do wrong (1 Pet. 2:14), and to wreak a vengeance and a wrath that are called the vengeance and wrath of God. He is only talking about how individuals are to live in relation to others, apart from official position and authority.”

This is not an uncommon route to take--insisting that different ethical standards apply in private life vs. public life--and I am not going to contest that there must be some difference, because there is still a provisional task of judgment to execute until the fullness of the Kingdom comes. The question we must ask, though, is whether it is an absolute difference; should the commands of Christ have no effect on how a government decides to execute vengeance? Do the priority of peacemaking and the value of mercy have no purchase in the public sphere? Moreover, we must beware of articulating this eschatological distinction in terms which suggest it is simply a public/private distinction, as Luther appears to do here: do Christian ethics cease to have any relevance once we move from the individual level to the level of any institution? The CEO of Enron had “official position and authority,” he was working not as an individual, but as representative of an institution. Did the same ethics no longer apply? As we go on, we will see that our concern here is not unwarranted.

Luther goes on to draw a sharp distinction between office and person:

“The man who is called Hans or Martin is a man quite different from the one who is called elector or doctor or preacher. Here we have two different persons in one man.” Jesus, is not talking about the office-person: “He is not talking about this person here, letting it alone in its own office and rule, as he has ordained it. He is talking merely about how each individual, natural person is to behave in relation to others.”

See, now this is a very troubling move. We have shifted from contrasting civil government and private life to contrasting any “office” such as “doctor or preacher” with private life. While clearly every man has certain functions which belong exclusively to a particular office that he executes, and are not relevant outside of that office, it is rather more problematic to assert that different ethical principles apply within and without the office. Moreover, if we are speaking about “offices” of this sort, it seems that very little of our lives indeed lie under the commands of Jesus.

All this is simply under the discussion of meekness. Later, as he turns to consider the difficult commands of 5:38-40, he insists that this doesn’t mean a literal turning the other cheek--

“it was enough for a person to be ready in his heart to offer the other cheek....We say, therefore, that all it does is to proclaim to every Christian that he should willingly and patiently suffer whatever is his lot, without seeking revenge or hitting back.

“But the question and argument still remain. Must a person suffer all sorts of things from everyone, without defending himself at all? Has he no right to plead a case or to lodge a complaint before a court, or to claim and demand what belongs to him? If all these things were forbidden, a strange situation would develop. It would be necessary to put up with everybody’s whim and insolence. Personal safety and private property would be impossible, and finally the social order would collapse.”

This new move is also quite troubling. To take Christ “literally” here would mean that we would constantly have to suffer from “everybody’s whim and insolence,” and so it is clear that Christ merely means that we should turn the cheek of our hearts, so to speak, that we should be willing to suffer passively, but should not actually do so. Such bifurcation of action and intention seems to rob these commands of most of their force, relevance, and value.

In the following paragraphs, Luther combines the two approaches he has taken here--the distinction of civil government and private life, and the distinction of heart and outward action. The earthly regime, we are told, must continue to “administer law and punishment,” maintain distinctions of ranks, etc.

“But the Gospel does not trouble itself with these matters. It teaches about the right relation of the heart to God, while in all these other questions it should take care to stay pure and not to stumble into a false righteousness. You must grasp and obey this distinction, for it is the basis on which such questions can easily be answered. Then you will see that Christ is talking about a spiritual existence and life and that he is addressing himself to his Christians. He is telling them to live and behave before God and in the world with their heart dependent upon God and uninterested in things like secular rule or government, power or punishment, anger or revenge.”

We begin, it seems, with a distinction between civil government and the kingdom of Christ, but this latter gets defined as “the right relation of the heart to God,” suggesting that, as Luther has already ventured, what matters is not that our actions conform to Christ’s commands, but that our hearts do.

Of course, it is possible to read this at first in an Anabaptist way; Christians are to be “uninterested in things like secular rule or government, power or punishment” because they live according to a different kingdom. However, we are going to see that he does not mean that Christians are to stay aloof from such things--of course they are to be involved in such things, but as secular persons, not as Christians. As a Christian, we must love our enemies. But Christian could be, in addition to being a Christian “a prince or a judge or a servant or a maid--all of which are termed ‘secular’ persons because they are part of the secular realm.” One’s identity in relation to other people, in this portrait, is not part of one’s being a Christian--one is a secular person inasmuch as one stands in relation to other people. We may then ask how it is that a Christian could love his enemies, because inasmuch as he relates to his enemies, he must do so as a secular person. You will see soon that I am not overstating the problem...Luther just plunges further and further into it.

He expands upon the bifurcation of person and office, and considers the office to be a “secular person”: “There is no getting around it, a Christian has to be a secular person of some sort.” In this role, “your name is not ‘Christian,’ but father’ or ‘lord’ or ‘prince.’ According to your own person you are a Christian; but in relation to your servant you are a different person, and you are obliged to protect him.”

He continues,

“You see, now we are talking about a Christian-in-relation: not about his being a Christian, but about this life and his obligation in it to some other person, whether under him or over him or even alongside him, like a lord or a lady, a wife or children or neighbors, whom he is obliged, if possible, to defend, guard, and protect.”

In such cases we are told that it is wrong to apply the turn-the-other-cheek principle. Is it wrong because the principle is in abeyance when you are acting in an office, or because the principle is about self, not others?

He no longer draws the distinction clearly. Observe, for instance, where he says:

“What kind of crazy mother would it be who would refuse to defend and save her child from a dog or a wolf and who would say: ‘A Christian must not defend himself’? Should we not teach her a lesson with a good whipping and say: ‘Are you a mother? Then do your duty as a mother, as you are charged to do it.”

Rather than taking the obvious route with this example and saying, “Christ says a Christian must not defend himself, but clearly he should defend his child, so there is no contradiction,” Luther imagines that we must, as it were, suspend the Sermon on the Mount because we are talking about someone acting as a secular person. We are to neatly distinguish two different identities for the Christian and two different sets of ethics for these identities: “Now, with this distinction of the boundary between the province of the Christian person and that of the secular person you can neatly classify all these saying and apply them properly where they belong, not confusing them and throwing them in one pot, the way the teaching and the administration of the pope has done.”

What, we must ask, remains in the province of the Christian person, if we have bracketed out every aspect of his life that is in relation or in obligation to others? It would seem that Christ’s commands are still to apply when it is solely oneself who is threatened, and Luther says so. But having said this, he then immediately flip-flops and says, “It is permissible to use orderly procedure in demanding and obtaining your rights, but be careful not to have a vindictive heart.” It’s fine to use the law simply for your protection, only not for vindictivenss. “When the heart is pure, then everything is right and well done.”

So the Sermon on the Mount does not offer us instruction when it comes to living in relation to others, and, even addressing us as individuals, it should be taken only as speaking to our hearts, our intentions, not our outward actions. This is because any of our outward actions, it appears, are part of our “secular person.”:

“He lives simultaneously as a Christian toward everyone, personally suffering all sorts of things in the world, and as a secular person, maintaining, using, and performing all the functions required by the law of his territory or city, by civil law, and by domestic law....A Christian should not resist any evil; but within the limits of his office, a secular person should oppose every evil. The head of a household should not put up with insubordination or bickering among his servants. A Christian should not sue anyone, but should surrender both his coat and cloak when they are taken away from him; but a secular person should go to court if he can to protect and defend himself against some violence or outrage.”

Since we are all secular people, we should all go to court to defend ourselves, but in our hearts, we should still live as Christians. Here is an ethics that has been entirely emasculated and robbed of any livable form. Here the Catholic counsels/precepts distinction gets turned on its side, separating each individual into a spiritual person who inwardly follows the counsels--the hard teachings of Christian ethics--and outwardly follows the precepts--more basic, natural law teachings.

This is, of course, not Luther at his best, and we mustn’t imagine that Luther actually consistently applied such a bizarre and schizophrenic ethic. Nevertheless, this sort of inward/outward ethical dualism has exerted a very strong influence on Protestantism and we must be alert to its presence. A common form it takes in the modern world is in the dual standards we apply to the world of business: as a private individual, I am not greedy, nor combative, I seek peace with all men, but as a businessman, I can be a cutthroat competitor, seeking to destroy the competition and wring the last cent out of my customers, always seeking more and more profit.

For Luther, the attempt to escape the hard words of the Sermon on the Mount has led him to destroy the foundations of Christian ethics. Clearly, we need a better interpretive solution.

"Theology and the Peace of the Church"

2010-07-08T16:47:00.000+01:00

July 8, 2010

John Webster kicked off the proceedings at the Controversy Conference with his lecture “Theology and the Peace of the Church,” and as one might’ve expected from a man like Webster, it was profound, sophisticated, systematic, and rooted thoroughly in the doctrine of God. I might add that it was rooted in a thoroughly metaphysical doctrine of God, though I do not mean that pejoratively (a caveat one has to make in this anti-metaphysical age). His argument was essentially methodological, and sought to make two main points.

First, attempts to discuss the issue of controversy and conflict in the Church generally move immediately to the ethical, the imperative, without first establishing the theological, the indicative. Exhortations to overcome conflict thus degenerate into empty moralizing. Instead of this, we must, like St. Paul, first establish who God is and what He has done, and then we can construct ethical imperatives to act in accord with what is already the case by virtue of God’s character.

Second, this theological account which we must first provide is one in which peace is ontologically prior to violence, where being is good and evil is a privation of being, not a counter-being, in other words, the venerable Augustinian account of evil, enriched by his discussion of peace from City of God 19. Anything else ends in Manichaeanism, in which conflict is just as basic to the world as peace, intrinsic to the Church’s life and inescapable.

Webster began by contesting the common claim, mentioned in the introductory post about this conference, that it is through conflict that truth comes to light, that conflict makes clear what would else have remained obscure. We may think this is so, he said, but this is an illusion that comes from the dramatic oversimplification of the options that conflict engenders. In the midst of conflict, we artificially draw black-and-white distinctions that, while they appear to facilitate a triumph of rationality, are actually its downfall. We have two basic options, according to Webster: either we can see conflict as the natural condition of reason, or else it is an aberration from God who is the principle of order and peace. We must see it as the latter, because peace is ontologically prior to violence, and is indeed the guarantee of the possibility of reason. “An account of peaceful conduct,” he said, “rests upon a dogmatic account of the peace that God is and bestows.”

God is both the principle and the pattern of creaturely peace, but the former, said Webster, is generally ignored in favor of the latter. In other words, we exhort ourselves to be ethically conformed to the pattern of God’s peacefulness, without first meditating on how God provides the source and foundation for peaceable being. To do this requires that we reflect on who God is in himself. But of course we run into an immediate problem--we cannot know God as he is in himself. We must, said Webster, let this inhibition stand, but nonetheless recognize that God summons us into his inner presence by his outward activities.

In his account of the immanent Trinity, Webster’s hidden interlocutors were surely modern “dynamic trinitarians” (to coin a phrase, if it isn’t already one) like Moltmann and Jenson. The works of the Trinity, he said, are fully harmonious; there is no disorder, disruption, or contradiction in God’s making of the world, and thus not also in the inner life of God. At this point I found myself torn; on the one hand, of course--how could it be otherwise--God is perfect peace and harmony. On the other hand, I have learned too much at the feet of “dynamic trinitarians,” people who emphasized the ways in which the Godhead is also the archetype of diversity and creative tension, to be wholly satisfied. No disorder in God’s making of the world, sure; but could we say there was tension? And likewise in the inner life of God.

But let us let these objections rest for a moment, and follow Webster’s account out into the world of created being. Here he founded his case firmly on the Augustinian premise: Peace is intrinsic to creaturely being. Chaos is not a mode of being, but a declension from being. Conflict is devoid of ontological weight, because created nature is peaceful. Because of this, peace is first a property in the order of being, and only secondly a precept in the order of obligation--this is his recurring point about the indicative preceding the imperative.

In the New Testament narrative, peace is integral to grace; it is the chief product of Christ’s work of reconciliation. Peace is not first announced as a precept for the Church, but as a condition of the Church. The Church exists in peace as a function of the reconciliation of peace accomplished by Christ on the cross. This statement seems to locate the true being of the Church behind the visible church, and this will be troubling to many. The church that matters, many will object, is the actual visible church, and this is not peaceful; it is torn by conflict; we must seek to address this conflict, rather than offering ourselves false comfort that the Church really does exist in peace. An understandable objection, said Webster, but one that falls into the error of making practical ecclesiology the first theological science.

The summary precept of peacemaking, he said, is “Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts”--and this is not directed toward making peace real, but toward making peace visible. We must insist upon this, that our task is simply to make visible a peace which already defines the Church’s being, instead of manufacturing a peace where one does not yet exist; otherwise, our task is hopeless from the start. To be sure, conflict remains a present ecclesial reality, but what kind of reality? We must not assume, said Webster, that we can straightforwardly interpret the reality. We must read it in light of the illumination of the gospel of peace, by which we can see conflict for what it is: sin against peace. We must remember that vice is always contra naturam; it is not an ugly mode of being, but as a contrary to the mode of being. Conflict must not be described in a Manichaean way, as an eternal parallel to peace.

This all sounds great, but what does it really mean in practical terms? Does the rubber here ever meet the road? I was skeptical at this point in the lecture, but Webster went on to draw some very fruitful applications.

First, we must deploy intelligence to penetrate through the phenomenon of conflict to the peaceful nature underlying. That is to say, we must remember that, despite our conflict in the Church, we share a unity in Christ, and because of that, there is much else that we share. We must seek to discover this source of peace and unity that underlies our disagreements, and recognizing our conflict as a temporary aberration, seek to uncover its cause and dispel it.

Second, we must not attribute to conflict an irreducibility that it does not possess. If we get too worked up about conflict, then we attribute to a being that it lacks. If evil is non-being, then ultimately it is nothing to fear. If conflict is but a temporary aberration, then we can rest in confidence that it will be dispelled by faithful waiting upon Christ. We must see conflict for what it is, which is to say, as Webster put it with surprising eloquence, “The afterlife of what the gospel has already excluded, the lingering shadow that the rising sun has yet to chase away.” Therefore, in a sense, we do not need to make an assault upon conflict, but rather to reassure ourselves in confidence that no such assault is required.

None of this means that we are to blithely and complacently dismiss the fact of conflict, the fact that we may need to enter controversy at times to defend the peaceable kingdom, but it dramatically changes our attitude to it.

It means that we can lay down these three basic precepts for conflict and controversy:

It must be a work of charity, for the Church and our neighbors.
It must be exercised in common pursuit of divine truth.
It must arise from and attend toward peace.

In order to approach controversy in this way, what kind of person does the theologian need to be? Webster asked.

Theological science requires grace-character. It requires tranquillity of mind, lack of ambition, competitiveness, and vain curiosity.

At this point, Webster paused to reflect on zeal--is zeal a virtue or a vice? How may zeal promote the peace of God in the Church? Zeal is a righteous form of anger, but an unstable one. What is the distinction between righteous and unrighteous anger? Corrupt anger corrodes both rational and common life; it reduces controversy to a hopelessly conflictual affair, and destroys the clear vision of intelligence. Righteous anger is cooler and more objective. It follows a judgment of reason. It is a public passion for Gospel truth. Anger through zeal does not destroy the operation of reason, but nevertheless it may impair its performance; therefore, zeal must be moderated by our recognition of the ontological priority of peace.

What should the conduct of theological controversy be? The Church does not dispute according to the fashion of the world. Four rules for edifying controversy can be laid down:

First, it must display and magnify the truth of the Gospel, whose author is peace. Controversy will only serve peace in the Church if it has an external orientation, toward an object outside of the disputing parties. It must not become reduced to a simple party strife.

Second, theological controversy must not allow divergence of opinion to become divergence of will. Concord in the Church is a union of will, not of opinion. We must recognize that those who differ from us in opinion often share the same will toward the same good. There are of course, cases in which this is not the case, where we do not share a common object of love; but when this is the case, these are disputes not in the Church, but about the Church, and here we must await the converting work of the Spirit.

Third, it must recognize the catholicity of the truth, a truth that exceeds any representation that we may make. This object of love over which we contend is one too profound for us to rightly grasp. We cannot ever “end our dealings with it.”

Fourth, it must be undertaken in tranquil confidence that the Spirit will illuminate the Church. We often let ourselves fall into a barren naturalism, in which appeals to Scripture founder on irreconcilable exegetical conflict. We lose faith that there is an efficacy in the Word, a Word that will make itself clear to us, and will resolve this conflict. We may be confident that exegesis, rightly pursued, will, by Christ’s aid, lead us to peace and resolution.

-----

All that by way of exposition. Now some evaluation is in order. First, some words of ringing endorsement:

Although I might’ve wanted to put it in somewhat different, more Christocentric terms--Christ has conquered, he has brought us peace and guaranteed us peace--I thought his insistence on the priority of peace over conflict, the essential impotence of conflict, was fantastic. Too easily we get depressed over the conflicts all around us in the Church, or mired down in the midst of them, and forget that they are ultimately frivolous and insubstantial, Christ will preserve his Church, the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it, and any divisions that appear to loom large for us now will ultimately be reconciled in perfect harmony. Or else some of us get so intoxicated with the fumes of conflict that we come to imagine it as a positive good, as a joy to be indulged, rather than an aberration to be deplored. Certainly Webster provides us a wholesome corrective here. Conflict must never become an end in itself, but must be oriented toward peace, and that a just peace, not the peace of the merciless victor who has silenced all opposition. Nor is conflict inevitable or irresolvable--patient waiting upon Christ will reveal a resolution.

In particular, I liked Webster’s final point about the efficacy of the Word. Too true it is that, for all our passionate insistence on the authority of Scripture, we treat it as a dead letter. One side alleges texts that prove their point, and the other side insists upon other texts, or demands a better exegesis of the opponent’s texts. Both seem trapped by certain hermeneutical assumptions, and conclude that it is hopeless; the text remains silent about its interpretation, and so the quarrel will never be adjudicated. But in Scripture we do not have a dead letter to reckon with, but a living Word, a Word continually made efficacious by the Spirit who breathes it and the Son about whom it speaks. This Word will reveal itself to those who wait patiently upon it in faith. The perspicacity of Scripture is not immediate, perhaps, but it is in the end real.

But then there are some objections to raise, or rather, not objections, merely questions.

First, on a minor note, although I liked his point about recognizing that there can be concord--unity of will--amidst diversity of opinion, so long as we share the same object of love, this leaves a large part of our question unsolved. After all, at some vague level, we share a “common object of love” with anyone who seeks truth, or wants to serve some kind of God. If the presence or absence of a common object of love determines whether we have a dispute within the Church or a dispute about the Church, as Webster so meaningfully put it, then how do we define this common object of love? I talked to him about the problem afterward, and he recognized that this object “had to have some shape to it”--a creed, for instance. But then, how do we know that we are merely united in will and that we are not confessing the same words with very different concepts or intentions? The problem is not so easily resolved. This is not a fault with Webster’s presentation, merely a call for further elaboration.

But there is a much more significant objection, one that I knew Leithart was going to raise, so I asked it for him and beat him to it: while it may be true that God is peace, and that Christ’s redemptive work is a work of peace, how do we maintain this while simultaneously doing justice to the fact that this is not exactly how Scripture often speaks. The Old Testament is full of war, and Yahweh is described as a warrior; even in the New Testament, Christ says that he comes not to bring peace, but a sword, and Revelation pictures him as a conquering warrior destroying his foes. Or, to put this problem as Webster preferred to put it--how do we reconcile the immanent reality of peace with the economy that is dominated by drama and conflict? Leithart pursued the same point further with Webster after the formal Q&A session, and the three of us discussed it on the way over to lunch. In some ways, this is merely a methodological question, but it seems to make a lot of difference to our paradigm. After all, if conflict is integral to the economy of redemption, then perhaps we should embrace it with more gusto than Webster would seem to advocate, perhaps seeking peace with the serpent, as Adam did in Genesis 3 (Leithart’s example) is a failure, and seeking conflict is a truer imitation of the divine character.

Webster acknowledged that it was a thorny problem, and did not want to minimize the fact that, whatever may be the case on the immanent plane, on the level of the economy, peace is only reached through a great deal of “drama and conflict.” However, he wanted to insist that the crucial point is that peace is the starting point, and peace the endpoint, and conflict is an aberration, it is not eternal, it is not integral. It all comes down, he said, to whether you accept a privative account of evil, or not. On a phenomenal level, such an account is deeply unsatisfactory, because it seems to deny the reality of the evil we encounter, but ultimately, he didn’t see how you could do without it; otherwise you end in Manichaeanism. And he didn’t want to risk going there.

I am quite sympathetic to this outlook, and it does seem that you have to maintain a privative account of evil, but it also seems to me that you have to be careful about not letting that affirmation loom too large in your theology, or else you end up minimizing large sections of Scripture. I suggested that perhaps this was just one of those many paradoxes that we have to live with in theology, affirming both seemingly opposing truths--God is peace, God is a warrior--without ever satisfactorily synthesizing them. I think both Webster and Leithart were, at some level, satisfied with this way of putting it

Yet, a real difference of theological method persists. For Webster, we must begin with the immanent and let that condition our interpretation of the economic; we must begin with an account of who God is in Godself, and then use this as an interpretive grid for making sense of what Scripture says that God does. A cynic would say that this means we begin with philosophy and let this set the parameters of Scripture. Webster stated his determination to avoid that error, but nevertheless insisted on what he called “a very dangerous, but a very important principle”: the proportions of dogmatics do not have to match the proportions of the economy. Scripture may tell us very very little about who God is in Godself, but dogmatics needs to talk about it quite a great deal. As he charmingly put it: “Your conclusion will in the end be that of Job--‘God is great, and we know him not.’ But you still have to spend a few hundred pages saying ‘God is great, and we know him not.’” Ultimately, I wouldn’t want to deny any of that, and I don’t think Leithart would either. But Leithart, I know, would be a lot more comfortable starting from the economy, learning that Yahweh is a warrior, that we are called to imitate him in that, and only then seeking to establish the senses in which God is peace, and we are to imitate him in that (of course, it is also possible that one could take Leithart’s method of starting with the economy, but still argue that in the economy, God reveals himself as peace much more than he does as warrior).

In any case, some of the crucial lessons of Webster’s lecture would remain--conflict is not the starting point or the endpoint, peace is. Conflict is not therefore irresolvable, it is not to be sought for its own sake, and it must only be engaged in with patient faith that God is a God of reconciliation.

Luther on the Sermon on the Mount

2010-07-06T18:11:00.003+01:00

July 6, 2010
Now, let’s turn to look at Martin Luther’s expositions of the Sermon on the Mount. We find the first of these in his treatise Temporal Authority: To What Extent It Should Be Obeyed, and the second in, unsurprisingly, The Sermon on the Mount. The first, while troubled by a number of inconsistencies (some simply the result of Luther’s characteristic lack of rhetorical caution), offers a much more satisfactory account than the second. I shall resist the temptation to dwell on the inconsistencies and will stick to the core argument.

In this treatise, Luther beings by rejecting the “counsels of perfection” idea. We must, he says, find a way to make these words “apply to everyone alike, be he perfect or imperfect.”

All Christians then are bound by the commands of the Sermon on the Mount, and for themselves have no need of “prince, king, lord, sword, or law.” However, the majority of those who live here in the world are not Christians; they do not observe Christ’s commands, but are full of violence and evil. We cannot insist on applying these commands across the board in a society that is not ready for them. “Certainly it is true that Christians, so far as they themselves are concerned, are subject neither to law nor sword, and have need of neither. But take heed and first fill the world with real Chrsitains before you attempt to rule it in a Christian and evangelical manner.” And so it is necessary that for such people there be a temporal sword “to bring about peace and prevent evil deeds,” while the spiritual does its work of “producing righteousness.”

Now, at this point, the argument is looking quite unsatisfactory. You are tempted to scribble in the margin (as I did), something along the lines of, “But Martin, Jesus knew that not everyone would do good when he gave the command to resist not evil; otherwise, there would have been no need for the command. He’s presuming that we’re surrounded by violent men, but we’re supposed to overcome by love, not a sword.” But then things become much clearer. Luther says,

“Since a true Christian lives and labors on earth not for himself alone but for his neighbor, he does by the very nature of his spirit even what he himself has no need of, but is needful and usefu to his neighbor. Because the sword is most beneficial and necessary for the whole world in order to preserve peace, punish sin, and restrain the wicked, the Christian submits most willingly to the rule of the sword, pays his taxes, honors those in authority, serves, helps, and does all he can to assist the governing authority... Although he has no need of these things for himself--to him they are not essential--nevertheless, he concerns himself about what is serviceable and of benefit to others.”

In other words, Christ has forbidden his followers to use the sword to defend themselves, he has counselled them to give up their own cloaks when demanded, but he has never said that they cannot defend others, or track down and punish the thieves who take the cloaks of others. He finally states this clearly a couple of pages later:

“From all this we gain the true meaning of Christ’s words in Matthew 5:39, ‘Do not resist evil,’ etc. It is this: A Christian should be so disposed that he will suffer every evil and injustice without avenging himself; neither will he seek legal redress in the courts but have utterly no need of temporal authority and law for his own sake. On behalf of others, however, he may and should seek vengeance, justice, protection, and help, and do as much as he can to achieve it. Likewise, the governing authority shoud, on its own initiative or through the instigation of others, help and protect him too, without any complaint, application, or instigation on his own part. If it fails to do this, he should permit himself to be despoiled and slandered; he should not resist evil, as Christ’s words say.”

Now this is quite interesting, and in fact, quite different from what he started out by saying. You will see that as he reaches his conclusion, the two kingdoms schema he had begun with proves irrelevant. For it is not that Christians don’t use the sword, and unbelievers do, or that Christians mustn’t use the sword against one another, but must against unbelievers who do, or even that Christians don’t use the sword for themsleves, but do use it for unbelievers. Rather, it is quite simply, no Christian uses the sword for himself, or is anxious for his own rights and well-being, but all are anxious for the rights and well-being of others, Christians or worldlings, and will use the sword to protect them if necessary.

This solution then qualifies, under the schema identified in the first part of this essay, as the fourth approach to dealing with the Sermon on the Mount. It has the strength of having not added to or detracted from Christ’s words there--he means exactly what he says: “If you are attacked, turn the other cheek. If you are stolen from, give to your enemy.” However, Luther does not stick to this solution, as we will see in the next segment.

Church and Controversy Quick-Takes

2010-07-05T22:23:00.000+01:00

July 5, 2010

(This post is not about VanDrunen--can you believe it?)

I just returned from an immensely fruitful weekend in Aberdeen, attending the conference “Theology, the Church, and Controversy,” hosted by the wonderfully hospitable Francesca Murphy and featuring such luminaries in theology and ethics as John Webster, Robert Jenson, David Bentley Hart, Brian Brock, and the inimitable Peter Leithart. The conference featured an excellent lineup of papers exploring how the Church ought to engage in controversy from historical, ethical, and theological angles, and a fantastic roundtable discussion at the end that wrestled its way through the question of how we ought to engage the homosexuality controversy today. (Not to mention, of course, the “Church Controversy Charades” that featured such once-in-a-lifetime experiences as watching John Webster attempt to visually act out the heresy of universalism, or Peter Leithart reenacting the castration of Abelard.)

A recurrent question that seemed to go back and forth during the conference in an irresolvable tug-of-war was: is controversy a blessing for the Church or an aberration that should be avoided wherever possible?

A couple months ago this question was highlighted by Davey Henreckson at Theopolitical a couple months back, who pointed to an article in Christianity Today comparing an N.T. Wright conference in Wheaton with a simultaneous neo-Reformed conference at Louisville. For the neo-Reformed,

“protecting disputed doctrines against heresy is where good theology is born. Clear thinking comes from friction and protestation, from Hegelian dialectics (R.C. Sproul spoke on this), but not from compromise. The Patristic Fathers got it right whenever they were ironing out disputed doctrines and fighting against heresy, said Ligon Duncan in his talk. But on matters that were not disputed, he said, their thought sometimes got muddled up.”

This is a common sort of claim to make, especially in Reformed circles. Controversy is necessary to bring truth to light; without it, we would grow dull and lose our grip on the Gospel. Fighting, then, is a necessary and desirable part of the life of the Church, suggesting that, if we ever find ourselves without fights, we should perhaps stir some up to get ourselves back in shape.

Although no one at the Aberdeen conference put things quite that combatively, there were certainly a few talks that sought to emphasize a bit more the positive side of theological controversy. Robert Jenson, for instance, argued that “provocations” are an important part of the Church’s life, and although some of these will be wholly destructive, and some would have been destructive but for God overruling and bringing good out of evil, some are clearly constructive, despite painful side-effects, such as when some Christians began preaching against segregation in the 1960s. Peter Leithart, too, despite being the gentle irenist that we all know and love, sounded a rather combative note in his defence of Athanasius, so much so that he was quickly type-cast by some who did not know him as the stereotypical pugnacious Presbyterian.

Brian Brock, on the other hand, taking as his subjects Stanley Hauerwas and the French philosopher Michel Serres, argued that Hauerwas’s combative, intentionally provocative style stood at odds with his pacifistic convictions, and that Serres’s pursuit of peaceful discourse was a more consistent pacifism. This was not to say that there was no legitimate place for Hauerwasian provocations, but it must be a very subordinate place. The most powerful account of the negative role of controversy was given in a brilliant and sophisticated paper by John Webster, “Theology and the Peace of the Church,” which came first, and set the tone for much of the rest of the conference, culminating in a fascinating exchange between Leithart and Webster at the roundtable discussion at the end of the conference over the doctrine of God and theological method.

Intriguingly, the flamboyant and combative David Bentley Hart sounded, if anything, a more Websterian note, appearing before us as a public penitent for his own propensity to violent rhetorical outbursts against error. (Needless to say, I hope that he does not overcome this vice too quickly, as it makes for jolly entertaining reading!)

That’s just a little taste for now; I hope over the next few days to be posting reflections from each of these talks and a couple others, with particular attention to Webster and the discussions he engendered.

Kuyperian Tug-of-War (VanDrunen Review VII)

2010-06-30T16:09:00.001+01:00

June 30, 2010

In keeping with my new commitment to keep this review concise, I’m going to try and cover this chapter in just one installment (though it will be a very long one). This shouldn’t be too difficult, moreover, as it is a shorter chapter, its argument is generally rather clear and straightforward, and where there are difficulties in the argument, they’re at points already discussed in this review. Also, having officially and publicly lost patience with VanDrunen in the last chapter, I have regained my composure, and don’t expect there to be any more outbursts of that sort, although from here on out the focus of the reviews will be essentially critical, rather than expository.

VanDrunen’s basic point in this chapter is to argue, that even when it comes to Abraham Kuyper, the father of “Kuyperianism” and thus of modern “neo-Calvinism,” neo-Calvinists do not have a firm foundation for their views. Kuyper, he wants to argue, remains by and large in the two kingdoms, natural law camp, despite--you guessed it--some lingering inconsistencies.

My complaint, as you might have expected, regards VanDrunen’s continued certainty that all these historical Reformed figures simply could not make their practice consistent with their theory. This is plausible at first, but as the inconsistencies pile up, the most persuasive conclusion is simply that their theory is not what VanDrunen insists it must be. Admittedly, VanDrunen says that the inconsistencies in Kuyper’s case are somewhat different than those we’ve seen in the previous chapters--Kuyper is no Erastian. But there still seem to be some assumptions VanDrunen is foisting on the discussion that make it inevitable that he will find “inconsistencies.”

One assumption that I am still trying to figure out is exactly what he thinks modern “neo-Calvinists” think. This is a problem that is coming to dog the discussion more and more insistently, as the polemical target of this book becomes ever more prominent--who is the target? If he intended to write a book against the “neo-Calvinists,” as he clearly intended to do, it would’ve been helpful for him to explain what precisely he thought they were. The opening chapter made some stab at doing this, but it was a stab in the dark, if there ever was one. No particular “neo-Calvinist” was ever cited, but instead what we had was a vague mosaic containing figures as diverse as John Howard Yoder, N.T. Wright, and John Milbank, who have few things in common except for the fact that none of them are Reformed. So, we begin the book with almost no idea of what these Reformed neo-Calvinists look like, except that they want “to construct specifically Christian world views, bring Christ’s kingdom to exprssion in every area of life, and level radical critiques of non-Christian thought.”

Now, as it turns out, VanDrunen is planning to turn in chapters 8 and 9 to examine these neo-Calvinists, and I am eager to see what he has to say. However, the fact that he has not clearly identified them earlier makes many of his contrasts between true Calvinism and neo-Calvinism vague and unhelpful at best. This becomes particularly true in this chapter, where he seeks to claim that Kuyper was not like a modern neo-Calvinist because he still saw that there were essentially two kingdoms, rather than one kingdom of Christ, even if he didn’t exactly use this terminology. Now that VanDrunen has allowed for a little flexibility in terminology, then we may fairly ask why the mere fact that some neo-Calvinists use the terminology of “one kingdom” puts them in an entirely different paradigm. After all, all neo-Calvinists that I know of would still affirm many important distinctions between the civil and ecclesiastical jurisdictions, and they would all (at least, all the ones with whom I have any familiarity) insist that the Church remains the kingdom of God in a uniquely important sense. So it seems a bit disingenous when VanDrunen says something like, “Kuyper maintains a distinction between the two realms, and identifies the Church as the focal point of God’s redemptive activity; therefore he’s with the old two kingdoms paradigm, not the new neo-Calvinist paradigm” (leaving aside of course the problem of VanDrunen’s failure to offer us a clear portrait of the “old two kingdoms paradigm” in the first place).

I’m a bit suspicious that when VanDrunen speaks disparagingly of the modern neo-Calvinists, he has something like theonomy and Christian Reconstructionism in mind. If so, this clarifies a lot, but it also greatly cheapens the value of his critique, given that there are probably about 15 Christian Reconstructionists remaining in the US. Ok, I’m joking, and there are certainly still circles with a strongly theonomic bent; however, they do not represent most “neo-Calvinists,” and in any case are on quite an opposite pole from the Milbanks, Wrights, and Hauerwases in many important respects. Here’s why I have that suspicion: VanDrunen acknowledges that Kuyper sought to apply the Bible to all areas of life, including politics, since Scripture “clarifies the things revealed in nature and allows people again to perceive ‘the ground rules, the primary relationships, the principles that govern man’s life together and his relationship to the most holy God’” (282). But then VanD lays great stress on the fact that Kuyper distances himself from “biblicism” and denies that Scripture can be used to make concrete decisions in the political realm, saying, for instance, “A state polity that dismisses and scorns the observation of life and simply wishes to duplicate the situation of Israel, taking Holy Scripture as a complete code of Christian law for the state, would, according to the spiritual fathers of Calvinism, be the epitome of absurdity” (283). VanDrunen seems to think he has established a significant point in the argument, and repeatedly seeks to build on it. Kuyper thought that Scripture provided only general principles for the political realm, that must be applied differently in different times and places; it did not provide a detailed theonomic blueprint--ergo, Kuyper was not a neo-Calvinist. However, I don’t think this is a tremendously significant point after all, because hardly anyone except a few die-hard theonomists would say otherwise. Even hard-core theonomists, in fact, would recognize that many features of the OT law should be adapted to changing circumstances in line with their “general equity.” Necessarily, Scripture’s teaching with reference to life in the civil realm is a matter of rational deduction and flexible application, not a matter of a timeless detailed blueprint.

But--and here’s the kicker--so is Scripture’s teaching on many matters, including many matters that are clearly within the ecclesial realm. Scripture does not, despite the desperate attempts of hard-line regulativists, provide us a detailed timeless blueprint for worship. It provides us with certain general instructions and illustrations, which we must use our reasons to adapt and apply. In fact, it does provide a detailed blueprint, but in the Old Testament, which we generally recognize cannot be applied directly to our current situation--rather, it must be sifted and applied in light of New Testament revelation and common wisdom. Or how about church polity? Here too, although clearly Scripture should be our authority on the subject, it is not terribly helpful in laying down the law with precision. Centuries of polemical struggle have failed to make the New Testament any clearer on how the government of the Church is to be organized. Oh, to be sure, we can figure out a number of things from the New Testament, rule out a number of possibilities, and, I think, establish the likelihood of certain conclusions. But ultimately, we must conclude that we do not have a detailed blueprint, and the Church must rely on its general wisdom, illumined by the Spirit and the light of nature, to ascertain how the general principles of Scripture are to be applied, and how much of the Old Testament can be carried over.

Note, then, that on two hugely significant issues about the spiritual kingdom of God, the “visible Church”--its worship and its polity--Scripture leaves us with general principles and with suggestive illustrations, but requires us to work out specific applications on our own. This does not seem to me all that different from how Kuyper envisions Scripture’s testimony on matters of culture, politics, and society--it gives us “ground rules, primary relationships, and general principles” without giving us “a complete code of Christian law.” Now don’t me wrong. There are still some important differences between these kingdoms, but I cannot understand VanDrunen’s argument: “If you grant that Scripture does not give us a detailed blueprint for X, then you commit yourself to saying (if you want to be consistent) that natural law, not Scripture, is the authority for X, and Scripture is in fact wholly unnecessary.” This is in fact a sort of reductio ad absurdum in favor of the theonomists. Theonomists, you may recall, were fond of arguing that if we did not allow that Scripture was, on its own, the sole, absolute, detailed standard for civil law, then we were erecting in its place another standard, a higher standard, so that reason, and not Scripture, was our highest authority. If this is true, then any time you use reason to help you interpret and apply Scripture, you are no longer letting Scripture be the highest authority! And yet VanDrunen here seems to happily accept the theonomic charge, and wants to insist that if Scripture does not provide us a precisely detailed standard, then it can provide us with no standard.

But, we have digressed far from Kuyper. It is also worth observing, briefly, that eager as VanDrunen is to rescue Kuyper from the neo-Calvinists and throw him into the camp of Reformed orthodoxy, this merely serves again to highlight the incommensurability of VanDrunen’s own commitments with Reformed orthodoxy. You may recall in the last chapter that VanDrunen chided even Thornwell for not sufficiently recognizing that the Church must refrain from offering any guidance on civil affairs, since Scripture offers no guidance for them. But Kuyper here has insisted that Scripture provides various principles for life in the civil kingdom, a position that VanDrunen has had to acknowledge ase consonant with the historic Reformed position. He has also provided us, incidentally, with a rather helpful and clear position on the relationship of natural law and special revelation, one which for the most part fits with historical Reformed reflection on these issues. This position can be briefly summarized thus: there is a natural law, implanted in creation--it provides the principles by which God intended creation to operate. However, because of the fall, creation no longer operates as it was intended to, and we are no longer able to properly grasp how it was intended to operate. Special revelation helps show us what natural law is supposed to look like, and corrects the misunderstandings into which we would be prone to fall if relying on our sinful intellects alone. The Gospel, then, does not try to divert the creation toward some new purpose, but helps show us what creation’s original purpose was supposed to be, and gives us the tools we need to realize that original purpose in this fallen world. Now, this is how Kuyper sees natural law, and this is, so far as I can tell, how most of the earlier figures that VanDrunen discusses saw it. And yet VanDrunen thinks that, on the whole, this provides evidence for his case. “See, they believed in natural law!” he shouts and waves; “See, they believed that creation had its own purpose, which it continues to have even after the Gospel!” Well, yes, but they believed that the gospel, that special revelation was necessary to help us realize all that. They did not believe that just because there was a natural law meant that it was completely self-interpreting and self-authorizing even in a sinful world. This is the lacuna that VanDrunen has never filled in his historical analysis--his idea that the natural law alone was fully sufficient for life in the civil kingdom. The earlier Reformers did not seem to make this claim, becuase they understood that sin got in the way of our understanding of natural law. VanDrunen continually gives lipservice to the problem of sin, but he never explains how his understanding of the sufficiency of the unilluminated natural law squares with a robust doctrine of human depravity.

Now, given that VanDrunen seems reasonably happy with these aspects of Kuyper’s thought (even when it is hard to see why), where does he identify the problem? Where is the tension in Kuyper, the tension that neo-Calvinists resolve in the wrong direction? The answer comes in the past couple pages.

First, VanDrunen says, “Kuyper believed that societies and nations could be ‘Christian’ even if few true Christians were in them, so long as Christianity had had a formative influence on the character of their culture. The point of tension is that the cultural life of such a society is then both ‘common’ and ‘Christian’ simultaneously. Since it exists on the terrain of common grace there is never anything new in it, as it simply develops the potencies inscribed on the original creation. Special grace, that is, the ‘Christian’ influence, serves merely to help the common realm develop these potencies better than it otherwise would. This is therefore a non-redemptive ‘Christian’ influence, a ‘Christianization’ that does not save or pertain to re-creation. Though Kuyper here is careful not to confuse the salvation or re-creation that is administered in the institutional church with the common preservation of the original creation in the other spheres of human endeavor, his use of ‘Christian’ terminology for both seems at best confusing.” (312-13)

Now, in objecting in this way, VanDrunen seems to want to put a wide chasm between the original creation, which is simply preserved, has its original “potencies” developed, and is not redeemed, and the “re-creation,” salvation, which is something entirely different. This isn’t how Scripture speaks: “For the earnest expectation of the creation eagerly waits for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it in hope; because the creation itself also will be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groans and labors with birth pangs together until now. Not only that, but we also who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, eagerly waiting for the adoption, the redemption of our body.” (Rom. 8:19-23) Sure, we could say that creation only has its original “potencies” developed, because the glorified new creation is what creation was built to become. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t need outside help, just as a child will not develop the “potencies inscribed” on him without good parenting--thus grace must perfect nature (even in the absence of sin, I would tend to argue). But after sin, creation has been subjected to futility, and needs this redemption even more. Its redemption, its bringing-to-fulfillment, is bound up with our redemption, says Paul here. When Scripture speaks of “new creation” or “re-creation,” when Christ says, “Behold, I make all things new,” the picture is of a “renewed creation,” not of some totally new project that Christ decided to undertake. This is why, for all his problems and tensions, Kuyper can legitimately speak both of something being “Christian” in the sense of being itself within the locus of redemption--the Church--and of something being “Christian” in the sense of being in the sphere of common grace, of the original creation, as it is being renewed by redemption.

This problem is related to the second, which has come up before--this issue of the dual mediatorships of Christ. I have charged VanDrunen with latent modalism at this point, and he is not giving me much opportunity to back down from that charge. Kuyper too uses the language of dual mediatorship, but in a way that seems to me safe from heresy, as he makes a distinction without a separation--these are two distinct works of Christ, but they cohere in the same person and so are ultimately related and inseparable. But VanDrunen won’t have it:

“But once Kuyper makes this distinction and seeks to use it to construct his cultural and political program, theological coherence and clarity require considerably more precision in language than Kuyper exhibits. To distinguish between the Son as creator and the Son as redeemer entails that the title of ‘Christ,’ or ‘Messiah’--the Anointed One--in his special mission of becoming incarnate for the particular work of saving his people. The Son redeemed the world, but did not create the world, as the Messiah, the Christ. Therefore, for Kuyper to make the traditional distinction between two mediatorships and then defend the idea of the ‘Christianization’ of the common grace realm because it is the work of ‘Christ,’ is to confuse categories and language precisely where categories and language are at issue. If the Son of God creates in a different capacity from his capacity as redeemer, then he does not create as ‘Christ,’ and the terrain of common grace, grounded in the creation order, is not ‘Christian,’ no matter how noble it becomes.”

In other words, not only can you not attribute the same office to the person who does both of these works, you can’t even attribute the same name to the person, because that might lead us to think that there might be some kind of connection between these two things that he does! Let us not fall into the danger of attributing any more unity than necessary to this bifurcated person of Christ! In any case, VanDrunen is being exceptionally disingenuous in chalking this up to a confusion of language, because he himself has indulged in this same confusion repeatedly in this book (e.g., p. 180: “as creator and sustainer, Christ rules the temporal kingdom as the sovereign lord of all; as incarnate redeemer, Christ rules the spiritual kingdom as a tender savior”) as do all the major figures he cites. VanDrunen, immediately after this quote, grudgingly acknowledges that Turretin spoke this way, but, it was different, he says, because Turretin did not use this language in support of error. Ah, ok. Well, what about the Apostle Paul, who repeatedly uses the name “Christ” to refer to the Son in his eternal role of upholding creation and ruling every principality and power (e.g., Col. 2:2-3, 8-10), and Paul seems inclined to use this unity of name and person as a device to--God forbid!--confuse the offices: “He has delivered us from the power of darkness and confeyed us into the kingdom of the Son of His love, in whom we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins. He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by Him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things were created through Him and for Him. And He is before all things, and in Him all things consist. And he is the head of the body, the church, who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in all things He may have the preeminence.” (Col. 1:13-18) Here Paul moves seamlessly between Christ as eternal mediator, ruler of the nations, to Christ as saving mediator, ruler of the Church. Paul wants us to see these two works of the one Christ in close relationship, as complements of one another. But, let’s not get overly distracted by the Bible, now. This is after all supposed to be history.

Just in case there’s any confusion, I should make clear that I am no Kuyperian, just as I am no Erastian. I would’ve identified myself self-consciously as a Kuyperian for a brief span between, if you really want to know, the eighth month of my seventeenth year (i.e., the year when I was 16) and roughly the fourth month of my eighteenth year. Since then, I have considered Kuyperianism a serious problem, indeed, for some of the same reasons VanDrunen does. One of the strongest points in this chapter was his criticism on the marginalization of the visible Church in Kuyper’s life and thought. I am wholeheartedly against that, and I think that an overemphasis on Christ’s kingship over the nations instead of his kingship over the Church is part of the problem. But here’s the rub. VanDrunen thinks he can solve this problem by completely separating Christ’s kingship over the nations (Oh, forgive me...I meant to say, “the Son of God’s kingship over the nations”) from Christ’s kingship over the Church; whereas I think, rather, that we need to much more closely bind Christ’s kingship over the nations to his kingship over the Church, and make the latter the source, so to speak, for the former. This is, after all, what Paul seems to do in 1 Corinthians 15, Ephesians, and Colossians, and what the author of Hebrews seems to do, so I’m pretty comfortable taking that route.

Taking Off the Gloves

2010-06-26T21:10:00.000+01:00

June 26, 2010

In chapter 6, this book turn a turn from the wearisome to the farcical, and I’m afraid I lost my patience. I no longer have the patience to write 10,000 words slowly and politely deconstructing the argument of each chapter. Chapter 6, although massive (65 pages) and full of details crying out for attention, does not merit such time. So, I’m going to whip through it in one rather tempestuous segment. I’m going to promise to keep this under 2,500 words, though methinks I can dispose of it even quicker than that.

VanDrunen’s argument in this chapter seems to be that, although the universally-held position of the Reformers and their heirs for 150 years on the two-kingdoms was always hobbled by blatant inconsistencies, that they were unable or unwilling to recognize or expurgate, that finally, 270 years after the Reformation, in a new land across the sea, under the sunny influence of Enlightenment philosophy and still reeking of gunpowder from a recently successful revolution, the Virginian heirs of the Reformation finally realized what their forefathers had been trying to say but hadn’t been able to enunciate properly, and embraced the true, pure form of the two kingdoms doctrine--separation of Church and State. It turns out, though, that this isn’t his argument; it is only Stuart Robinson’s, a Civil War-era Kentucky Presbyterian who constructed this narrative so as to make his own bizarrely innovative position look historical. VanDrunen begins by appearing to endorse Robinson’s narrative, but on a closer look at the historical evidence, dismisses it for a still more fantastic one. No, it turns out, the Virginia Presbyterians in the 1780s did not consistently embrace two kingdoms teaching either, for they still thought it was fine for the Church to give its input on civil affairs. No, it wasn’t until another 80 years later, 350 years after the Reformation in the midst of an attempt to defend Negro slavery from ecclesiastical censure, that the true meaning of the two kingdoms doctrine was finally understood, in the idiosyncratic and novel teaching of Stuart Robinson and James Henley Thornwell. Finally, upon closer examination of these figures, VanDrunen concludes that, although they got close, these men too failed to purge the two kingdoms view of its inconsistencies and realize its true genius, because they too still felt that the Church might have something to say at least on the moral dimension of civil affairs. The true meaning of the Reformation view, it seems, continued to remain hidden to its heirs, until God brought VanDrunen himself along to purge it of its inconsistencies, and present it pure and unspotted before the world.

Purged of its inconsistencies? What a joke! How, I must ask, is one to make sense of the claims that the Church must limit its preaching, teaching, and application to the prescriptions of Scripture only, and that therefore the Church must confine itself only to spiritual affairs, offering no insight on civil affairs? What Scripture, I must ask, are we talking about, if it is one that speaks only of “spiritual” matters and has no insight to offer on “civil” matters, whatever those two terms might mean (and VanDrunen has yet to offer us anything coherent they could mean in his usage)? I’d best quote the whole paragraph in which this claim transpires, because you have to see it to believe it: “Thornwell suggests a position quite similar to Hodge’s, namely, that though there may be a relatively small class of ‘purely political’ issues, there are a wide range of issues for which the church and state have overlapping jurisdiction, namely, civil issues about which the Bible has something to say. Perhaps one cannot blame Thornwell too much for tripping on this matter, for the matter of assigning respective jurisdictions to church and state had tripped his Reformation and Reformed orthodox predecessors as well. As discussed in previous chapters, their incoherence involved enunciating the two kingdoms doctrine and then trying to find a civil aspect to religious concerns and thus entrusting magistrates with protecting religious purity as a civil responsibility. The issue here with Hodge and Thornwell entailed the reverse scenario. American Presbyterians had in significant ways (though not entirely) rejected the idea that the state was to enforce religious purity as a civil task. But Hodge, despite his stance against the Spring Resolutions, held on to common American Presbyterian notions that the church should project its voice directly into political and other cultural affairs. Insofar as Thornwell echoed similar concerns after enunciating his spirituality doctrine, he lapsed into incoherence by finding a religious aspect to civil concerns and thus entrusting the church with promotion of civil good as a spiritual responsibility. Thus, Thornwell’s thought illustrates the continuing difficulty with which Reformed theologians sought to apply their two kingdoms doctrine in a theoretically and practically consistent way.”

Well, I bet he lapsed into incoherence, because it’s impossible to enunciate something like Thornwell’s spirituality doctrine without doing so. But tell me, Dr. VanDrunen, why it is incoherent to find a “religious aspect to civil concerns?” Oh wait, you can’t do that, because you’re just a historian, right? Could’ve fooled me.

The root problem here is, as I have insisted before, the methodological separation of Reformed political theory from Reformed political practice, as if the former could be established without reference to the latter, and then used to prove that the latter was incoherent. Notice how VanDrunen puts it above: “their incoherence involved enunciating the two kingdoms doctrine and then trying to find a civil aspect to religious concerns and thus entrusting magistrates with protecting religious purity as a civil responsibility”--as if there were a temporal sequence: first they enunciated this pristine “two kingdoms doctrine” and then they tried to find a civil aspect to the religious side of it. But of course, it wasn’t like that...it was all part and parcel of the same theory. And, simply as a matter of historical probability, it is extraordinarily unlikely that for hundreds of years, all the proponents of this theory consistently failed to say what it was they meant to say, consistently failed to see that their “real” theory differed from the one they sought to propound and apply. As it turns out, unsurprisingly, it was not. Their real theory simply wasn’t what VanDrunen tries to make it out to be, as Steven Wedgeworth very neatly summarizes here: http://www.credenda.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=218:two-kingdoms-critique&catid=96:theology&Itemid=122. Again, I can’t really imagine how it could’ve been, because I still can’t find a way to actually make coherent sense of what this “pure Two Kingdoms” theology is, in VanDrunen’s mind.

Essentially, then, what VanDrunen is asking us to do is to suspend our historical disbelief in order to try and imagine a fictional real doctrine lurking hidden behind the stated Reformed teaching, and he asks us to make this leap into historical incoherence in service to a theological proposition that he has never made any effort to establish the coherence of, because he’s supposedly just a historian. I’m sorry, I just can’t go with him along that road any longer.

The worst part is that the would-be heroes of the fantastical narrative of this chapter just aren’t very good heroes. John Cotton appears as the villain, because after all, he persecuted Roger Williams and wouldn’t allow religious freedom. In the words of Brian Regan, “Wow, you’re breakin’ some new ground there, Copernicus.” VanDrunen makes little effort to go beyond traditional prejudices here. That doesn’t mean I’m a fan of John Cotton; no, but I’d much rather go with him, a man of principle, than the next set of actors that strut across the stage--the Virginia Presbyterians in the 1760s-80s. These men, VanDrunen wants to say, finally broke free of the bonds of inconsistency that had tied up the Reformed tradition for centuries by espousing the separation of Church and State. But then, it turns out, as even VanDrunen must regretfully admit, that actually they didn’t do this out of principle, but simply because they happened to be the religious minority in Virginia, and “Separation of Church and State” was a way of getting the Anglican establishment off their backs. When the opportunity presented itself of them being co-established alongside the Anglicans, they jumped at the opportunity, before lapsing back into separationist mode as soon as the opportunity disappeared. Hardly the most principled lot. In any case, VanDrunen is unhappy with them himself, because they failed to see that, as a corollary of freeing the Church from state control, they needed to keep the Church from, on its part, giving advice to the state. Oh, heaven forbid that the Church might ever want to do anything like that--that would be too much like...oh, I don’t know...Isaiah? Elijah? John the Baptist? Jesus Christ?

So onto the stage strut our pair of arch-heroes, Negro servants in tow, grovelling as appropriate--James Thornwell and Stuart Robinson. VanDrunen momentarily entertains some doubts that perhaps their motivations in keeping the Church out of anything besides “spiritual affairs” were more a matter of trying to protect slavery than of theological principle, but tries to gloss over these objections: “The consistency of and motivation for Southern Presbyterian advocacy of the spirituality of the church are interesting and difficult questions, but this section will delve into them only lightly.” (249) Wait, hang on a second--it might well be that the masterminds of your pet doctrine actually just cooked it up so they could hold onto their African slaves, but you don’t see that that really matters to your point? Actually, it makes sense that VanDrunen would not think that it matters, because this kind of mind/body dualism has been an operating principle all along--if he can just distill the intellectual theological essence of the doctrine, it does not matter what ugly practical applications it was wrapped up in. This is perhaps understandable for a systematic theologian, but it is just bad history. A footnote acknowledges the debate over Thornwell and Robinson’s motivations, but while it lists six sources that have been written to make the case that slavery was their chief motivation, it lists only two for the contrary position, one of which hardly counts, because it is by D.G. Hart, a buddy of VanDrunen’s who has the same polemical axe to grind.

But again, whatever we are to think of the ignoble heroes VanDrunen has scripted for us, we come back to the same mystifying question--just how is it that Scripture--we are talking about the same Scripture, right? Genesis through Revelation, 66 books and all that?--does not have anything to say about, to use Robinson’s words, “wrong moral views of social and civil affairs,” and not just wrong moral views, mind you, but wrong moral practice? (If you think that was a convoluted sentence, at least it wasn’t as convoluted as this paradigm.)

Essentially, what VanDrunen leaves us with are the alternatives either to accept his historical narrative and grant that the Reformers must’ve chucked Scripture out the window as soon as they started thinking about these matters, or else to trust that the Reformers must’ve had a few ounces of Biblical sense and so discard his historical narrative. I’m no big fan of the Reformers’ political theology, but I know which alternative I’ll take.

(There, only 1914 words..)

The Procrustean Paradigm (VanDrunen Review V.4)

2010-06-25T22:04:00.001+01:00

June 25, 2010
If you're getting tired of VanDrunen, I don't blame you. I did too, as you'll see in the next installment after this one that I'm going to post. The new website is still under construction, but should be up soon. In the meantime, anyone out there who's really into two kingdoms theology in the 17th century can read on.

In the concluding section, VanDrunen endeavours to reconcile this two kingdoms theory with its practical application in seventeenth-century Reformed political thought. At this point, he finally turns to take note of documents such as the National Covenant, and cites passages in Althusius, Rutherford, and Turretin where they insist upon a relationship of mutual harmony and support between Church and State, each assisting it in its duties, and correcting it if it fails. VanDrunen is certainly troubled by all this, and regarding the Church’s instruction toward the civil authority, he says, “if there are even different primary standards of authority in the civil and ecclesiastical realms (natural law and Scripture, respectively), then there seems to be reason to doubt that ministers, whose training lies in spiritual things, have the competence to offer useful and even authoritative instruction on political matters” (195).

However, he does not want to simply dismiss these figures as completely inconsistent; while acknowledging that there was certainly some inconsistency, he wants to show the way they articulated this relationship is in many ways consistent with the kind of two kingdoms theology and natural law theory they propounded. I appreciate VanDrunen’s honesty at this point, though as I argued earlier, his flawed methodology inevitably distorts the picture, since, instead of trying to understand their doctrine in light of their practical application of it, he tries to establish it on independent theoretical grounds, and only at the end makes certain adjustments and concessions in light of the practical application. This means that the significance of these adjustments and concessions is easily lost, and in the conclusion, VanDrunen quickly moves to reassert his master-narrative, suggesting that these thinkers were hindered by their Christendom context from drawing the proper conclusions from the theological groundwork they had laid.

What are some of the adjustments/concessions made in this section? Well for one, we find that these thinkers reconciled the magistrate’s care for religion with their two kingdoms thinking by distinguishing “between caring for religious affairs civilly or spiritually, externally or internally, with respect to the body or the soul. Repeatedly, Reformed orthodox writers permitted the magistrate care of religion only in a civil, external, bodily way, never in a spiritual, internal, or soulish way” (199). In other words, yes, these thinkers did believe there were two kingdoms, but the division between the two kingdoms was drawn between oversight of the body and its actions on the one hand and oversight of the soul and its actions on the other, not between “secular” affairs on the one hand and “religious” affairs on the other. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that drawing the distinction this way is a very problematic way to draw the distinction, and one that will land you in contradictions before long, but this is clearly how these thinkers intended to draw the distinction. It will not do for VanDrunen to come along and say, “Well, what they really meant to say was that one kingdom was civil and therefore secular, and the other was spiritual and religious.” Reformed theologians gave an enormous amount of thought to political theology, and had a good idea of what they wanted to say about it, and that is clearly not what they meant to say. Now, if VanDrunen wants to say, “The Reformers provided certain categories and arguments which we can use in order to argue that one kingdom is civil and therefore secular, and the other was spiritual and religious,” well, then, more power to him, but in that case, he needs to very clearly separate his historical claims from his contstructive theological claims, something he has yet to do.

Another adjustment/concession regards the use of natural law. Natural law, claims VanDrunen, particularly in the form of the Decalogue, rather than Scripture (the irony in that sentence is not lost on me, but I’ll leave it to VanDrunen to try and resolve it) was the source for their teaching that the magistrate should have the care of religion. Now, even if VanDrunen can successfully make that argument (which does not prove very easy to make), what are we left with? Well, we’re left with a doctrine of natural law that tells us rather a lot about how religious affairs should be conducted, not a natural law that restricts itself to secular civil affairs, which is clearly the kind of natural law that VanDrunen wants to propound. Again, it will not do to say, “Oh, well, what they meant to say regarding natural law was that it tells us simply of moral, civil duties toward our fellow man, and not of how we ought to conduct ourselves toward God and in the Church.” That is clearly not what they meant to say.

To my mind, these fellows are not very inconsistent with themselves, at least not in the ways that VanDrunen feels compelled to admit; however, they are very inconsistent with the alien paradigm VanDrunen seeks to foist upon them. In his concluding remarks, VanDrunen laments that “Reformed orthodoxy, like Calvin, seems to waver between two ways of speaking. It speaks in Diognetian, Augustinian terms of a civil realm whose characteristics imply a common area between Christians and non-Christians, and it speaks in Gelasian terms of the civil realm as part of a unified Christian society which, alongside the spiritual realm, is governed by two complementary authorities” (207). Perhaps there is a simpler way of putting it. Perhaps what all these thinkers are trying to say is that Christianity is not of the esse of the civil realm, but it is of the bene esse. Yes, it is possible for unbelievers to form a civil society, and to function passably within it on the basis of what they can grasp of natural law; however, for those who have the benefit of Christian truth, it is clear that civil society will function much better if it it oriented toward the pursuit of the true religion. This is a fairly clear, consistent way of putting the matter, and certainly seems to make sense of everything these fellows are saying. And yet, VanDrunen seems unwilling to put it this way, as he seems personally convinced that the bene esse of civil society consists in remaining formally secular. Once again, the historical task gets clouded by the constructive theological task.

Two Kingdoms=Two Christs? (VanDrunen Review V.3)

2010-06-24T14:00:00.000+01:00

June 24, 2010

In the section on the doctrine of the two kingdoms in the age of Reformed orthodoxy, my suspicion is immediately aroused by VanDrunen’s invocation of the Scottish Presbyterians as leading proponents of two kingdoms thinking. These Scottish Presbyterians are often known as “Covenanters” for their signing of the National Covenant in 1638, a document that united both civil rulers and churchmen in the task of protecting the Reformed religion in Scotland. This document repeatedly blurs together civil and ecclesiastical concerns, going so far as to cite passages such as these from Parliamentary Acts:

“Seeing the cause of God's true religion and his Highness's authority are so joined, as the hurt of the one is common to both; that none shall be reputed as loyal and faithful subjects to our sovereign Lord, or his authority, but be punishable as rebellers and gainstanders of the same, who shall not give their confession, and make their profession of the said true religion” and “That all Kings and Princes at their coronation, and reception of their princely authority, shall make their faithful promise by their solemn oath, in the presence of the eternal God, that, enduring the whole time of their lives, they shall serve the same eternal God, to the uttermost of their power, according as he hath required in his most holy word, contained in the Old and New Testament; and according to the same word, shall maintain the true religion of Christ Jesus, the preaching of his holy word, the due and right ministration of the sacraments now received and preached within this realm, (according to the Confession of Faith immediately preceding,) and shall abolish and gainstand all false religion contrary to the same.” These passages are quoted, mind you, not in order to contest them, but as the legal basis upon which the Covenanters take their stand. They go on to pledge their resolve to faithfully serve both the King and the cause of true religion, since these two are inseparably conjoined, and to resist equally enemies of the king and of the true religion.

Documents like this should be enough to tell us that, whatever the sense in which these fellows may speak of “two kingdoms,” it is certainly not in the sense VanDrunen has in mind. Nevertheless, it is certainly true that some of these fellows have some troubling things to say. For instance, we again find some strikingly dualistic language. Turretin is at pains to state that the redemptive kingdom “is not mundane and earthly, but spiritual and celestial” (177) and “Rutherford distinguished between one kingdom ruled by God as creator (and hence temporal and mundane) and the other kingdom ruled by God as redeemer (and hence spiritual and heavenly)” (177). Now this “and hence” befuddles me--both of them do. Why should creation necessarily be merely “temporal,” and thus, in this context, temporary? In this picture, it is as if God just created a physical world for kicks as something he was just going to dispose of a little later on in favor of a “spiritual, heavenly” world. On such a model, how are we to take the current creation seriously at all, or attribute any significance to life in the body? And why should redemption be necessarily “spiritual” and “heavenly,” as if God could not possibly redeem this earth or our earthly existence, but could only redeem us out of it, or redeem some “spiritual” dimension of our existence that floats uneasily above this world? This sounds more like Manichaeanism than Christianity. Of course, Turretin and Rutherford are far from the only Christians to speak this way--such dualism has been a long-standing malady in the Church. But inasmuch as much recent theology has helped us to break free of it and return to a more Biblical, creation-affirming stance, I find it bizarre that VanDrunen wants to lead us back into captivity, as it were.

But there are still more troubling problems in this section. Remember that whole scary bit about the extra Calvinisticum and the dual kingship of Christ back in the chapter on Calvin? Well, VanDrunen finds all this more systematically and explicitly stated by Turretin. He summarizes Turretin’s statements thus: “Christ rules the one kingdom as eternal God, as the agent of creation and providence, and over all creatures. Christ rules the other kingdom as the incarnate God-man, as the agent of redemption, and over the Church. The latter kingdom is redemptive, the former is non-redemptive. The latter is exclusive, the former is inclusive” (177). This kind of sharp separation of two distinct roles in Christ raises significant questions of Christology and Trinitarian theology. Such sharp discontinuity implies that these two different kingships of Christ have no essential relation to one another; they are just two different offices that happen to be filled by the same person, just as (to use the example I used above in chapter 3) I happen to be both an investment advisor and also a research student in Reformation political theology, two widely distinct roles that have little effect on one another. Such hat-wearing may be common enough in human affairs, but orthodox theology has long recognized that it is problematic for theology. The heresy of modalism was condemned precisely for such a hat-wearing view of God. God, the modalists claimed, was not really three distinct persons, but was one person who opted to reveal himself under three different guises, carrying out three different offices. Now, that’s not what’s going on here, but the same basic concern presents itself. The problem with modalism, orthodox theology contended, was that it asserted a sharp discontinuity between the immanent and economic trinity, between who God was and how he revealed himself. God manifested himself in history as three agents, and yet he was only one agent--if this was true, then God had not truly revealed himself. Don’t we have the same the same problem with this bifurcation in Christ? Christ manifests himself in Jesus of Nazareth as redeemer, and this self-revelation bears little or no relation to his pre-existent role as the eternal Son who governs a creation without redeeming it. How does Jesus Christ faithfully reveal to us the Father, then, if he is not even a faithful witness of himself?

Moreover, we might well ask, what exactly is the theological point in asserting that it is Christ, the second person of the Trinity, who executes this kingship over creation, “as eternal God, as the agent of creation and providence, and over all creatures”? This office bears no relation to his distinctively Christological work, to his distinct second-personhood within the Trinity, but rather appears simply as a function of his generic God-ness. In what sense is it Christ who exercises this particular kingship and not rather God the Father? This turns out to be no mere idle question when we see how Samuel Rutherford assigns the two kingships--to “God as creator” and “God as redeemer.” VanDrunen takes note of the distinction in language: “while Turretin speaks of the temporal kingdom as ruled by Christ as God, with the Father and Spirit, Rutherford simply speaks of this kingdom as ruled by God (the creator). But the theological idea expressed by these theologians is substantively identical” (178).

He returns to it later, at more length: “Rutherford’s language is similar though not identical to Turretin’s, and their substantive theological claims are the same. As noted above, Rutherford put the temporal kingdom under ‘God the creator’ and spiritual kingdom under ‘Christ the Redeemer and Head of the Church.’ In speaking futher about the former, he writes that it is ‘not a part’ of Christ’s spiritual kingdom and thus states bluntly that the civil magistrate ‘is not subordinate to Christ as mediator and head fo the church.’ Along similar lines, he says later that ‘magistrates as magistrates’ are not ‘the ambassadors of Christ’ but ‘the deputy of God as the God of order, and as the creator.’... In light of this evidence, I suggest that Turretin and Rutherford teach the same doctrine in these passages, though from somewhat different angles. Turretin answers Yes to the question whether Christ rules the temporal kingdom, but with qualifications (i.e., that he does so only as eternal God, with the Father and Holy Spirit, as creator/sustainer); Rutherford answers No to the same question, but with qualifications (i.e., that God the creator does rule this kingdom). When the qualifications of each are compared to the other’s, the effect is the same. To put it as precisely as possible, they both teach that the Son of God rules the temporal kingdom as an eternal member of the Divine Trinity but does not rule it in his capacity as the incarnate mediator/redeemer” (181).

In his haste to reconcile Turretin and Rutherford here, VanDrunen has, in my view, stumbled headlong into what looks like serious Trinitarian heresy. Rutherford’s viewpoint, whatever its weaknesses, seems to me to at least be theologically coherent and safe, if I am correct in interpreting “God the creator” to mean for him “God the Father.” In this model, God the Father creates and governs the world, and delegates authority to magistrates as governors of the world, and God the Son redeems this creation, and delegates authority to the Church as a redeemer of the world.” This basic model certainly needs work, but it is reasonably stable and has been frequently employed in political theology. But what Turretin (and certainly what VanDrunen) is saying seems different. They posit a disjunction between what the Son does in his own person, and what he does as a member of the Trinity, as generic God. This suggests that there are four agencies in the Godhead--one for each of the persons, and one for “eternal God”--the unity of the three persons, thus turning the three-in-oneness of orthodox theology into a three-plus-oneness. Moreover, it suggests that, while one of the Son’s offices is executed coordinately with the Father and Spirit (that of governing creation), another is unique to him as Son (redeeming the world), thus violating the fundamental dictum of Trinitarian orthodoxy: “in the opera ad extra, the works of God are undivided.” We must affirm that, in all his work, the Son works both uniquely as himself, and coordinately with Father and Spirit as a member of the Trinity. Finally, we have here what looks like undisguised modalism: a sharp rift between what the Son does (and thus, who he is) as incarnate mediator, and the Son as “eternal member of the divine Trinity”--in other words, the incarnate mediatorial work of Christ turns out to just be a hat-wearing, an identity fundamentally separate from the eternal life of the divine Trinity, and of the Logos himself. To put it simply: for VanDrunen, Jesus Christ the Son of God does not even really show us himself, the Logos, much less show us the Father, as he claimed to do. He is merely an avatar.

The only way to avoid this frightful conclusion, it seems to me, is to insist, with the New Testament, on the deep unity between Christ’s work as creator and as redeemer, as the one “by whom all things were made” and the one who “makes all things new.” The opening to the Gospel of John makes this all as clear as one could wish (what follows is my own translation, as literal as possible):

“1 In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.

2 This one was in the beginning with God.

3 All things came to be through him and without him nothing came to be that came to be.

4 In him was life and the life was the light of men.

5 And the light shines in the darkness and the darkness overtook/understood it not.

6 A man named John came to be, being sent from God.

7 He came for a witness so that he might bear witness concerning the light that all might believe through him.

8 That man was not the light but he came that he might bear witness concerning the light.

9 He was the true light who lightens every man who is coming into the world.

10 He was in the world and the world through him came to be and the world did not know him.

11 He came unto his own and his own received him not.
12 As many as received him, to them he gave power to become sons of God, to those who believed in his name,

13 those who not from blood nor from the will of the flesh nor from the will of man but from from God were born.

14 And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the unique one from the Father, full of grace and truth.

15 John bore witness concerning him and cried out, saying, "This was of whom I said to you that he coming behind me should become before me, because he was earlier than me."

16 And from his fullness we have all received and grace because of grace.

17 For the law was given through Moses, but grace and truth through Jesus Christ.

18 No one has seen God at any time, but the unique Son, who is in the bosom of the father, that one has exegeted him.”

This passage is uncompromising: it is the Word who was God and through whom all things came to be that himself became flesh, whose glory, that is to say, whose true dynamic identity, we witnessed, from whose fullness we received grace. In him from the beginning was the life that by his life he brought to the world. From the beginning he shed the light of his grace in the world, and finally he came to offer in himself the fullness of grace to the world which he had created. In so doing, he perfectly revealed (“exegeted”) not only himself as he had been from all eternity, but also God the Father. This Word who becomes flesh is not only the Creator from all eternity, but is redeemer from all eternity, and comes into the world so that men his creatures might become “sons of God”--what they were created to be in the beginning.

Now, how exactly all this cashes out in terms of the nitty-gritty of political theology, and of Church and State, still needs a lot of work. But it is at least clear that, however we cash this out, we cannot do so in a way that seeks to drive a wedge between Christ the creator and Christ the redeemer.

Still Mired in Obfuscation (VanDrunen Review V.2)

2010-06-21T16:51:00.001+01:00

June 21, 2010

(Sorry, I like the word "obfuscation.")
VanDrunen's extensive discussion of natural law in this chapter sheds little more light on the problem than did his singularly unhelpful discussion in chapter 4. The opening subsection of the main discussion in this chapter starts out promisingly, as VanDrunen quotes Francis Turretin and John Owen on the nature and origin of natural law. Turretin says that the natural law arises “from a divine obligation being impressed by God upon the conscience of man in his very creation,” and, moreover, “that so many remains and evidences of this law are still left in our nature (although it has been in different ways corrupeted and obscured by sin) that there is no mortal who cannot feel its force either more or less.”

Now this last bit is intriguing, because it is here, I have suggested, that a crucial part of the question hangs. For natural law to be a sufficient guide for life in the civil kingdom, then natural law must be clearly and sufficiently knowable by us even in our fallen state. It isn’t enough for natural law to exist, it isn’t enough for us to have comprehended it in a pre-fallen state, and it isn’t enough for us to have some remaining notions of it. What VanDrunen needs to show in these thinkers is that we still have a clear and sufficient knowledge of it to conduct our lives by it. Is this what Turretin says? I’m not sure--“there is no mortal who cannot feel its force either more or less.” That doesn’t sound terribly promising to me. To feel the force of it (more or less) does not seem the same as having a clear apprehension of all its essential dictates.

The Owen quote increases my doubt. Owen, VanDrunen tells us, did not want to define natural law as “the dictates of right reason. Which all men, or men generally, consent in and agree about”--instead, he said, “By the law of nature, then, I intend, not a law which our nature gives unto all our actions, but a law given unto our nature, as a rule and measure unto our moral actions....And this respect alone can give it the nature of a law,--that is, an obliging force or power.” Now, the way I read this (though I may be misunderstanding), what Owen is trying to say is that natural law is not something within us that tells us how to act, but something that functions as a measure to judge our actions--in other words, not an infallible guide for our actions prospectively, but something by which they may be held accountable retrospectively. Now this makes good sense to me. Because of sin, we have an insufficient grasp of the natural law to simply use it in determining what to do, but God can nevertheless judge us by whether we have lived up to it.

Owen goes on to say, “This law, therefore, is that rule which God hath given unto human nature, in all the individual partakers of it, for all its moral actions, in the state and condition wherein it was by him created and placed, with respect unto his own government of it and judging concerning it; which rule is made known in them and to them by their inward constitution and outward condition wherein they were placed by God.” Now this seems pretty explicit: the rule was “made known in them and to them,” but in the “condition wherein they were placed by God,” that is, Eden. Is it still made known in the same way to us in our current condition? This quote doesn’t say, but I figure VanDrunen would’ve quoted Owen on it if he had said so.

Based on what VanD has shown me so far, then, his summary comments about these writers are simply unjustified: “the natural law is known by nature apart from special revelation, it teaches the basic content of the moral law, it is written on the heart of every human being and roughly associated with the conscience, and assures everyone’s accountability before God.” It is known, now, without special revelation? Do you want to put any qualifiers on that? Show me where Turretin and Owen said that.

The next couple of pages discuss the relationship between natural law and God’s nature, which, while a mildly interesting question, does not really assist us in answering the questions at hand. Following this is a discussion of the connection between the natural law and the conscience. Now, again, this makes sense to me--natural law speaks to us through our conscience, sure, encouraging us to choose what is good and to turn away from what is evil. However, conscience is rather vague and notoriously unreliable. Conscience is much better at telling me, “I don’t think that would be a very good idea” than it is at telling me just what would be a good idea, and inasmuch as for me, as a Christian, it does tell me what would be a good idea, it is almost always relying on what I know to be good because my faith has taught it to me. Conscience can easily be deceived, or misled by a false set of principles. If I have come to accept false criteria about what is right and what is wrong (as fallen man is always wont to do), then my conscience will no longer be a reliable guide. Nor, even when conscience is functioning properly and telling us what to do, can it get us very far on its own. Its voice is too easily drowned out or misheard. In short, if the conscience speaks the natural law to us, very well; but this will hardly be sufficient to tell us how to rightly govern a kingdom or set up an economy. It just doesn’t tell us enough on its own to get us very far.

A couple pages later, the equation of the natural law and the moral law is mentioned, along with the role of the Decalogue as a summary of the moral law. I will pause here briefly to consider one of the questions I touched on in my introductory comments about this chapter. VanDrunen says, “the common teaching of Reformed orthodox theology...equated the content of the natural law with the moral law (as summarized in the Decalogue). More technical discussions distinguished the natural and moral laws insofar as the former was unwritten and known through general revelation and the latter was written and known through special revelation. In Turretin’s words, they differ not in substance or principles, but in ‘mode of delivery.’” If this is so, we may naturally ask what need there was for the special revelation? If the Decalogue simply tells us what the natural law already told us, then why did God bother to tell it to us? The simple answer seems to be, “because the natural law was insufficiently clear, and special revelation elucidated it.” But this answer seems fatal to VanDrunen’s purpose, which is to establish the independent sufficiency of natural law for life in the civil kingdom.

VanDrunen moves on in this section to discuss the relationship between the natural law and the covenant of works, a relationship that demonstrates for him the fact that the natural law is rooted in God’s creating work, as opposed to his redeeming work. I have touched on VanDrunen’s odd use of this dichotomy a few times before, and will merely reiterate my central objection--rooted in and related to are different. The natural law may well be rooted in creation, but insofar as it cannot remain unaffected by the basic trajectory creation-fall-new creation, redemption in Christ must needs have an important relation to the natural law, whether it be one of transfiguring, of resurrecting, or of illuminating, depending on your paradigm.

The invocation of the covenant of works also displays another weak point in VanDrunen’s case, in my opinion. He quotes Turretin saying that “It [the covenant of works] is also called ‘legal’ because the condition on man’s part was the observation of the law of nature engraved within him.” Now, what’s all this language of engraving (language that VanDrunen really latches onto)? Let me quote from another Reformed scholastic source, the Westminster Shorter Catechism (Q. 12): “When God had created man, he entered into a covenant of life with him, upon condition of perfect obedience; forbidding him to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, upon the pain of death.” This “covenant of life” is what is elsewhere known as the covenant of works, and what does it consist in? God’s specific commands to Adam about what he was and wasn’t to do. In Genesis 2, there is no talk of engraving, but rather talk of speaking and commanding. The terms of the covenant of works, then, appear to be given via special revelation--revealed directly by God to man--rather than by natural man--engraved in man from the moment of his creation. Now, I am certainly open to the argument that, although the specific terms of the covenant of works were given via special revelation, there were certainly other moral duties, implicit in the covenant, which God simply engraved in Adam’s heart at creation, and these are what we call the natural law. But if that be the case, then the covenant of works is not the same as natural law, but is in fact an exception to it.

Two other points need to be mentioned in this section. First, VanDrunen continues to elide the important distinction between “binding on” and “knowable by.” To be sure, the natural law remained binding upon men after the Fall, and VanDrunen has plenty of quotes from Reformed scholastics to back that up. But that fact does not demonstrate that they were able to recognize its binding rules in detail, certainly not in the kind of detail necessary to make it a sufficient basis for successful life in “the civil kingdom.” VanDrunen claims that “natural law serves to sustain moral life in the world without itself offering a means for attaining to a life beyond this world” (164). This seems to be an odd dichotomy--I thought that attaining a life beyond this world had something to do with--indeed, depended upon--a moral life in the world. Perhaps VanDrunen’s paradigm here is dependent on the modern Reformed sola fideism that ignores good works. In any case, to suggest that natural law allows unredeemed man to live a moral life seems to neglect the robust Reformed teaching on total depravity, which VanDrunen repeatedly glosses over.

Second, VanDrunen’s sources do not support the neat connection he wishes to draw between the natural law and the civil kingdom. They clearly believed that natural law related to affairs of the “spiritual kingdom” as well. For instance, he cites, as an example of the continuing role of natural law WCF 21.1: “The light of nature showeth that there is a God, who hath lordship and sovereignty over all, is good, and doth good unto all, and is therefore to be feared, loved, praised, called upon, trusted in, and served, with all the heard, and with all the soul, and with all the might.” WCF 21 is concerned with issues of worship and the Sabbath. In other words, here we have the WCF invoking the role of “natural law” precisely in those areas where, according to VanDrunen, it does not extend, but gives way to special revelation: life with God and duties toward Him, as opposed to horizontal duties toward others in this life. This tension does not go away, of course, but manifests itself over and over in the thinkers VanDrunen surveys, such as in their claims that magistrates are to enforce both tables of the law. Of course, VanDrunen himself has highlighted the idea that the Decalogue is a summation of the natural law, so this ought not to trouble him--these thinkers are just saying that the magistrate should enforce all of the natural law. But VanDrunen wants to continue to insist that the civil enforcement of spiritual duties is wrong and is inconsistent with these men’s teachings.

This problem continues to be highlighted in the following section on the relation between the natural law and the Mosaic civil law. To be sure, the way these thinkers construed this relationship seems to be a strong point for VanDrunen’s case. They generally agreed that the Mosaic civil laws were not to applied in detail in contemporary principalities, because circumstances were different--rather, whatever was enduring and “moral” in these laws, that is to say, the natural law component of them, was binding in the present day. This paradigm grants hermeneutical authority to the natural law as a grid for using the Mosaic law, and thus privileges the role of natural revelation over special revelation in this situation. This is very useful for VanDrunen’s argument, to be sure. But the fact remains that these thinkers thought that the Mosaic civil law was a perfect application of the natural law to the Israelite polity, and if this is so, it is hard to see how they could also think that the natural law pertained only to civil affairs, or authorized rulers only to govern civil affairs, and not spiritual. And the fact also remains that, for whatever reason, God saw fit to give this law by special revelation, even though, on the natural law paradigm, the Hebrews ought to have been able to deduce it perfectly well for themselves.

VanDrunen concludes this section with a recap of what he has covered and emphasizes that this natural law thinking was deeply engrained into the structure of Reformed theology in this period, declaring “Clearly, natural law was not an aspect of Reformed orthodox theology and ethics that could be eliminated without serious ramifications for the system of Reformed thought as a whole” (173).

This may be clear, but it is not clear either exactly how much authority natural law wields or how clearly it could be discerned and applied on its own. And it is certainly not clear how 17th-century natural law teaching could be integrated into the system of theology VanDrunen wants to propound, a system that wants to make natural law the guarantor of a religiously neutral, unredeemed, universally accessible saeculum. This certainly is not how Turretin, Rutherford, Althusius, et al. envision it.

Moratorium and Teaser

2010-06-05T01:23:00.003+01:00

June 4, 2010

If you check in here with any regularity, you have no doubt noticed that activity has fallen off dramatically here since I've been traveling. Since I will be continuing to visit relatives over the next couple weeks, and have my hands quite completely full with business, dissertation, and other responsibilities, I expect to be putting my posting here pretty much on hold till the middle of the month, though I hope there will still be installments of the VanDrunen review trickling in.

But I can offer this exciting teaser--by the end of the month, I expect to be migrating this whole blog over to a new site, www.swordandploughshare.com, that will be not only a much better-looking, better-organized, and better-working blog, but indeed, I hope, much more than a blog. So stay posted for the big move!

The Obfuscation of Natural Law (VanDrunen Review IV)

2010-05-27T05:22:00.001+01:00

May 27, 2010
This chapter was certainly the weakest so far, and the weakness, unless I’m missing something, is rather simple to identify and describe, so this review shouldn’t take so long. His approach in this chapter is quite simple: examine the treatises of six prominent “Reformed resistance theorists”--three from among the English Marian exiles (John Knox, John Ponet, and Christopher Goodman) and three from among the Huguenots (Francois Hotman, Theodore Beza, and the author of the Vindiciae)--and look for any appeals to non-Biblical sources, all of which can then be lumped under the heading of “natural law.” The result is rich in scholarly-sounding footnotes but quite lacking in substance.

The problem with this chapter stems from VanDrunen’s failure, as I have mentioned a couple of times, to ever take the time to adequately define “natural law,” distinguish between the dramatically varying forms of the doctrine, and attend to the significant implications of these variations. I had hoped that, reserving as he now was an entire chapter for a discussion of natural law, he would remedy this serious gap in the argument. Unfortunately, the account of natural law in this chapter is, if anything, even more flattened and insubstantial than what we’ve had heretofore. Indeed, although this admittedly sounds harsh, it is hard not to feel at many points throughout this chapter that VanDrunen simply used a computer to do a word search for “reason,” “nature,” and “natural” in the writings of these resistance theorists, and then copied and pasted any hits into the paragraphs of this chapter. Repeatedly, the reader is simply bombarded with a lineup of quotations such as “nature instructs us to defend our lives with liberty” “let nature teach you the absurdity thereof [viz., rule by women],” or, in fact, with any quotation demonstrating the use of extra-biblical sources, and is not given the benefit of any careful reflection on how these thinkers see the law of nature imparted to us, what epistemological and ethical authority the appeal to nature has for them, and how they understand the relationship between natural law and Biblical law.

Without such reflection, it is difficult to see how this chapter is to offer any substantive contribution to VanDrunen’s argument in this book. This sort of claim is repeatedly made: “Though the authority of Scripture is placed front and center, this author also does not hesitate to combine appeals to Scripture with appeals to natural law or other non-biblical sources. One of the most evident ways is the author’s use of biblical history alongside of ancient and more recent history to illustrate his points” (132). It is not clear to me, however, that this claim in itself proves anything other than that these writers were intelligent, educated, articulate human beings. Indeed, here is a sampling of the sorts of things that VanDrunen appeals to as evidence of the presence of natural law theory:

Goodman, we are told, invokes “natural law” because “In the first chapter of Superior Powers, Goodman recounts the story of Acts 4 in which the Jewish leaders threaten the apostles. Goodman, without appeal to the biblical text itself, remarks that these threats were against both reason and God’s word” (130). In the next paragraph, we are given another example: “Deuteronomy 17 commanded Israel to choose a king ‘from among his brothers.’ In part, says Goodman, this was because foreigners would not have a ‘natural zeal’ for the people and, especially, because Israel was to avoid ‘that monster in nature,’ namely the rule of women” (130).

Under the heading of invocations of natural law are any use of analogies drawn from nature, e.g, when in Hotman’s treatise, “The relationship of king and kingdom, he says, is like that of tutor and student, guardian and ward, pilot and passengers, pastor and flock, and commander and army. In all of these examples, the obvious from everyday life provides the political conclusion” (139), or when Ponet “in his defense of tyrannicide, asserts that society can kill a tyrant just as a person can cut away an incurable part of the body that otherwise would destroy the whole.” Citations of heathen writers and mention of examples from secular history also are taken by VanDrunen as forms of appeal to natural law.

Now it is hard to see how these sorts of citations do not simply represent basic principles of good writing in any age. For instance, I would not consider myself a natural law thinker, but if I were to write on, say, the Biblical call to love and mercy--to overcome evil with good--then, even on this clearly evangelical doctrine, I might well make all manner of appeals to “nature” and non-Biblical sources. I might, for instance, offer many historical examples of how self-sacrificial mercy turned out to triumph over evil, where the seemingly rational course of retaliation failed. I might quote non-Christian authors, ancient and modern, who also recognized the value of mercy--for instance, I might quote Gandhi’s “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth will only make the whole world blind and toothless.” In making such appeals, I would simply be following the good rhetorical strategy of seeking to illustrate my point via as many different routes as possible, and the good theological strategy of trying to show that God’s commands are not arbitrary, but fit the grain of the universe. In this latter aim, I might be said to be appealing in some sense to natural law, but only as an illustration, or as an authority clearly subordinate to Scripture, not as an independent basic of norms. To this extent, almost any theologian could be said to “make use of natural law,” but this would thus be a very unhelpful way of speaking.

Clearly, for these thinkers to serve the purpose VanDrunen has for them, they would have to make use of natural law in a rather more robust sense. Let us revisit briefly the thesis which VanDrunen has set forth at the end of chapter 3, and then ask what questions this chapter would need to address in order to advance that thesis. That thesis, as I understand it, is this: natural law provides a universally accessible, ethically normative account of how life is to be lived in the civil kingdom, such that the institutions of that kingdom can be established and operated successfully, by pagans or Christians, without recourse to the laws of the Gospel or Christ’s work of redemption, governed only by appeal to these principles established in creation, and rationally discernible by all. I think this is an accurate summary of what he is proposing as his nifty synthesis of natural law and two kingdoms doctrines.

Now, what would we have to find in these resistance theorists to substantiate or advance this thesis?

1) We would have to find an account of natural law as not merely universally binding upon, but universally recognizable as binding, by Christians and pagans alike.

2) We would have to find a clear use of natural law by these authors not merely in an illustrative or testimonial function, but in an authoritative function.

3) We would have to find evidence that these authors viewed natural law as providing not merely a basis for political life, but a fully sufficient basis.

Let me elaborate on each of these.

First, it will not do simply to establish that these thinkers saw in natural law a universally binding set of ethical principles that were built into the world from creation, and that served as a basis from which moral duties could be deduced. After all, if this natural law existed and were in fact built into creation, but we were such that, because of sin, we could either not discern its principles, or could discern its principles but not recognize them as ethical norms (as in, for instance, the modern liberal who recognizes the seeming “unnaturalness” of homosexuality, but does not see this as prescribing any ethical norm), then it would only be a useful authority for Christians. As Christians, redeemed and enlightened by revelation, we are able to recognize the principles of the natural law for what they are, and are able to understand that, since God is their author, they are ethically binding upon us; but can unbelievers make use of natural law in the same way? For natural law to serve as the rule for life in the civil kingdom, a rule accessible to both believers and unbelievers and, then natural law would not only have to exist, but would have to be, on some level, recognized by unbelievers as an authoritative rule for life in the civil kingdom. For these thinkers, I do not think that natural law can be reliably recognized in this way--they all hold to the doctrine of total depravity, as VanDrunen himself recognizes: “these writers, obviously reflecting their Reformed theological perspective, viwed human reason itself as badly corrpted. Though nature confronts all people with the divine law, reason as a human faculty is not inherently trustworthy....What reason ought to comprehend by nature and what it actually deos are therefore different things for these writers” (134). But he does not seem to recognize how dangerous this admission is to his thesis.

Second, it will not do to establish that these thinkers appealed to natural law as a form of evidence in arguments regarding politics. Following off of the previous point, if it is true that natural law exists, but is also true that our discernment of it is limited, then natural law only becomes usable once it is illuminated by the clear truth given to us in Scripture. We might say that natural law, in this scheme, is like the moon to Scripture’s sun--we do indeed receive some light from natural law, and, those lacking Scripture can stumble along slowly by that light, but Scripture is the source of the knowledge and authority that natural law offers, and will be necessary if we are to make much headway at all. On VanDrunen’s thesis, however, if natural law is to be the basis for life in the civil kingdom, without recourse to special revelation, then it will need to be authoritative in itself; it can’t merely serve as extra illustration or substantiation for principles whose authority is established by direct appeal to special revelation. And, from what VanDrunen gives us in this chapter, it seems like this latter use is the use it has in these resistance theorists. I already quoted VanDrunen saying, “Though the authority of Scripture is placed front and center, this author also does not hesitate to combine appeals to Scripture with appeals to natural law or other non-biblical sources. One of the most evident ways is the author’s use of biblical history alongside of ancient and more recent history to illustrate his points” (132). A little furhter on, he says, “This author, then, together with the other five, clearly refused to limit his argumentation to Scripture, but frequently resorted to a wide variety of natural law and other non-biblical sources to buttress, illustrate, and shape biblical claims” (132). He frequently perceives in these authors a “harmony between biblical and natural law sources” (129). Or what about when VanDrunen quotes Beza’s justification for why heathen writers may be appealed to: “they are not so far removed frm the standard of justice that it may not justifiably be said that justice was on one side and injustice on the other” (140). Clearly discernible in this quote is the idea that there is a pre-established standard of justice (presumably drawn from Scripture), that can serve as the benchmark against which heathen thinkers can be judged. Where they measure up to it, they may be usefully quoted; where they do not, their opinions are of no authority. Throughout, the picture here is one of Scripture as the necessary foundation, and natural law as providing additional support; these thinkers, it seems, would not be able to imagine using natural law as itself the foundation.

The third point is closely related to the second, but pertains more to the content than to the authority of natural law. Even if, for these thinkers, certain arguments could be not only substantiated but in fact established on the basis of the natural law, this is scarcely enough for VanDrunen’s purpose. On the thesis he wishes to argue, the natural law provides a sufficient and authoritative rule for life in the civil kingdom; it doesn’t simply give us a few useful principles here and there, which must then be filled out by appeals to Scripture, but it gives us a complete blueprint for civil life. Special revelation, then, need not inform life in the civil kingdom. But this does not seem at all to be the way these resistance theorists are using natural law. Scripture is the clear backbone of their argument, and where they think that certain political principles can be established by natural law, they often use it. But if you challenged them, “Here, rewrite your entire treatise proving all these principles simply by recourse to natural law, and without these unnecessary appeals to Scripture,” I expect they would’ve looked at you like you’d gone mad. But unless natural law was, for these authors, such that it could be used as a blueprint for political life on its own, then it is hard to see how its use by the resistance theorists really proves anything for VanDrunen except, “Well, certain principles for political life can be recognized, and have been recognized even by unbelievers, by looking at nature and history.” But it’s hard to see how proving this is proving anything significant at all.

Before closing, I should mention a couple final problems with the appeal to natural law here. First, consider this litte quote: “This is not to say that all of their interpretations of the content of natural law are palatable to most contemporary readers. Knox’s condemnation of the rule of women as a ‘monster in’ and ‘repugnant to’ nature is a case in point” (137). This points a big problem with the appeal to natural law, a problem I mentioned in the discussion of chapter 3 as well: the multicultural challenge to natural law, the fact that their perception of it is quite different than ours. If the whole point of natural law is that it is a universally recognizable standard, apparent in nature and capable of being grasped by our reason with sufficient precision as to render it a foundation for civil life, then how do we account for the fact that, at least to how our reasons grasp nature, these thinkers got many principles of natural law appallingly wrong? Is the rule of women against natural law? If so, then why are we so unable to see it? If not, then why was Knox so misled? And, since either we or he are clearly in grave error in our interpretation of natural law on this rather significant point, how can we feel confident that we are not making similar blunders across the board in our attempts to grasp it and apply it?

Second, I want to voice my theological concern with the attempt to appeal to natural law in political life, as these resistance theorists do. If “natural law” or heathen authors, or history, or whatever it may be, is being appealed to in support of a principle that seems to directly oppose the principle given to us in Scripture, then something is wrong. By the nature of this chapter, this problem screams to be addressed. Here all these theorists are attempting to construct theologies of “resistance”--of armed rebellion, despite the fact that there seems to be some quite clear New Testament teaching against it. For instance, “Vindiciae at several places speaks of natural law as teaching a principle of self-preservation: ‘nature instructs us to defend our lives and our liberty, without which life is hardly life at all’” (135). Am I the only one who is hearing alarm bells? Doesn’t Christ teach us (at least in many circumstances) not to seek to defend our lives and our liberty, and to abandon the principle of self-preservation for a principle of self-sacrifice? Whatever the use of natural law, it should not be appealed to in contradiction to evangelical law. And this concern, of course, is what makes me so suspicious of VanDrunen’s whole project--the attempt to found the civil kingdom on natural law generally means an attempt to inoculate the civil kingdom against having to follow any of Christ’s commands, since it can operate by a different and often contradictory ethical standard.

Priest-Kings?

2010-05-22T01:18:00.004+01:00

May 21, 2010
(Note: I'm leaving town tomorrow, and will have little chance to reply to post--hence the barrage today--or reply to comments for several days. So by all means comment, but I may take a few days to get back to you...the same goes for comments earlier today that I haven't gotten to.)

So I have found a reason to like Vermigli: namely, he’s a bit more restrained than Bullinger. In “On the Office of the Magistrate” from the Sermonum Decades, Bullinger starts out rather carelessly on his proof that “care of religion belongs to the Magistrate,” by alleging that in ancient times, kings were also priests.

“For among them of old, their kinges were priestes, I mean maisters and overseers of religion. Melchisedech that holie and wise Prince of the Chanaanitish people, who bare the type or figure of Christe our Lord, is wonderfullie commended in holie Scriptures: Now he was both king and priest together. Moreover in the booke of Numbers, to Iosue [Joshua] newlie ordained and lately consecrated, are the lawes belonging to religion given up and delivered.”

A bit later, after explaining how the magistrate is to make sure to forbid and punish idolatry, he pushes things further again:

“What may be thought of that moreover, that the most excellent princes and friends of God, among God’s people, did challeng to themselves the care of religion as belonging to themselves, in so much that they exercised and toke the charge therof, even as if they had beene ministers of the holie things? Iosue in the mount Hebal caused an altar to be builded, and fulfilled all the worship of God, as it was commaunded of God by the mouth of Moses. David in bringing in and bestowing the arke of God in his place, and in ordering the worship of God, was so diligent, that it is wonder to tel.”

In these passages Bullinger has (deliberately), it seems, blurred the line between kingly and priestly duties, insisting that, so much does the magistrate have the care of religion, that he can pretty much be said to share the priestly office. In response to an objection a couple pages on, Bullinger protests “But our disputation tendeth not to the confounding of the offices and duties of the magistrate, and ministers of the Church, as that wee would have the king to preach, to baptize, and to minister the Lord’s supper”--nay, Bullinger, your disputation doth tend that way.

Essentially what Bullinger does in this essay and others is to invert the hyper-papalist version of the “two swords” doctrine. Where Boniface VIII in Unam Sanctam held that the ecclesial authority rightly held all spiritual and temporal power, but condescended to delegate most of the actual dirty work of temporal power to civil rulers, reserving the right to correct them when they messed up, Bullinger tends to present us with a mirror image: the civil authority rightly holds all spiritual and temporal power, but condescends to delegate most of the actual work of spiritual power to ecclesial ministers, reserving the right to correct them when they mess up.

While Vermigli in places presents the same kind of model, on this particular matter of priest-kings, he is more cautious, as I discovered in a passage I just translated today, commenting on 1 Kings 12:26-33 (Jeroboam’s idolatrous sacrifices). Vermigli attempts to give us a balanced account:

“Indeed, these are two functions, but very much conjoined, and they mutually help and correct one another. For ministers move the people in a certain way by teaching and admonition, that they might gladly perform the commands of the higher magistrates; and good magistrates, in turn, take care that the people live by the prescription of the divine law. Again, ministers correct the errors of magistrates, not of course with the sword, but with the word of heavenly teaching. And indeed a magistrate, if the ministers of the Church less than rightly attend to their tasks, or fall into grave sins, can either remove them out of their place or move them by the punishments they deserve. Yet however much these two resources are thus conjoined, they are not nevertheless one and the same; it is permitted to a single person to execute one of them only....the civil power and the sacred ministry are matters of such weight, care, and concern, that each should expend a whole man and all his strength; and it is hardly possible to find one man who is sufficient to carry out all the duties of either of them. Nor should anyone raise as an objection the case of Moses, who attended to both; because it was such a burden that he sustained it only briefly. For God commanded him quickly that he commit the priesthood to Aaron. To be sure, the Hasmoneans were priests and kings, but, though they are to be commended in this--that they liberated the people--their occupation of the Israelite kingdom is hardly to be approved of. And in truth, we should not be at pains to explain concerning Samuel and Eli; because their deeds pertained not to making laws, but to judging specific claims, nor are they to be hauled in for imitation. And in Melchisedek God willed for there to be this joining of offices, so that the express type of Christ might be discerned in him.” (NB: This was a first stab at a translation, and a couple parts are a bit iffy.)

Bullinger and the Zoroastrian Paedagogues

2010-05-22T01:07:00.000+01:00

May 21, 2010
VanDrunen’s claim about the use of the natural law in Reformed political theology certainly seems to ring true for a lot of what we find in Vermigli and Bullinger. His claim was that, since for the Reformers, the political realm was outside of the sphere of the redemptive gospel, and belonged only to the sphere of creation, the ethics of that sphere were determined by the natural law and not by Scripture, and so pagan sources could be appealed to just as readily as Christian ones. Of course, there are many problems with the way VanDrunen tries to make this claim, as I have been discussing in my reviews, but it is certainly true that these early Reformed thinkers are quite comfortable mingling sacred and secular sources in developing their political theology. Consider Bullinger’s dedication to On the Authority of Holy Scripture, which I just posted about earlier.

In convincing Henry VIII (as if he needed any convincing) that magistrates ought to be involved in managing religious affairs, he discusses first the example of Jehoshaphat, then a passage from Isaiah 49, and then turns to a rather random and eccentic account of Zoroastrian practice, and then an even more eccentric discussion of Egyptian statues:

“To this also seems to pertain that which was so among the ancients, that kings were also priests. The king of the Persians, when he arrived at the fourteenth year of his life, was handed over to the paedagogues. They were those selected from among the Persians, and in particular, four most wise, just, temperate, and courageous men, the first of whom would teach the magic of Zoroaster, and that indeed not a thing impious and superstitious, but the royal institution which related to the worship of God. The second admonished him that he be truthful in his whole life. The third taught him not to be overcome by any desire, that he might be accustomed to live freely and as a king in truth, governing those things which are in himself before all others, a slave of no one. The fourth, finally, would make him fearless and intrepid, lest, fearing anyone, he should thereby become a slave. (The author of this is Plato in the Alcibiade.) In the same work I think that one may find that the Egyptians represented their princes in statues thus: that they embellished the eye with a scepter; without doubt signifying that a wisdom of divine and human things is looked for in a prince, and that wisdom and a pious prince are in a kingdom what the eye is in the body.
Hence, not only by divine but also by human law it is confirmed that the primary duty of kings is to be religious and to to meticulously care for religion before all else.”

Abortive Politics

2010-05-22T01:03:00.000+01:00

May 21, 2010

If the idea of the left-wing and right-wing parties joining to form a coalition government here in the UK isn’t weird enough to us Americans, a woman at church last Sunday pointed out to me another huge disconnect between American and British politics. In Britain, she said, it’s an open question who Christians are going to vote for; most likely, in a sizable and reasonably diverse congregation, fairly equal numbers of the members will vote for the Tories, the Lib Dems, or Labour. But in America, so far as she could tell, it was pretty much assumed that if you were Christian, you were voting Republican. She recounted the bizarre experience some of her friends had had of receiving emails from American friends back in 2008 asking for prayer that Obama wouldn’t win. I regretfully assured her that her impressions of the polarization were quite accurate. But why?

Why is it that Christians in the US are so politically partisan compared to their British counterparts? Is it because good and evil are so much clearer in US politics than in the UK? I must confess that I’ve never seen anything to suggest a clear division of good and evil between the Democrats and the Republicans. Is it because Brits simply don’t take their faith seriously enough to apply it to politics? I suppose there might be something to that, but I don’t think that’s a fair criticism. Let us pause to consider this, though. A flexibility among Christians with regard to political affiliation could imply an underdeveloped sense of the Gospel’s relevance to political life; however, it may well simply imply a healthy understanding of the provisionality of politics. In our modern societies, it is important for Christians to recognize that, although there may be in theory a robustly Biblical politics, none of the existing political options comes close to embodying it, but each of them does offer some prospects of achieving some provisional goods that Christians can recognize as genuine public goods. In such a situation, complete abstention from voting is a legitimate route to take (and is more or less my own persuasion), on the grounds that each of the options represents a sufficiently flawed, unChristian, and untrustworthy platform that it would be wisest not to support any. But it is also potentially legitimate to, acknowledging the essential rottenness of all the options, weigh up the provisional public goods of each option, and vote for the one that seems on balance the best, all the while granting that your Christian brother may well weigh things up a little differently, without this implying any fundamental disconnect between your ultimate values. Such a sense of provisionality seems (so far as I have discerned in my very brief time) to dominate the thinking on politics among British Christians, but not among Americans. American Christians, for the most part, have trouble letting go of the idea that political allegiances are matters of ultimate value, and should be a religious battleground.

The chief cause of this religious partisanship, so far as I can tell, seems to have been the abortion debate. Of course, that’s far from the only issue on which Christians line up with the conservative party line, but my sense is that it’s the tail that wags the dog. Where would Christians have gotten the idea that all these conservative policies were Christian policies? Why should love of gun rights be a particularly Christian political position? Or opposition to immigration? Or being perennially hawkish about military action? Etc. The closest thing I’ve been able to come to an explanation is simply this: when Roe v. Wade happened, the Democrats happened to be dominated by socially liberal leadership (McGovern), and so the Republicans were able to position themselves as the anti-abortion party. Christians, fired with fanatical political activism over the abortion issue, flocked more and more to the Republican banner and began assimilating its ways, even if there wasn’t anything very Christian about them. The abortion issue was one on which Christianity had a clear answer to give, and so it came to be the only one on which Christianity had any answer to give. And, since Democrats are seen as the embracers of abortion, which is clearly wicked, they can be easily demonized in the popular Christian imagination--they must be wicked, filthy people, and so every political stance associated with the Democrats must be a wicked, filthy one...no need to investigate the matter much further.

In Britain, where the abortion issue never became politicized*, Christians never flocked to one party en masse, nor did they start attributing life-and-death significance to politics. So, while we may allege that have not sufficiently put faith in politics in the sense of putting faith into politics, making their Christianity central to their political involvement, they seem to have thereby avoided our error of putting faith in politics in the sense of making an idol of politics and thus losing our grip on the Christianity that we were trying to bring into the public sphere.

*Note: It is particularly odd, as this woman and I were discussing, that the abortion issue should have become politicized in the US and not the UK given that in the former, it was was a judicial decision, and in the latter, a legislative one. Historically, an independent, unpoliticized judiciary has been seen as a chief bulwark of freedom, but American Christians have heedlessly chucked that ideal out the window in their single-minded pursuit of a political solution to the abortion problem, a problem that is not a fundamentally political problem. And so, even while decrying “liberal activist jurisprudence,” we have aggressively and explicitly tried to turn our entire political process, at every election, into an attempt to stack the Court with politically-aligned judges to overturn abortion. And so we have connived with the liberal activists for the destruction of an independent judiciary, so that we now regularly expect Supreme Court decisions to fall along partisan lines.

Usury Today

2010-05-21T17:26:00.000+01:00

May 21, 2010

Building off of my post yesterday, I now make a stab at answering the questions "Does the ban carry over into the New Covenant?" and "What does it mean for us today?"

Well, according to fairly standard accounts of applying the Old Testament law, it would carry over in its general equity. It may be be straightforwardly part of the moral law, but it seems not. It would seem to be a deduction, an application, from the moral law, for the nation of Israel. This would mean that, to apply it, we have to deduce what moral principles it is seeking to apply, what things it is trying to safeguard for the communities of Israel, and then see to what extent those principles and concerns apply to other settings beyond ancient Israel. Insofar as they do apply, then the prohibition on usury should continue to govern our societies, but we do not need to see it as a priori binding across the board. (One thing that should be clear, though, is that insofar as it now applies, it would apply without distinction between co-religionists and foreigners, since in Christ all men become our neighbors.)

Notice here that I am not taking the medieval scholastic approach, which sought to demonstrate why usury was an inherently unjust action from the standpoint of the natural law. Why? Well, two main reasons. First, that whole line of argument is rather difficult for most people (including myself) to grasp, and relies on quite a few assumptions (e.g., about the nature of money) that many people are no longer inclined to grant, and which, in any case, seem to be largely of a philosophical nature that is hard to either prove or disprove Biblically. Therefore, the scholastic position against usury has limited persuasive value, and I do not feel myself sufficiently qualified to decide whether or not I accept the argument, much less, to try to recommend it to others. Second, that whole approach has proven to be very susceptible of casuistry. That is to say, it gradually got watered down through various exceptions and qualifications and drawing what feel like arbitrary lines in the sand, so that it became nearly useless as a standard for modern economic ethics, and lost sight, it seems to me, of some of the concerns that lay at the root of the prohibition. If this is overly harsh, correct me...I really only know about a tenth as much about this as I'd like to.

So how might it apply to more "capitalist" economic settings? What I outlined before was a fairly broad account of the harmful effects of usurious credit on communities and economies, but of course it has to be said that these effects would be much more serious in a small agrarian society like Israel. That's because the chief resource of Israel's economy--land--was in limited supply, and the supply could not be increased. The value of commercial credit, of course, is that it helps drive the expansion of production--finding more raw materials, tools to extract them faster, tools to process them faster, new ways of manufacturing and distributing them, etc. Where the supply of raw materials is plenteous and flexible, credit can help boost production for everyone in the market--a rising tide lifts all boats--but, where the supply of raw materials is limited and relatively inflexible, credit just means an intensification of competition for a piece of the pie, and tends to have the effect of increasing inequality--making some members of the market masters of the resources, and others servants. I think this effect will tend to happen in any economy, but the effect is considerably heightened in an agrarian setting. Therefore, one might well suggest that, in other economic settings, the second rationale for the ban that I've suggested--the tendency of credit to produce inequality--wouldn't be as much of a factor. Likewise, the first rationale--the tendency of borrower to get enslaved to lender--might not be as much of a factor. As I mentioned, in an agrarian setting, the farmer is largely at the mercy of fortune as regards his ability to produce a good crop and pay back the loan; it would be very easy for him, through no fault of his own, to default, because of weather, locusts, etc. However, for people in more stable industries, interest-bearing loans really might help them expand their business without grave risk, unless they brought the risk on themselves by behaving foolishly. So, one could argue that, on these two fronts at least, a much more positive case can be made for usury in our economies than could be made in ancient Israel (of course, one might then object that perhaps we ought to have a much more agrarian economy, more like Israel's, and I would be friendly to such an objection).

Nevertheless, neither of these concerns about usury has been wholly done away with. In any economy or any industry, usury can have the effect of imposing servitude upon the borrower, a servitude that it may prove difficult to escape, and will often have the effect of increasing inequality by encouraging the growth of the stronger producer at the expense of the weak. Moreover, the third objection still stands: usurious credit reduces the need for cooperation and interdependence. For these reasons, I think that we would do well to adopt the scholastic (and the Islamic) principle that commercial credit ought to be extended in the form of co-investment, in which the risk and profits are shared, rather than in the form of a loan, in which the creditor has a claim on the borrower and all his assets. To be sure, if we do this, economic growth may not be as rapid, because the entrepreneur will have a harder time getting the capital to grow his business quickly, however, the growth that we have will be more stable, and more equally shared; certainly the last couple years should be enough proof that mere speed of growth is not the best thing for an economy.

So, on the basis of the OT usury bans, I do not think that we can conclude that any charging of interest is wrong, or even that it may not have a limited role to play in some economic situations, but we can conclude that it is dangerous tool, and it is very dangerous to a society if that society becomes dominated by debt and interest, as our societies undoubtedly have been for a couple centuries, and so we should aggressively seek to foster alternative modes of finance and investment. This sort of conclusion also means, of course, that a Christian does not need to immediately disengage himself from any usurious uses to which his money may be being put (indeed, it would be almost impossible for most of us to do so today), but it does mean he should seek to have an ethically critical, rather than a casual attitude toward the way he handles his own finances, and to the ways he might pursue a profession in finance (I say this as a part-time investment advisor, an ethically scary position if there ever was one), and that as Christian communities, we should look for alternative financial practices.

---

All of this is much more thinking out loud than it is attempting to lay out a treatise (even if it sounds a bit like the latter), so by all means engage, critique, and force me to modify my proposals until they're unrecognizable.

The Soul of the Body of England

2010-05-21T15:18:00.000+01:00

May 21, 2010

Heinrich Bullinger gets a little carried away with himself in his dedication to King Henry VIII at the beginning of his treatise “On the Authority of Holy Scripture,” making for some jolly fun translation work. After a couple pages spent reassuring Henry that he has been right to take for himself the headship of the Church of England, and not to listen to those who say that kings have no right to rule the Church, he exhorts him to take the reform of the Church firmly into his own hands, and concludes with this rousing encomium:

“But already, O most powerful King, since the Lord has selected and anointed you to be above his people, you understand what is proper for you and what it is necessary to do. You are the king, therefore you are the father of your country. You are the head of the kingdom, therefore you will exercise understanding for yourself and your kingdom. You are the soul of the body of England, therefore you will animate your people for the duties of a holy life. You are the eye, the sun, and the light of the Church of England, therefore, snatching the Church redeemed by the blood of Christ from the jaws of the Antichrist himself, you will illuminate it with the word of Christ, and what is subverted by superstition will also be restored by true religion. You have begun the work of Christ beautifully, and it advances extraordinarily through the grace of God; you will continue fearlessly in hope of the promise of God. They who desire the advancement of the glory of Christ pray to the Lord for you and for your kingdom, and they rejoice for the gifts given by the Lord for those who labor therein.”*

This is especially remarkable, of course, in light of how little the Reformation was advancing under Henry at this point...in fact, this same year he began taking steps to actively repress it, and made denial of transubstantiation a capital offence.

*my own translation

Making Sense of the Usury Prohibition

2010-05-20T22:42:00.001+01:00

A friend asked me recently to share some of my thoughts on usury--the meaning of the OT prohibitions, their validity in the NT, and their applicability in the modern world. As usual, my thoughts turned out to be rather wordy, so I decided it was worth exploring them in a two- or three-part blog series.

So, what was the original purpose of the ban on usury in the Old Testament?

I do not buy the idea that the ban on usury was simply on charitable loans, that commercial loans of any sort were not envisioned, because they weren't relevant in that sort of economy. On this reading, they were relevant in the economy of trading with non-Israelites, and that was why the law in Deuteronomy permitted them to charge interest to aliens. From the reading I have done, it seems the main function of loans in the ANE economy at the time the usury laws were given was to finance farmers--either simply to buy seed to plant extra crops for the next year, or to expand their fields to increase their production; a hefty portion of the crop's yield was then usually demanded as interest. Now, this means that such loans fell somewhere along a spectrum between commercial and charitable. For the very small subsistence farmer, who was so poor he hadn't been able to save any of his seed from the year before, and had to take out a loan to buy seed to plant a crop for the coming year, the loan would have much of the character of a charitable loan. For a more well-off farmer, who was looking for an opportunity to rapidly boost his production, such loans would have been basically commercial loans. Clearly there was then a significant place in even a rather agrarian economy like ancient Israel for productive commercial lending. So I don't buy the idea that the ban was simply not envisioning the possibility of such loans.

Why then would God have wanted to ban usury, even in cases when it wasn't straightforwardly exploiting a brother? Three reasons, it seems to me. First, because even prudent commercial loans, for clearly profitable enterprises, can quickly become enslaving. Human nature being what it is, people tend to grasp for more than is wise, overconfident in their abilities, and so a borrower will borrow a little more than he can really afford at a higher rate than he can really afford, and will soon find himself and his farm at the mercy of his creditors; this would be particularly so in an agrarian economy where so much one's production depended on factors outside one's control. The instability and unhealthy dependency that widespread credit introduces into an economy can be readily seen in our current financial crisis. God wanted his people to be free, and such freedom would quickly be endangered if for-profit lending was allowed a large foothold in their economy.

Second, because credit-driven production requires aggressive expansion. To make an interest-paying loan worthwhile, you have to use it to expand your business and boost your production at a higher rate than the rate of interest; and of course, credit enables you to expand much faster than you would otherwise be able to do. Of course, this is why credit is viewed as so wonderful and absolutely necessary in the modern economy--we are told that it is the only way in which we could generate as much economic growth as we have seen in the past couple centuries, and this is the way we're going to overcome poverty. But of course, the problem is that credit-driven growth does not end poverty, because it increases inequality, at least, it certainly does in an economy like ancient Israel, where, with a limited amount of land to go around, and most of the economy dependent on the land, the only way for a borrower to expand his enterprise is to dispossess other smaller producers. And then, of course, once he has expanded his enterprise so that he is much larger than nearby producers, he can command a much lower rate of interest than smaller borrowers, and so is able to continually strengthen his position relative to them. In short, interest-bearing credit helps to consolidate larger and larger slices of the pie in certain hands at the expense of others.

Third, because usurious credit reduces the need for cooperation and interdependence, since its absence would have to be filled either by interest-free loans or capital investments. Interest-free loans would be more likely to establish brotherly relationships among Israelites, instead of the master-slave relationships that usurious credit would tend to engender. If such loans were not forthcoming, then an Israelite wanting to embark on a risky business enterprise would need to solicit cooperative investment from fellow Israelites, who would share both the risk and the profits of the venture with him, instead of having a low-risk claim on his assets should he fail, as the creditor would. This would mean a greater likelihood that Israelite society would be characterized by relationships of cooperation and interdependence.

The chief rationales for banning usury then, it seems to me, are just the same as that for the seven-year debt cancellation and the Jubilee law: to maintain a well-distributed possession of the land and its produce, in which each family maintained its patrimony; without these policies, there would have been a tendency over time for the land ownership to become gradually consolidated in wealthier hands, while more and more Israelites would become landless serfs. With these policies, the people of God would be more likely to be free, equal, and interdependent.

Why then were they allowed to lend to foreigners? The answer seems simple enough, if the problem with usury was not so much that there was something inherently unjust about charging it, but rather that its regular practice would have baleful implications for the economy of God's people. Since the economies of the foreigners already operated on usury, with the inequalities and difficulties this created, then for the Israelites to lend to them would not have any serious effects on them, and such lending would presumably have remained a relatively small part of the Israelite economy--clearly, the law was not designed for the kind of permanent Diaspora that made money-lending the core of the Jewish economy for two millenia.

Truth-Free Markets

2010-05-20T14:13:00.002+01:00

May 20, 2010
Virgin screwed us, again. I speak of Virgin Media, of course, as any UK reader might guess. Having suffered under their hidden fees, overpriced services, and wretched customer service for nine months, and having heard from others about similar experiences, we knew they were likely to. And that’s why we wanted out; so we made all the arrangements, prepared to switch to a new provider, only to find that Virgin had, without our knowledge, swindled us into an eight-month contract extension, to which we were now bound. All this despite dedicated research and fine-print reading before we signed up, and ceaseless vigilance afterward (trust me, this is going somewhere--this isn’t just a rant...or, it may be a rant, but it's a thoughtful one).

Our experience, it seems, is fairly typical. When we were looking into switching, I found that the company we were planning on switching to was way cheaper than Virgin, so I figured there must be a dark side. So I researched and found they had received 3.1 out of 5 stars from online reviewers. Ew, I thought, that’s not very positive. So I looked at Virgin. 1.4 out of 5 stars. The third-largest broadband provider in the UK has a 1.4-star rating (and overpriced services!). What about the largest provider, Talk-Talk? 1.3 stars. How can this be? If these companies are so hated by their customers, how could they be so successful? Surely no one should be able to capture 30% of the UK market share with a 1.3-star rating from existing customers? Didn’t we all learn in our economics textbooks about how competition will destroy all the companies that provide poor products at bad prices, and that the great companies, that make their customers happy, will automatically rise to the top? Why isn’t that happening? Is there some government monopoly? No, this was a free competitive marketplace. Why doesn’t competition work?

Everyone must know by now, deep down, that the fairy tale about free markets and competition isn’t true, but for some reason, one still hears it touted all the time. The marketing pitch for free markets claims that all you need is a free arena for different providers of goods and services to compete to offer consumers the best product at the best price, and then customers will flock to whoever is offering the best product at the best price, and the providers of inferior products will have to give up or improve. Competition, in this fairy tale, is all about seeing who can best meet the needs of consumers, and the more competition we have, the happier consumers will be. The free market of competition is an automatic mechanism for separating the sheep from the goats--the bad companies will lose customers, and the good companies will gain them.

There’s one problem with this lovely little portrait (well, actually there’s several, but I’m only talking about one right now)--it ignores the reality of marketing. Perhaps this blissful state of affairs existed in someplace long, long ago and far, far, away, but it ceases to operate as soon as marketing enters an economy on any scale. The simple fact of marketing makes a lie out all of the free marketeers’ claims about how completely free and uncoerced consumers are.

Who, in this day and age, is so naive or so arrogant as to claim that they are not manipulated every day by advertising? Manipulation is the name of the game, and when manipulation fails, deception is called upon, and when deception fails, outright cheating is often the weapon of last resort. In a marketing economy, competition is not over who has the best products at the best price, but over who has the best marketing. Whoever has the best marketing strategy, and the most money to push it, wins the competition, even with a markedly inferior product, and whoever has lame marketing, loses, even with a markedly superior product. In fact, one might even go so far as to say that the inferior product usually wins, because it’s the companies who spend less on providing a good product that have more money left to spend on marketing, while the companies that devote their resources to an outstanding product have little left over to market it.

Now don’t get me wrong--I am not meaning to suggest that the market will destroy every producer of quality goods; there are always enough savvy, picky customers to make a niche market for genuinely quality products that get most of their advertising by word-of mouth. But the fact remains that the many sectors of the economy are substantially dominated by companies that can make no claim to providing the best product at the best price, but merely the best (or often, the sleaziest) marketing.

The diehard free-marketeer will reply that, in a free market, consumers should be responsible to learn the truth about what they’re buying, and if they choose to be susceptible to manipulation, that’s their problem. The obvious objection is--how far does this line of reasoning go? Do we apply the same rationale to the case of a young girl who is manipulatively seduced into unwanted sex? But in any case, this is an absurd defence, because all human beings have limited time--it is simply impossible for every working head of household to take the time to thoroughly research the truth about the products he is buying; just as in every other area of life, he has to take some things on trust. And a truly free economy would be one in which the consumer was free to actually trust what merchants and salesmen told him, so that he can make an informed decision without having to have an exhaustive knowledge of his own.

Trust, however, is long gone from our economic life, and we are caught in an unending spiral of ever more hardened cynicism--consumers learning to be more and more distrustful of advertisers and salesmen, and marketing gurus becoming ever more devious and stooping ever lower in their attempts to hook the suspicious shopper. Unfortunately, in this cheerless game of cat and mouse, the marketer generally has the superior resources and determination to win in the end.

The stale rhetoric of “free” vs. “coerced” exchange, it seems, simply does not apply to the seedy realities of our modern markets, if it ever did, since freedom requires truth, and our economic and political life is dominated by a commitment to hiding the truth and hiding from truth.

Putting the Puzzle Pieces Together (VanD Review III.4)

2010-05-17T18:55:00.000+01:00

May 17, 2010

The remainder of chapter 3 consists of three main sections--an assessment of Calvin’s use of natural law, an attempt to neatly connect Calvin’s doctrines of natural law and the two kingdoms so they are complementary and mutually interpretive (this is the heart of VanDrunen’s project), and a very brief assessment of some of Calvin’s contemporaries. Although there is a lot of ground to be covered here, the initial section on the natural law. Perhaps it is just the fact that I am rather less familiar with natural law discussions than two kingdoms discussions, but this section did not seem to raise many red flags for me. The second section raises some serious questions and problems, and will merit a close discussion; while the final section plays too insignificant a role to be worth discussing here.

Calvin has generally been depicted, says VanDrunen, as having a rather negative attitude toward the natural law, often attributed to his voluntarist and nominalist roots. VanD wants to contest this on several counts--first of all, Calvin was not such a thoroughgoing nominalist and voluntarist as often claimed; second, as he has already briefly discussed in the previous chapter, natural law thinking was not at all alien to the nominalist tradition; and third, in any case, Calvin frequently and repeatedly invokes the idea of natural law.

Although, as I just mentioned, I’m no expert on natural law discussions, a recurring weakness seems to me to plague VanD’s discussions of it, both in the previous chapter and here: the discussion always remains very vague. Many different ideas of natural law have be put forward, and many different doctrines of to what extent we can grasp it, what relationship it has to the law of grace or evangelical law, etc. It is far from a univocal term. And of course, VanD does not entirely ignore these variations and complexities, but it does often feel that he is just saying, “See, Aquinas believed in natural law, and so did Ockham, and so did Luther, and so did Calvin. So there!” So what?

In any case, what do we learn in these pages? Well, for Calvin, human beings knew God in two ways, as Creator and Redeemer, and the former could be known via nature (99). Natural law, we are told, is “related to this general knowledge of God in creation” and has been implanted in human hearts (100). Natural law for Calvin was closely connected to the idea of conscience, by which we naturally know right and wrong (101-2). Indeed, in some ways, suggests VanD, Calvin’s notion of the role of the natural law was stronger than Aquinas’s, since while for Aquinas most applications of the natural law had to be deduced and applied by conscience, for Calvin the conscience offered us the immediately accessible testimony of the natural law (101-2), and for Calvin, charity was a matter of the natural law, rather than a supernatural virtue (which, it must be said, seems rather bizarre). In a footnote, VanD cites quotes one scholar’s list of some of the “moral questions on which Calvin took natural law to deliver rules of conduct”--rules immediately available to us via the conscience. It is a rather remarkable list, so I will quote it:

“Calvin thought that ‘nature’ or ‘natural sense’ or ‘reason’ teaches the authority of fathers over wives and children, the sanctity of monogamous marriage, the duty to care for families, breast-feeding, primogeniture (albeit with qualifications), the sacrosanctity of envoys and ambassadors, the obligation of promises, degrees of marriage, the need for witnesses in murder trials, the need for a distinction of ranks in society; and natural law prohibits incest, murder, adultery, slavery, and even the rule of one man. And again, nature itself teaches the duty to award honours only to those qualified, respect for the old, equity in commercial dealings, and that religion must be the first concern of governors” (102).

Really? I mean, come on, you’re telling me that all these things can be known by men immediately as deliverances of the natural law? If so, you’re going to have to add the qualification that many men have lost sight of these truths through sin, because the fact is that a number of these “universal truths” were universal only to early-modern Europe, if even there. I shan’t comment more for now, but hold this in mind, because I think this quote will come back to bite VanDrunen before the end of the chapter.

VanDrunen goes on to tell us a few other vaguely interesting but, so far as I can tell, not particularly-to-the-point tidbits comparing Calvin and Aquinas on the relationship of the natural law to the divine character and the divine will, and then VanDrunen turns to briefly consider the side of Calvin that we’re all more familiar with, the side that is deeply skeptical of our ability to know the natural law given the corruption of sin. “Because of this, Calvin insisted that sin makes the natural knowledge of God insufficient and therefore that moral understanding requires a revealed written law” (106). Indeed, “in expositing his very stark view of the effects of sin, he asserts that reason, though not entirely taken away, is a corrupted and shapeless ruin” (107). Again, hold these quotes in mind for the forthcoming section.

Finally, we are offered a brief discussion on “Natural Law, Civil Law, and Mosaic Law in Calvin,” where we are told that Calvin connects these in much the same way as Aquinas, Scotus, Ockham, and Luther--namely, that civil law derives its authority from natural law, of which it is a flexible application to the needs of particular societies. The Mosaic judicial law, then, while providing a model of such application, does not have specific authority for other nations in other times and places.

Now, where is this all leading? Well, VanDrunen wants to propose a way of solving the puzzle posed by Calvin’s sometimes very positive, sometimes very negative assessments of the natural law. How's he going to do that? By putting together the pieces he has painstakingly laid out in this chapter and reading Calvin's statements on the natural law through the filter of Calvin’s Two Kingdoms theology:

“I argue here that Calvin was in fact not inconsistent in speaking as he did. Instead, Calvin ascribed surprisingly positive use of natural law (in the form of various cultural achievements) in his discussions of life in the civil kingdom and consistently negative use for it (in the form of leaving all people inexcusable for their sin) in his discussions of life in the spiritual kingdom. Calvin’s different evaluations of the use of natural law were not the result of intellectual inconsistency but of his view that though natural law permits even pagans to form good laws and produce other social goods in the civil kingdom, it is completely incapable of producing true spiritual good in people for the attainment of heavenly bliss, the realm of the spiritual kingdom” (110)

Huh. Well that is quite interesting. So natural law suffices to tell us how to live our lives here on earth, with other people, and the corruption of sin has not taken this comprehension away from us; all that sin has taken away from us is our ability to perceive God’s redemption in Christ, and to know how to live in relation to Him. Now I have some screaming objections on several levels, but I’ll try to keep this orderly and under control, and just mention two for now. One objection is that, on this portrait, I wonder if sin has taken anything away, because natural law never revealed to us redemption in Christ to begin with. Natural law was always about how to live here on earth, in relation to other people, and if that hasn’t been taken away by sin at all, what has? A second objection is that, while I’m no Calvin expert, this doesn’t seem to do justice to even the meager bits that VanD has cited, like the bit about sin leaving our reason a “corrupted and shapeless ruin”--so a corrupted and shapeless ruin is able to “form good laws and produce other social goods in the civil kingdom”? Hm.

VanD is going to tell us more, so let’s wait and hear him out. The key discussion, we are told, comes in Institutes II.2.12-15, where Calvin believes that reason was “weakened and corrupted in part, but not totally destroyed” (111), and goes on to specify this corruption in light of a distinction between “earthly things” and “heavenly things,” that is to say, the two kingdoms. “In regard to earthly things, sinful human reason continues to operate at a basic level and enables the human race to maintain a degree of civil order and at times to discover and achieve great things” (111-12), while with regard to heavenly things, the natural man is completely blind.

VanDrunen summarizes man’s remaining abilities regarding earthly things:

“The fact that ‘no man is devoid of the light of reason’ is proven by the continuing natural instinct to be a social animal and the primary ideas of justice that express themselves in all human societies. The accomplishments of sinful human beings in the ‘manual and liberal arts’ display ‘the fact of an universal reason and intelligence naturally implanted.’ The works of pagan authors, the enactments of ancient lawgivers, and the various accomplishments of the philosophers, rhetoricians, physicians, and mathematicians all remind ‘how many gifts the Lord has left in possession of human nature’ and warn against rejecting the truth wherever it appears” (112).

Now, let’s cross-examine this a bit. I am perfectly happy to admit that, by virtue of our created faculties of body and mind, we are able, whatever the effects of sin, to grasp a great deal in the way of purely intellectual truths and to gain many practical skills and arts. Anyone is willing to grant this, even the most hardened Van Tillian. It is when we come to the questions of how we ought to use these skills and this knowledge, that is, moral questions, that we run into trouble, for our moral sensibilities have been grievously impaired by sin. And after all, this is what the natural law is mainly about, as VanD himself has said at points--the moral law. So I must ask whether man, operating solely by means of the natural law, can discern rightly how he ought to act toward others. Earlier, VanDrunen said he could not--remember “Because of this, Calvin insisted that sin makes the natural knowledge of God insufficient and therefore that moral understanding requires a revealed written law” (106). But here, VanDrunen suggests the opposite answer in Calvin--fallen man comprehends ”the primary ideas of justice that express themselves in all human societies.”

And indeed, when you look at the relevant passage in the Institutes, the claim is rather strong:

“Since man is by nature a social animal, he is disposed, from natural instinct, to cherish and preserve society; and accordingly we see that the minds of all men have impressions of civil order and honesty. Hence it is that every individual understands how human societies must be regulated by laws, and also is able to comprehend the principles of those laws. Hence the universal agreement in regard to such subjects, both among nations and individuals, the seeds of them being implanted in the breasts of all without a teacher or lawgiver.”

But is there such universal agreement? Perhaps Calvin could make that claim, being familiar only with the nations of Christendom and, before them, with a somewhat rose-colored portrait of Greece and Rome. With our current knowledge of the variety of the world’s cultures throughout history, few would make such a claim. Sure, most societies have agreed that there must be some principles of law and order, but there has been rather little agreement as to what those principles might be. To pick a few random examples, compare sub-Saharan African tribes, the Aztecs, Genghis Khan’s Mongols, and the Samurais. This problem becomes much more pressing when we consider the quote above, where we were told that things like natural reason teaches such things as the authority of husbands over wives, monogamy, the right of primogeniture, the need for ranks in society, the evilness of slavery, and need for a plurality of political rulers. It’s easy to think of a host of societies, ancient and modern, that have not recognized these deliverances of reason. Now remember, this is not to contend that they are not in fact taught by natural reason (even though I would contend that on a number of the points), but that, if they are, natural reason is clearly sufficiently distorted by sin that many people have failed to grasp these moral and social requirements. So, to VanDrunen I would say, “Sure, awareness of the natural law often (though far from always) allows for some modicum of peace, prosperity, and even justice in the civil kingdom (as Augustine recognized), but it’s usually a pretty meagre modicum (as Augustine recognized) and it clearly needs to be supplemented; it clearly needs to be redeemed in light of the Gospel.” And of course, that’s precisely what VanDrunen says the civil kingdom is not--redeemed.

I should note briefly that VanDrunen’s discussion at this point seems to be dogged by over-intellectualism--e.g., “[Calvin] denied that natural law could ever give knowledge of salvation in the heavenly kingdom, even while he affirmed that it provided true and useful knowledge of mundane things in the civil kingdom” (113). The focus keeps coming back to "knowledge." When you put things this way, what VanD is saying seems to make sense-- “Oh yeah,” you reason to yourself, “it sure is true that unbelievers are able to figure out all kinds of great things about astronomy and physics, and about history...all sorts of useful knowledge for getting along in the world. But it’s pretty clear that they couldn’t know Christian doctrines like the resurrection or the Trinity without revelation and grace.” But this is a rather distorted way of looking at it. If we put it more in terms of moral understanding and praxis, I think it would become clear rather quickly that, without grace, man gets along pretty wretchedly indeed, and that, with grace, his life in both the “spiritual kingdom” [whatever exactly that is] and the civil kingdom are dramatically transformed.

It’s also worth noting briefly in passing that essentially what VanDrunen seems to have discovered in Calvin (or read into him; I’m not enough of an expert to make a firm judgment, though I do note that VanD has been rather selective in his quotations) is the sort of nature/grace dualism that was falsely read into Aquinas, and that modern Thomists have been aggressively reading out of him--namely, the so-called “two-tier” model of reality. Nature provides the bottom storey, complete in itself for all of man’s natural needs of taking care of himself and living in society, and learning about the world around him, etc.; and Grace provides the separate top storey, taking care of man’s “spiritual needs” and teaching him how to live in relation to God. A common problem with this way of thinking is that it seems generally to leave us with a very unsocial gospel, because all that seems to be left for the realm of grace is man-to-God relationships. If the realm of grace transformed man-to-man relationships, then it would be intruding on the proper province of the realm of nature, implying that the realm of nature was not in fact sufficient in itself to govern man’s social relations. We saw this sort of tension in VanDrunen’s admission that marriage, while clearly a civil institution, obviously was the concern of the spiritual kingdom as well.

Let’s wrap this up, though. VanD summarizes,

“An earlier part of this chapter discussed the distinction between the civil and spiritual kingdoms in terms of the distinction between God’s non-redemptive work of creation and preservation and his work of redemption. Another part of this chapter portrayed Calvin’s association of natural law with creation and preservation (particularly through God’s inscribing the law on the heart and sustaining the testimony of conscience). This meant, for Calvin, that God gave natural law as part of his creating work and not as part of his redeeming work. Hence, Calvin was quite coherent in recognizing natural law as the standard of life in the civil kingdom, where God rules but not in a redemptive manner, but not as the standard for the spiritual kingdom, which is the realm of God’s redemptive activity” (113).

Now, the key problem with this (aside from the fact that Calvin did not recognize natural law as “the standard of life in the civil kingdom,” but as a standard, to which the Bible should be added as an additional standard, a fact that VanDrunen actually admits in the paragraph right above the quote here), is the continued equivocation about “redemption.” The fact that the civil kingdom and the natural law are products of God’s creating work and are neither products or tools of his redeeming work does not mean that they are outside “the realm of God’s redemptive activity.” If they are fallen, then they need to be redeemed, right? VanDrunen avoids this straightforward question with his ambiguous “God does not rule them in a redemptive manner.” And, on a related but bigger note, I think there’s all kinds of theological problem with this sharp separation of God’s “creating work” and his “redeeming work”--as if the latter was not intended to bring the former to completion! I don’t think VanDrunen thinks it was, but if not, then this discussion is not about little issues in political theology, but is about the very heart of Christian theology.

There, closing on a dramatic, alarmist note like that can perhaps offer some justification for my incredible wordiness in reviewing this chapter. Note that I will omit discussing VanD’s piddling three pages on Calvin’s contemporaries. I noted at the beginning of this chapter than neither Vermigli or Bucer had a two kingdoms doctrine that was much like Calvin’s, and certainly neither was anything like what VanDrunen wants to recover. Time permitting, I hope to, some time in the next few weeks, give a decent-sized post to Vermigli, Bullinger, and Bucer each, looking at their “two kingdoms” doctrines, or lack thereof. (But time may well not permit.)

Loose the Bonds of Wickedness

2010-05-17T14:28:00.000+01:00

May 17, 2010
Yesterday, my friend Byron preached a fantastic sermon on Isaiah 58, a remarkable passage that I was startled to find that I didn’t remember ever noticing it or having heard it before. Just goes to show how rarely we are ever led to consider those passages that smack of liberation theology. This passage is particularly challenging in its rejection of the “worship first, justice later” paradigm that is so prevalent in our circles, as it is unsettling to note that the worship being condemned is genuine heartfelt worship, not hypocrisy or empty show. The passage was so striking, I thought I would post verses 1-11 here:

1 “Cry aloud, spare not;
      Lift up your voice like a trumpet;
      Tell My people their transgression,
      And the house of Jacob their sins.
       2 Yet they seek Me daily,
      And delight to know My ways,
      As a nation that did righteousness,
      And did not forsake the ordinance of their God.
      They ask of Me the ordinances of justice;
      They take delight in approaching God.
       3 ‘ Why have we fasted,’ they say, ‘and You have not seen?
      Why have we afflicted our souls, and You take no notice?’
      “ In fact, in the day of your fast you find pleasure,
      And exploit all your laborers.
       4 Indeed you fast for strife and debate,
      And to strike with the fist of wickedness.
      You will not fast as you do this day,
      To make your voice heard on high.
       5 Is it a fast that I have chosen,
      A day for a man to afflict his soul?
      Is it to bow down his head like a bulrush,
      And to spread out sackcloth and ashes?
      Would you call this a fast,
      And an acceptable day to the LORD?
       6 “ Is this not the fast that I have chosen:
      To loose the bonds of wickedness,
      To undo the heavy burdens,
      To let the oppressed go free,
      And that you break every yoke?
       7 Is it not to share your bread with the hungry,
      And that you bring to your house the poor who are cast out;
      When you see the naked, that you cover him,
      And not hide yourself from your own flesh?
       8 Then your light shall break forth like the morning,
      Your healing shall spring forth speedily,
      And your righteousness shall go before you;
      The glory of the LORD shall be your rear guard.
       9 Then you shall call, and the LORD will answer;
      You shall cry, and He will say, ‘Here I am.’
      “ If you take away the yoke from your midst,
      The pointing of the finger, and speaking wickedness,
       10 If you extend your soul to the hungry
      And satisfy the afflicted soul,
      Then your light shall dawn in the darkness,
      And your darkness shall be as the noonday.
       11 The LORD will guide you continually,
      And satisfy your soul in drought,
      And strengthen your bones;
      You shall be like a watered garden,
      And like a spring of water, whose waters do not fail.
       12 Those from among you
      Shall build the old waste places;
      You shall raise up the foundations of many generations;
      And you shall be called the Repairer of the Breach,
      The Restorer of Streets to Dwell In.”

Kierkegaard in a Nutshell: Offense, no Defense

2010-05-16T15:58:00.000+01:00

May 16, 2010

In the midst of his profound and powerful discussion of “Our Duty to Remain in Love’s Debt” in Works of Love, Kierkegaard gets carried away, as he is wont to do, and goes on a tangent. All his tangents are good, but this one was a rare gem, since in it, he expresses as clearly, concisely, and compellingly as I have ever seen him do, the fundamental message of all of his work. When I read this, I couldn’t help thinking of Hauerwas, and wondering why it was that I had never mentally connected these two before. But I’ll let Kierkegaard speak for himself here, and let you make your own connections.

“When Christianity came into the world, it did not itself need to point out (even though it did do so) that it was an offense, because the world, which took offense, certainly discovered this easily enough. But now, now when the world has become Christian, now Christianity above all must itself pay attention to the offense. Therefore if it is true that many ‘Christians’ in these times miss out on Christianity, how does it happen except through their missing out on the possibility of offense, this, note well, terrifying thing! No wonder, then, that Chrsitianity, its salvation and its tasks, can no longer satisfy ‘the Christians’--indeed, they could not even be offended by it.
“When Christianity came into the world, it did not itself need to point out (even though it did do so) that it was contending with human reason, because the world discovered this easily enough. But now, now when Christianity for centuries has lived in protracted association with human reason, now when a fallen Christianity (just like those fallen angels who married mortal women) has married human reason, now when Christianity and reason have a familiar relationship--now Christianity must above all itself pay attention to the obstacle. If Christianity is to be preached out of the enchantment of illusion and deformed transmogrification (alas, it is like the fairy tale about the castle enchanted for a hundred years), then first of all the possibility of offense must be thoroughly preached back to life again. Only the possibility of offense (the antidote to the sleeping potion of apologetics) is able to rouse the one who has fallen asleep, is able to revoke the enchantment so that Christianity is itself again.

“If, then, Holy Scripture says, ‘Woe to the one by whom the offense comes,’ we have the confidence to say: Woe to the one who first hit upon the idea of preaching Christianity without the possibility of offense. Woe to the one who ingratiatingly, panderingly, commendingly, convincingly preached to people some unmanly something that was supposed to be Christianity! Woe to the one who could make the miracle comprehensible or at least open up to us bright prospects of its imminent accomplishment! Woe to the one who betrayed and broke the secret of faith and perverted it into public wisdom because he took away the possibility of offense! Woe to the one who could comprehend the secret of the Atonement without perceiving anything of the possibility of offense, and once again woe to him for thinking that thereby he would do God and Christianity a service. Woe to all those unfaithful stewards who sat down and wrote false IOUs and in that way gained friends for Christianity and themselves when they deducted from Christianity the possibility of offense and added to it follies by the hundreds!

“Oh, what lamentably wasted learning and acumen! What lamentably wasted time in this enormous work of defending Christianity! Truly, if Christianity will just again rise up formidable with the possibility of offense so this horror can again startle people--then Christianity will need no defense. On the other hand, the more learned, the better the defense, the more Christianity is distorted, abolished, deprived of its powers like a eunuch. The defense simply out of kindness wants to remove the possibility of offense. But Christianity must not be defended. It is the people who must see to it whether they are able to defend themselves and justify to themselves what they choose when Christianity terrifyingly, as it once did, offers them the choice and terrifyingly compels them to choose: either to be offended or to accept Christianity. Therefore, take away from the essentially Christian the possibility of offense, or take away from the forgiveness of sins the battle of the anguished conscience, .... and then close the churches, the sooner the better, or turn them into places of amusement that stand open all day!”

From the looks of post-Christian Europe today, these final lines have been sadly prophetic.

Leithart on Natural Law

2010-05-16T14:39:00.000+01:00

May 16, 2010

Check out this post from Peter Leithart for a fantastic discussion of J. Budziszewski’s The Line Through the Heart: Natural Law as Fact, Theory, and Sign of Contradiction, a book that I have promptly put on my Amazon wish list. Leithart calls it “about the best and most accessible defenses of natural law one could hope for,” but still has reservations:

The universe has, I agree, a grain, a design given it by the Triune Creator, and we are to live in accord with that grain. But we discern that grain not from “unaided reason” (J. Bud hedges with “so-called unaided reason”) but in the light of Christ, by the Spirit, through the spectacles of Scripture. When we have the mind of Christ, we see how the world is to be, and how humans are to live, and we learn in turn that the world is not as it should be. To put it more strongly, provocatively: There is nothing bigger, more basic, more universal than Christ the Lord, the One by whom all things were made, the One in whom all things cohere. Christ must be given epistemological priority, and natural law theories, even of the best varieties, don’t honor that priority.

Waffling Gnosticism (VanDrunen Review III.3)

2010-05-15T14:06:00.000+01:00

May 15, 2010

Alright, it’s time to move this review along...I’m supposed to have read and reviewed up through chapter 6 by now, but I’m still wading through chapter 3. So I’ll try to step lightly through the rest of the chapter, and only zero in on the parts that really need it. You may recall that VanD had listed “three important attributes of each kingdom that display the contrast of one with the other. The three attributes of the kingdom of Christ are its redemptive character, its spiritual or heavenly identity, and its present institutional expression in the church. The three attributes of the civil kingdom are its non-redemptive character, its external or earthly identity, and its present (though not exclusive) expression in civil government.” So let’s look at the second one.

We are told that for Calvin, the spiritual kingdom has to do with “the life of the soul” and “superior objects” while the civil has to do with “matters of the present life” or “external conduct” and “inferior objects” (75). Calvin elaborates thus: “By earthly things, I mean those which relate not to God and his kingdom, to true righteousness and future blessedness, but have some connection with the present life, and are in a manner confined within its boundaries. By heavenly things, I mean the pure knowledge of God, the method of true righteousness, and the mysteries of the heavenly kingdom” (76-77). Is Calvin trying to tell us here that affairs of this present life have nothing to do with God and his kingdom, a kingdom that pertains only to “pure knowledge” and “heavenly mysteries”? At this point, I scribbled frantically in the margin, “Mayday! Mayday! Gnosticism unchecked!” Now this is one of those points where I cannot much fault VanD for his historical work, but I have to protest on theological grounds. Sure, Calvin said stuff like this, but why would any of us want to follow him in it? Liberal theology in the last century has given us all kinds of problems and heresies, but one blessing it has surely given us is the firm and widespread conviction that our faith is a faith for this life, a faith meant to transform our present world, and the realization that we need to repent of many centuries of various forms of Gnosticism. VanDrunen goes on to extensively quote “a series of rather moving passages” in which “Calvin lifts his readers’ eyes away from present earthly existence toward a future, heavenly life” (77). These passages were “moving” all right, as they moved me very quickly to wrath and to wish that I could just take VanDrunen and stick him in solitary confinement with a copy of Surprised by Hope for about a year, and hope that he emerged from it a changed man.

I should perhaps clarify at this point that, although Calvin’s contrast between “this present life” and the kingdom of God leave me sputtering, I have no problem in principle with articulating a distinction between, say, “the kingdom of this present age” and “the kingdom of the age to come.” This kind of temporal contrast has a strong historical pedigree in the Christian tradition and is clearly found in the New Testament. But the key thing to understand about this distinction is that according to the Gospel (and this is what makes our gospel so wonderful) the age to come has already broken into the present age and started transforming it. So while the kingdom of Christ is certainly not of this present life in the sense that it derives from, and subsists in this present life, it is certainly of this present life in the sense that it comes to and pertains to this present life. We can see this same misuse of of in the way that VanDrunen and Calvin contrast the spirit and the body. Of course we are told in Scripture that the things of Christ are of the Spirit, not of the flesh; but in Scripture, this clearly means that they do not derive from the flesh, not that they do not pertain to the flesh. VanDrunen needs to be more precise with his language here.

Come to think of it, the same sort of problem plagued the previous section, where VanD contrasted the “redemptive” character of the heavenly kingdom and the “non-redemptive” character of the civil kingdom. Well, of course the civil kingdom is not “redemptive” in the sense that it does not redeem. But this is not the same thing as saying it is not redeemed. It is not the source of redemption, but it is surely the object of redemption. Somehow VanDrunen completely elides this distinction between subject and object, and moves seamlessly between talking about how the civil kingdom is not “redemptive” to talking about how it is unaffected by redemption. I am not convinced that Calvin was so careless on this point.

The third difference between the two kingdoms consists in the insitutional contrast between church and civil government. Now here, I think, a methodological difficulty that has been plaguing VanD all along rises to the surface, the product of the uncomfortable marriage he has tried to force between the Augustinian “two cities” and the Gelasian “two swords.” The difficulty is this: is the contrast between the two kingdoms the same as the contrast between church and state, or is it a contrast between “earthly” and “heavenly,” “physical” and “spiritual”? VanD seems to want to have his cake and eat it too, and this, I think, simply will not do, unless you want a totalitarian doctrine of the State. Let me attempt to explain.

If you want to develop a strong contrast between the work of the state and the work of the Church, then you have a potentially coherent and workable model, though one that has, to be sure, been fraught with tension for two millenia. There are a number of different ways to draw the lines between the two: you could draw it in terms of different tools, so that both the Church and the State pursue the good, but one uses coercive tools, while the other uses spiritual and charitable tools; or you could draw it in terms of the extent of their moral reach, so that the State is responsible merely for restraining vice, while the Church is responsible for cultivating virtue; or you could try to draw up spheres, so that the state handles certain functions in society, the church handles others, and presumably, other institutions handle still other functions. Now, each of these proposals runs into its own difficulties and ambiguities, but all are at least basically coherent and have been practiced with some measure of success. If you want to draw a strong contrast between the Church and civil society, so that the Church pertains to invisible, spiritual matters, affecting the soul and the future life, but not the body and the present life, as VanDrunen just seemed to be doing in the previous section, then you have something that, I suppose, makes sense in theory, though as I’ve said, it doesn’t make sense to me as an articulation of Biblical Christianity. But it’s important to realize that these are not the same distinctions. Historically, arguments over the relationship between Church and State presupposed that these two occupied basically the same plane--human society--and that they had to figure out how they interacted on that plane. Suggesting that the Church does not occupy the plane of human society at all (as VanD has just been doing) is a different proposition altogether. The only way in which these two distinctions can be basically the same is if you assume that the realm of civil society is coterminous with the realm of the State, if you assume that civil authority exercises its sway over the entire sweep of human social and cultural life. Now somehow I don’t think that VanDrunen, as an American conservative, really wants to do this.

And so it is that in this section, we keep seeing this odd waffliness: “A third and final point of contrast between the spiritual and civil kingdoms for Calvin is the former’s institutional expression in the church and the latter’s expression in a broad range of cultural endeavors, especially (and institutionally) in civil government” (79). What exactly is this “especially (and institutionally)”? We are told that Calvin “includes in this category [of the civil kingdom] ‘matters of policy and economy, all mechanical arts and liberal studies.‘ It would seem fair, therefore, to conclude that Calvin saw the range of (non-ecclesiastical) cultural endeavors as constituting the civil kingdom. But within this broad conception Calvin also accorded a particularly important place to civil government and its laws” (80). He then summarizes what he sees as Calvin’s “basic identification of the spiritual and civil kingdoms with the church and civil government” and then discusses the Church-state relationship in Calvin for a couple pages. This is all just too vague. You can’t just say that the civil kingdom includes, essentially, all “cultural endeavors” and then say that the civil kingdom is civil government, unless you want to say that all cultural endeavors fall under the legitimate (and exclusive?) purview of the civil government. Now, admittedly, some of the Reformers did seem to make this elision, as we see, for example, in the extremely wide-ranging responsibilities Bucer gives to the prince in De Regno Christi, but, judging from the political rhetoric of the Religious Right in America (of which the Reformed have generally comprised the most libertarian wing) I can’t see American Calvinists being willing to go this route. So I’d like to see a little intellectual honesty here--if you’re going to equate civil society with civil government, then embrace the political consequences.

In the following pages, VanD turns to address the vexing problem of the seeming disconnect between Calvin’s actual practice in Geneva (and of many remarks in his writings outside of Institutes III.19 and IV.20) and the clear two kingdoms doctrine he has just discerned. I already discussed a bit some of the methodological problems that make this such an issue for VanDrunen, so I won’t rehash them at length here.

VanD begins by reminding us that Calvin lived in an age of Christendom, so you can’t really expect him to have developed the modern secular society that his theology seems to demand. We are then given a couple pages on the ways in which the civil authorities in Geneva were involved in religious affairs (e.g., the burning of Servetus) and the ways in which the religious authorities were involved in civil affairs. Regarding the latter, for instance, “the Consistory’s range of concerns included general education and medical care and, according to Witte and Kingdon, especially sex, marriage, and family, but also in later years ‘business practices and disrespect for the leaders of government and church.’” (84) Now, for me, it’s hard to imagine how these sorts of things would not be concerns of the church, but I suppose that if you’ve said that the Church has nothing to do with “external conduct” this would seem to be something of an inconsistency. VanDrunen, being an honest scholar, then admits that this is not simply a disconnect between theory and practice, because Calvin seems to endorse such mutual meddling in his writings, including the Institutes, e.g., when (in IV.20 no less!), “Calvin writes that among the duties of civil government are ‘to foster and maintain the external worship of God, to defend sound doctrine and the condition of the Church,’” etc. (86)

VanD then embarks to determine just how inconsistent Calvin is, and begins by saying that two points can be raised in defense of his consistency on the church’s meddling in civil affairs: “First, Calvin frequently reminds the church, even when assigning such affairs to it, that it does not have civil jurisdiction or the power to coerce through the sword. Second, most of the civil affairs which Calvin made answerable to the Consistory can be said to have a spiritual dimension. Certainly the issues of marriage and family that took up so much of the Consistory’s attention are matters that, while clearly civil, also implicate the spiritual condition of people and thus are of rightful concern to their pastors and elders. Broadly, one might say that since people can fall into any sin in any are of life, no area of life can be completely slotted as civil and not at all as spiritual” (87).

Now, I pause to quote this whole paragraph because I think that’s it’s jolly fun that, in the course of trying to defend Calvin’s consistency here, he actually does a beautiful job of red-flagging some of the key inconsistencies. On the first point, the difficulty is that VanDrunen has all of a sudden shifted the ground of the distinction between the two kingdoms--now the distinction lies not in the content of the two kingdoms, but, in much more Gelasian (or Bucerian) fashion, in their means--one rules civil affairs coercively, the other non-coercively. But this is much more “two swords” than it is “two kingdoms,” and is not at all consistent with the kind of dichotomies VanD was tracing in Calvin just a few pages ago. On the second point, VanDrunen has made a very important and true statement--“no area of life can be completely slotted as civil and not at all as spiritual,” but at the cost of essentially renouncing everything he tried to establish on the previous pages, and granting a key neo-Calvinist premise.

On the next page, he offers some defenses of Calvin’s consistency on issues of the state meddling in religious affairs. We are told, for instance, that Calvin “is clear in entrusting to the state concern for the ‘external worship of God,’ a ‘public form of religion,’ the ‘open’ violation of God’s law, and ‘public blasphemy.’ This gives some plausibility to characterizing the magistrate’s activities even here as civil rather than spiritual, given Calvin’s contrast of the two kingdoms in terms of the external and the internal” (88). This achieves “consistency” at the cost of revealing how unhelpful the external/internal distinction was to begin with, and at the cost of making Calvin unserviceable to VanDrunen’s project, since I am quite sure that the kind of two kingdoms theory VanD wants us to embrace is not one in which the civil authority is in charge of all outward manifestations of religion.

In the end, though VanDrunen admits (with an almost audible sigh) that to some extent, Calvin really was inconsistent, and we have to remember that he was a man of his times. The problem of course is that VanD seems to want to treat one position--a sharp two-kingdoms dichotomy--as Calvin’s “real” position, and the other--close cooperation between the two kingdoms--as an inconsistent alien element that shows him to be a product of his times. By what right can VanDrunen single out the two kingdoms doctrine as Calvin’s “real” teaching? Couldn’t someone just as well argue that Calvin’s real position was one of close cooperation between church and state and that the bits of sharp dichotomy you see in passages of the Institutes are alien elements that come from overstated polemical concerns? That would be just as historically compelling, or perhaps more so.

VanD closes this section by relating Calvin’s version of Two Kingdoms doctrine to the various forms we have looked at before. Like Luther, he has a strong Augustinian doctrine of antithesis between believer and unbeliever and yet commonality amid the antithesis, and he has Gelasian emphasis on the positive institutional legitimacy of the state. Unlike Luther, however, he allowed the use of the sword in religious affairs, and he did not view the law/gospel distinction as coterminous with the two kingdoms distinction--there was a place for the law in the Church. Indeed, on the whole, says VanDrunen, taking Calvin’s practice into account, his model has a fair dose of Gelasian two-swords theory, mixed with his Lutheran two-kingdoms theory. VanDrunen summarizes the unresolved dilemma: “The point of particular tension here is the matter of commonality. Is the civil realm one that Christians and non-Christians share in common in the present age, as Luther’s two kingdoms theology held, following Diognetian and Augustinian lines? Or is the civil realm governed by church and state, albeit in their own ways, according to a vision in which the civil realm is populated, or at least ought properly be populated, by a Christian people, as a Gelasian vision suggests? In other words, is the civil realm ultimately characterized by commonality or Christianity? Though Calvin’s two kingdoms doctrine provides theological ground for affirming the former, in practice the latter prevailed” (93). Unfortunately, as I have argued in this review, this is far from the only unresolved tension in the picture VanDrunen has tried to give us.

This quote concludes VanDrunen’s discussion of Calvin’s two kingdoms doctrine; he moves on to discuss his natural law theory in the next section, and I should be able to tackle that and the remainder of the chapter in one more post.

The Calvinistic Extra-Large with Fries on the Side (VanD Review III.2)

2010-05-13T11:52:00.000+01:00

May 13, 2010

Now, VanDrunen starts out by seeking to relate Calvin to what has gone before, telling us that “Lying behind Calvin’s discussions of the two kingdoms is an Augustinian two cities paradigm...a fundamental antithesis divided Christians from non-Christians” (71). This, however, is not what his two kingdoms are about. “Both of Calvin’s two kingdoms are God’s, but are ruled by him in distinctive ways....Christians are members of both kingdoms during their earthly lives. Calvin perceived a clear difference between these two kingdoms but not a fundamental antithesis” (71). Alright, so what are these two kingdoms? VanDrunen quotes the famous passage from Institutes III.19:

“Let us observe that in man government is twofold: the one spiritual, by which the conscience is trained to piety and divine worship; the other civil, by which the individual is instructed in those duties which, as men and citizens, we are bound to perform....the former species has reference to the life of the soul, while the latter relates to matters of the present life, not only to food and clothing, but to the enacting of laws which require a man to live among his fellows purely, honourably, and modestly. The former has its seat within the soul, the latter only regulates the external conduct. We may call the one the spiritual, the other the civil kingdom” (III.19.15, quoted on 72).

If he were merely drawing a distinction, but not making a separation, then we might deem it a somewhat unhelpful distinction, but I could live with it. But then Calvin goes on to say (and VanDrunen goes on to quote him), “Now these two, as we have divided them, are always to be viewed apart from each other. When the one is considered, we should call off our minds, and not allow them to think of the other. For there exists in man a kind of two worlds, over which different kings and different laws can preside” (ibid).

Now this is the sort of thing that, to my mind, only makes sense when read as a rhetorical overreach for a specific goal. Do we as Christians really want to say that our Christian faith affects only our souls, and that, when considering it, we ought to call off our minds from any consideration of external conduct? To suggest that the “life of the soul” is unrelated to “matters of the present life” can only be read, in my mind, as a foolish rhetorical excess or as dangerous Gnosticism. Now, to be fair, VanDrunen much later on expresses some reservations about this language, saying (I will quote him in full): “One question that may be put to Calvin briefly at this point is whether his distinguishing the two kingdoms in terms of things that are ‘external’ and ‘internal’ or that concern the body and the soul accurately captures his intentions in regard to the institutions of church and state. Calvin surely did not mean to suggest that the spiritual kingdom is concerned only about things that are immaterial, since he assigned to the church tasks such as diaconal relief of the poor and administration of the sacraments....one wonders whether this less than precise language contributed to the lack of full consistency between his theology of the two kingdoms and his views on concrete social matters” (91). But, if VanDrunen doesn’t think this is quite the best way of identifying the dividing line between the two realms, I’d like to hear him articulate carefully where the line is, since so much weight is being put on it. What are these “spiritual” things that have nothing to do with civil, temporal things, with matters of everday life? This is no trivial question.

Some light (but little comfort) is provided as VanDrunen lays out “three important attributes of each kingdom that display the contrast of one with the other. The three attributes of the kingdom of Christ are its redemptive character, its spiritual or heavenly identity, and its present institutional expression in the church. The three attributes of the civil kingdom are its non-redemptive character, its external or earthly identity, and its present (though not exclusive) expression in civil government.”

So, first, let’s see what he says about this redemptive/non-redemptive business (hint, it’s pretty wild stuff, and piqued my interest about as piquantly as anything has piqued it all week). VanDrunen wades into this topic via Calvin’s discussion of Christian liberty. To be concise, I’ll just say that VanDrunen points out how Calvin invokes the two kingdoms doctrine in III.19.15 of the Institutes as a way of clarifying how the doctrine of Christian liberty is not supposed to overturn all human authority. He summarizes Calvin’s point thus: “the redemptive doctrine of Christian liberty applies to life in the spiritual kingdom but not to life in the civil kingdom. No human authority can bind the believer’s conscience in regard to participation in the spiritual kingdom of Christ....In the external things of the civil kingdom, in contrast, salvation in Christ does not at all diminish Christians’ obligation to obey magistrates” (74). Now, whether or not VanDrunen is interpreting Calvin rightly here, I have major questions about the attempt to broaden this principle into the dictum: “God rules the spiritual kingdom as its redeemer and the civil kingdom as its creator and sustainer” (74).

I must confess that I just don’t know how to make sense of this kind of statement. I ask, is the civil kingdom not then fallen? Presumably VanDrunen must admit that it is fallen. Then I must ask, is God happy for it to remain fallen? Where there is economic injustice going on, are Christians not to seek to bring redemption and Christ’s love to that situation? Where there is violence and political oppression going on, are Christians not to seek to bring redemption and Christ’s love to that situation? Where falsehood is being taught in schools, are Christians not supposed to bring the light of Christ’s truth there?

I suppose I know how VanDrunen would have to respond here. He would insist that yes, each of these situations must be remedied, but not redeemed. They must be remedied in accord with the natural law, not redeemed by evangelical law. So, where there is economic or political injustice, Christians should join with unbelievers in seeking reform according to the natural laws of equity; Christ’s love is not necessary to fix the problem. Where falsehood is being taught, Christians should appeal to reason to prove the truth, rather than proclaiming special revelation. But this doesn’t seem to do the trick, for at least three reasons. For one, assuming the natural law to be sufficient, is it not true that our ability to grasp it properly has been undermined by sin? We need the light of redemption to be able to see natural law rightly, to make use of it in reforming our fallen world. For another, even if we have perceived natural law rightly, the strength and purity to apply it rightly and steadfastly is impossible without the grace of redemption. Finally, assuming we have perceived and applied the natural law rightly, is this really enough for Christians? If the Gospel reveals to us a justice that is made perfect in mercy and love, are we to be satisfied with a civil kingdom ruled by justice alone, without the perfection of mercy and love? From my reading, it seems to be that many people would be; many Christians would be happy if the “civil kingdom” operated according to sub-Christian standard of justice and morality, while reserving Christian virtues for the Church alone, but I admit I am unable to think that way.

In any case, this way of looking at things is much more problematic if you understand the “civil kingdom” not as “the civil magistrate,” as VanDrunen wants to take it, but to mean “external conduct,” as Calvin puts it. I can’t imagine even VanDrunen wanting to say that “external conduct’ does not belong to God’s work of redemption. But these are big-picture questions about VanDrunen’s whole undertaking, and I’ll lay them aside again for now to attend to his argument in this section, which starts getting really interesting in the next page or two.

VanDrunen asks whether this dualism he has just presented fails to give us a “religiously unified” or “Christological” view of life, as the neo-Calvinists object. He replies that it does not; Calvin gives us a unified Christological account, but one that is cognizant of the “fundamental distinction between God’s non-redemptive work of creation and providence through his Eternal Son and his redemptive work through the incarnate Lord Jesus Christ” (75). “Yes, but these two works are two moments in the life of the same person, the second of which brings the first to completion,” we want to object--but VanDrunen will not let us even get past “Yes, but--” before he has an answer for us--the infamous extra Calvinisticum, or if, you really need a translation, the “Calvinistic extra.” This key point of Reformed Christological doctrine maintained, against the Lutherans, that even when he was on earth, Christ’s divine nature was not confined to his body, but existed “etiam extra carnem (‘even outside of his flesh’).” In other words, even while Christ the God-man was stretched out upon the cross, Christ the divine Son was simultaneously in heaven (or rather, in all places), upholding the heavens and the earth by his power.

Now, having been raised as a good Calvinist, I do believe that this doctrine serves to safeguard certain important points that have to be clung to (which is, after all, what Christology is all about), but I do recognize that it is a rather scary and potentially problematic way of expressing things. It’s like a cross-beam that you have to put into your theological structure to hold it all together, but if you put too much weight on it, the whole thing will collapse. And reading VanDrunen, I understood finally why the Lutherans have always been so uncomfortable about the Calvinistic extra and unwilling to go that route.

Here’s what he says,

“This gives Calvin categories for affirming that the Son of God rules one kingdom in a redemptive manner and the other kingdom in a non-redemptive manner. In his description of Calvin’s social thought, John Bolt helpfully explains: ‘As mediator, the divine Logos is not limited to his incarnate form even after the incarnation. He was mediator of creation prior to his incarnation and as mediator continues to sustain creation independent of his mediatorial work as reconciler of creation in the incarnation, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus of Nazareth.’” (75)

Now this is some pretty scary stuff--it looks like what we have here is the development of a “Christology” that can be abstracted from the concrete man Jesus Christ, in whom alone the Logos has been manifested to us; a gulf is being opened up between the immanent Christ and the economic Christ. Now, the way I learned the extra Calvinisticum, the point was to safeguard the idea that Christ was still fully divine while incarnate, not to drive a permanent wedge between the non-incarnate Christ and the incarnate Christ. And the way I learned theology, the whole point of affirming that the same Christ was both creator and redeemer was to help us understand that redemption was new creation, was the Son’s bringing to fulfilment of the work that he had begun in creation--the Son’s work of redemption was his perfection of his work of creation, and in his redemption lay the revelation to men of his creating and sustaining. But now VanDrunen and Bolt want to tell me that far from comprising a unified work, they are two totally different activities that just happen to be done by the same person, much as I study theology most of the time but also do part-time work for my dad and I’s investment advising firm from time to time. And they want to lay all this on the slender and tender thread of the extra Calvinisticum. Perhaps I’m overreacting, but I found myself having to take some slow deep breaths after this section.

Whatever the case, VanDrunen has stretched his argument well beyond Calvin at this point. While he claims that later Reformed theologians did indeed develop this notion of dual mediation (which is still not necessarily the same thing as the extra Calvinisticum) as a basis for a two kingdoms doctrine, he can say no more of Calvin than that he “laid the groundwork.” And even there, if you look at the footnotes, you find this: “While I suggest here that Calvin’s understanding of the extra Calvinisticum is theologically coherent with and in some sense precedent for the later Reformed doctrine of the two mediatorships of Christ, W.D.J. McKay has argued for an element of discontinuity between Calvin’s understanding of Christ’s kingship over the nations and the understanding of seventeenth-century Reformed thought” (76). In other words, “Actually, it turns out that my whole thesis here may be fundamentally flawed, but let’s just pretend that it isn’t.” Sorry, VanD, I’m not going to let you get away with this one.

Red Tories or Blue Liberals?

2010-05-12T12:17:00.000+01:00

May 12, 2010

Here on the tea-drinking, Marmite-spreading side of the pond, everyone has been in a tizzy for the past few days about the sensational outcome of the General Election last Thursday--no less sensational for having been widely predicted. With the voting public of the UK having developed a thorough contempt of Gordon Brown and Labour’s dismal record of nine years of licking America’s boots, yet unable to forget the deep hostility to the Tories that they contracted in the ‘90s, they found themselves seeking to steer between Scylla and Charybdis. Nick Clegg and his Liberal Democrat party set out to occupy that strategic position between the two monsters, and thought they were poised for a breakthrough election, but failed dismally, winning only 57 of the 650 seats despite 23% of the popular vote. The result, generally anticipated but still quite disconcerting when it happened, was a Hung Parliament, the first in 36 years--meaning that no party had a majority, even though the Conservatives had managed to beat out Labour by a margin of 305 to 258. The options at this point were four: 1) the Tories could form a coalition with the Liberal Democrats to form a solid majority government; 2) Labour could form a coalition with the Lib Dems and a couple other minor parties to form a slight majority government; 3) no coalition would be formed, but Labour would defiantly cling to power until it became too unpopular to continue to do so; 4) no coalition would be formed, but Gordon Brown would resign, and David Cameron, the Tory leader, would become Prime Minister and run a minority government until it became too unpopular to do so.

Clearly option 1 was the most desirable, and yet seemingly quite difficult to achieve, since the Lib Dems and the Tories occupied rather opposite ends of the political spectrum. And so an odd drama played out over the last five days, as both parties grovelled at the feet of Nick Clegg, the Lib Dem leader, despite his terrible showing in the election. Finally, last night, having wrung generous concessions from the Tories (the deputy prime ministership for himself, and five other cabinet positions for the Lib Dems), Nick Clegg threw his lot in with David Cameron, giving the UK its first coalition government since WWII and its youngest prime minister in 198 years.

As someone who has just been reading with interest Philip Blond’s Red Tory [I should clarify to American readers that, everywhere outside the US, “Red” equals left-wing, and “Blue” equals right-wing], I can’t help but be intrigued and excited by this outcome, and disposed to be much less cynical than normal. Does this coalition of Liberal Democrats and Conservatives suggest the possibility of a genuinely Red Tory agenda, the best of both left and right--social conservatism and fiscal responsibility combined with anti-nationalism and anti-corporatism? Or will it mean rather a Blue Liberal agenda, the worst of both worlds that we saw with Labour--market libertarianism and social libertarianism, expensive welfarism co-existing with unprincipled corporatism? Only time will tell. Of course, more likely than either is that the alliance will prove impossible to maintain, and will break down within a year or two.

In any case, however, as an American who is accustomed to the unseemly spectacle of Republicans and Democrats refusing to ever even vote for the same bill, it is an exciting and refreshing prospect to see such historically-opposed parties uniting to actually form a single coalition government! It’s as if McCain had won the election and then invited Al Gore to be his vice president! So, although opportunities for cynicism abound, I insist on seeing the bright side, at least this once.

Counsels of Perfection (Sermon on the Mount, Part II)

2010-05-08T21:49:00.001+01:00

May 8, 2010

In the Middle Ages, a tradition of ethical thought had developed which distinguished between the precepts and the counsels (also known as the counsels of perfection or the evangelical counsels). The former are binding upon all Christians, while the latter, including, for example, chastity and poverty, may be freely embraced by those who wish to attain to a higher level of moral perfection--e.g., those who take monastic vows. This distinction has been canonized as a cornerstone of Catholic moral theology, but it was never undisputed (e.g., the Franciscan poverty controversy of the 13th and 14th centuries), and was rejected wholesale by Protestantism. It was common in medieval thought to apply this distinction to the more troubling commands of the Sermon on the Mount, so that those who desired to become perfect would indeed renounce self-defense and show sacrificial love for their enemies, while ordinary Christians could safely ignore these difficult counsels and apply the criteria of justice to dealing with assailants, robbers, persecutors, etc.

While I am not sufficient with Catholic moral theology to pronounce very much on the deficiencies (and perhaps strengths) of the precepts/counsels distinction, I do think that it is a rather unsatisfactory way of resolving questions about the Sermon on the Mount. This strategy is, you will notice, a variation on the third approach to dealing with the Sermon that I mentioned in my last post--that is, saying that Jesus’ commands only apply to some people, but not to others. While I can see some role for the precepts/counsels distinction in pastorally reassuring Christians that these commands are difficult, and ordinary Christians should not expect to be able to live up to them perfectly, so that perhaps not every failure is sin, the question still remains--should we strive to not resist our enemies, or not? Because, in this case, those following the precepts and those following the counsels cannot get along so easily. It is not as if the counsel-followers are simply doing what the precept-followers are doing, but to a greater extent; rather, they are doing the opposite. Those following Christ’s commands here will act on the premise that it is wrong to fight against attackers or to punish evildoers, while those not following them here will act on the premise that they have a duty to fight against attackers and punish evildoers, and those who refuse to do so are gravely harming society. The property-owners can readily coexist and make common cause with the property-renouncers; the married can readily coexist and make common cause with the chaste; but can the violent do so with the pacifists? Perhaps, but it seems doubtful--the ethical stakes are just too high, since we are talking about the taking and the protecting of human life.

In any case, it is difficult to read the Sermon on the Mount as simply describing a vocation that Christians may choose to adopt--some choose to marry, some not; some choose to be carpenters, some not; some choose to be clergy, some not; some choose to love their enemies, some not. This problem is particularly insistent because of the context: “Don’t be angry at your brother, don’t lust, don’t divorce, don’t retaliate against your enemies.” If the latter is a counsel, not a precept, then what about the others? In short, I don’t think this is a promising route for making sense of these tough bits of the Sermon on the Mount. Perhaps I am just too Protestant to get my head around this distinction, and if there’s any Catholics reading this, I invite you to persuade me.

I raise this medieval distinction in order to direct our attention to the interesting relationship between it, and what gets adopted in Protestantism. We shall see that, although a number of different proposals are put forward by Protestants, one that keeps cropping up, that we will see in Luther and in Calvin, is a tendency to take this horizontal Catholic distinction, and make it vertical. That is, where the Catholics drew the line between the counsels and the precepts through the midst of the Christian community, so that some members lived according to one, and some according to the other, Protestantism showed a disturbing tendency to draw the line through the midst of each Christian believer, so that with one half of my being (my heart, perhaps?), I was to follow the counsels, and with the other half (my body, perhaps?), the precepts. As we shall see, this route proves to be a rather dangerous ethical proposal.

Bad History + Bad Theology = Bad Historical Theology (VanDrunen Review III.1)

2010-05-08T17:50:00.000+01:00

May 8, 2010

Van Drunen’s third chapter, “Reforming Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms: John Calvin and His Contemporaries,” is longer than either of the previous two, considerably denser, and much more important to VanDrunen’s project, and so I am afraid it will take quite a commodious review to do it justice. Before I start, I ought to admit up front that I am going to do something very un-kosher in this review--I am going to take a historian to task on theological grounds. I know, you’re covering your ears with horror at the very suggestion!

Historians will of course claim that theirs is an objective task of simply trying to figure out what historical writers said, and reserving judgment on whether what they said was right or wrong, to what extent we should imitate it today, etc. Theologians may argue over whether Calvin was wrong or right, but the historian is solely interested in uncovering what Calvin said, for good or ill. Of course, such claims are not altogether true of any historian, but in my mind, they are particularly disingenuous when dealing with historical theologians (or theological historians?), particularly ones working within very confessional traditions like the Reformed. When someone is taking the time to write a book on the history of a doctrine, odds are that they have a strong interest in the doctrine; and if they have a strong interest, odds are that they have a strong opinion; and if they have a strong opinion, then, human nature being what it is, odds are that they want to be able to show that their opinion has been supported by key historical figures. This is particularly true of Reformed theologians, who, despite their anti-Catholicism, have a strong affection for “tradition,” and are almost obsessive in their attempts to prove that their pet doctrines were held by the great Reformed theologians of ages past, particularly Calvin. In fact, it is a useful rule of thumb that if you ever see any Reformed guy arguing that Calvin has been misunderstood on a certain point, and what he really said was X, you can be quite sure that his interest is not merely historical, but stems from the fact that he strongly believes X himself.

Such is the case with VanDrunen; he has let us know right from the start that he thinks that the modern craze for extending Christ’s lordship to all of life is a mistake, and he wants to recover a tradition which keeps Christ’s lordship in its proper ecclesial sphere. Therefore, although he purports to be pursuing the merely historical task of telling us what Reformed theologians said, it is clear that he is also trying to recommend certain ideas to us rather than others, and so in this review I will not merely be questioning aspects of his historical narrative, but also the theological value of the position he attributes to Calvin. This is particularly reasonable since VanDrunen does not really seem very interested in history in this chapter, as I shall consider in a moment.

Given that I am sounding so negative, I should add another caveat--VanDrunen does some really solid work in this chapter. I’m about to make some objections about the way he handles the history, but I should say up front that he makes some very solid historical points, particularly against other Reformed folks who have manifested the same annoying tendency to try to prove that Calvin is on their side, whatever that side might be. Modern neo-Calvinists have got to face up to the fact that Calvin said some rather silly things, that they must be willing to renounce from time to time. And so, my biggest beef with VanDrunen in this chapter is not “Calvin never said that!” but rather, “Ok, Calvin said that...so what? The Bible clearly says the opposite, so let’s gently correct Calvin and move on.”

With these caveats out of the way, let me address three methodological problems with how this chapter is set up, from a historical standpoint. First, in the title of the chapter, “John Calvin” should have been written in size 24 font, and “and His Contemporaries” in size 8. In a 52-page chapter, Calvin’s contemporaries get 3 pages--1/2 page of intro, 1 page for Bucer, 1/2 page for Vermigli, and 1 page for Zanchi. For a study purporting to tell us about the origins of Reformed social thought, this is simply irresponsible. VanDrunen seems a little nervous about it himself, acknowledging in the chapter’s introductory pages that of course it was a common error to act like Calvin was “the one measure by which later Reformed theology must be assessed” (67), and that recent historians have highlighted both the importance of other early Reformed figures and the discontinuities between Calvin and later Calvinists. Yet, having raised these objections, VanDrunen dismisses them with a casual wave of his hand: “Though his influence on the later Reformed tradition was not exclusive, it was certainly not surpassed by any of his contemporaries” (68). Therefore, in a study which is necessarily selective, “granting Calvin the spotlight seems well justified” (68).

Now, let’s examine this for a minute. Let’s grant that Calvin exercised more influence on the subsequent Reformed tradition than any other single figure among his contemporaries; that does not mean that he exercised more than all of them combined. It might be fair to say that if we were to try to quantify influence, and oversimplify the picture a lot, we might say that Calvin’s influence on later Reformed thought was 35%, Bullinger’s 20%, Bucer’s 15%, Vermigli’s 10%, Knox’s 10%, and others’ 10% (sorry, I have a weakness for using statistics). Does this preponderance justify him receiving 49 pages and everyone else receiving 3?

In particular, VanDrunen has ignored an important point, which is that this study is not about Reformed theology in general (over which Calvin has had an unmistakably strong influence), but about Reformed social and political thought, which is a somewhat different matter. I’m sure that there’s a lot of literature on the subject that could offer a more well-informed opinion, but based on my knowledge, it seems quite certain that, compared to his influence on other issues, Calvin’s political theology had much less of an impact on subsequent Reformed thought. In France, the Huguenots, as a persecuted minority, never had much opportunity to put a political and social ideal into practice. In England and Scotland (and thus later in America), despite the name of Calvin being held in high regard, political theology and indeed ecclesiology was dominated either (among the Dissenters) by Knoxian and proto-Puritan strains of thought that differed dramatically from Calvin, or (among the Establishment) by Erastian, and, as Torrance Kirby shows, Tigurian (that is, from Zurich) political theology. In Germany and Switzerland, the latter influences held sway. The Netherlands I know too little about to say, though I think it would be fair to say that here Calvin’s influence was fairly strong, though alloyed with other elements. Even in Geneva, subsequent political and social thought was molded as much by Beza as by Calvin himself.

Now, to point all this out is not merely a quibble of historical methodology, as it would be if Calvin and his contemporaries shared basically the same paradigm (as VanDrunen seems to try and say, though without much conviction). Bucer’s De Regno Christi portrays a richer, more complex, and maddeningly ambiguous picture of the relation between “the kingdom of Christ” and “the kingdoms of this world” than does Calvin, as I shall hopefully discuss a bit more when I get to the end of the chapter. Knox and the Presbyterians, with their notion of a theocratic “national covenant” are certainly far from Calvin and even further from what VanDrunen wants to advocate. Vermigli and Bullinger (enormously influential upon many strands of early Reformed thought), while drawing a sharp “two kingdoms” dichotomy, did not draw it in anything like the way VanDrunen wants to, since their paradigm made the oversight of religious affairs the foremost duty of the civil magistrate (see Torrance Kirby’s The Zurich Connection for a fascinating discussion of the unique and bizarre blend of Gelasianism and Augustinianism that these two theologians propounded). All of this means that, whatever VanDrunen is able to prove about Calvin in this chapter really proves rather little about the “Development of Reformed Social Thought,” since it leaves 2/3 of the foundations of Reformed social thought out of the picture.

The second methodological problem is perhaps another to which the Reformed seem especially prone. We Reformed have an obsession with order, logic, systems. (Perhaps this is why--to indulge a thought that just struck me--we seem so prone to go head-over-heels for Austrian economics.) This has its uses, but it can really get in the way of doing good history, because it means we are always looking for people to be orderly, logical, consistent. And people aren’t! How many real thinkers, thinkers with interesting thoughts worth studying, were consistent in all of their thinking across different contexts, different genres, different debates, different decades? If you can point me to an example (Francis Turretin, maybe, or the dime-a-dozen Reformed systematicians of the last century) then to me that’s just proof that they aren’t thinkers with interesting thoughts worth studying, because they’re not thinking like real people. Real people change their minds, real people get passionate about something and overstate their case, real people get caught up in a debate and over-emphasize just one side of an issue, only to over-emphasize the other side the next year in a different debate.

VanDrunen seems terribly reluctant to admit that Calvin was “inconsistent,” as if this were to accuse him of the unforgiveable sin. He hems and he haws and he gives various explanations, before finally admitting that yes, perhaps, Calvin was inconsistent at points. This way of looking at it also means that, since inconsistency is an odd aberration, VanDrunen can identify what the “heart” of Calvin’s “real” position was, and then dismiss other aspects as lamentable inconsistencies. This, I submit, is not good history. The fact is that even a man as systematic as Calvin thought many different things over the course of his life and simultaneously wanted to do justice to a number of different intellectual and practical ideals, which led him to sometimes assert, for instance, a radical discontinuity between church and state, and sometimes a close partnership between the two. The Calvin that VanDrunen gives us is a rather inhuman, disembodied Calvin, a mind whose true ideas we can identify if we can succeed in disentangling them, as Calvin himself couldn’t quite do, from earth-bound issues of practical life. This perhaps makes sense, when we consider VanDrunen’s Gnostic paradigm of the Christian life, in which the Christian’s true identity is “spiritual” and “heavenly,” separated from the mundane earthly affairs in which, as a human, he must still be engaged. (You know, that came across rather harshly; I didn’t really intend for it to, but, there it is--maybe my true feelings are harsher than I thought.)

Third, and closely related, VanDrunen seems to have very little interest in the historical context within which Calvin and the Reformers formulated their statements on social and political issues. For someone seeking to do historical work in any period, this is a significant oversight, but when dealing with a period as tumultuous and conflicted as the Reformation, it is grievous indeed. At one point, after introducing Calvin’s rather shockingly dualistic statements in the Institutes (e.g., “For there exists in man a kind of two worlds, over which different kings and different laws can preside”) VanDrunen says, “I turn now to describe Calvin’s view of the nature of these two kingdoms and thereby to explain why he drew this contrast so sharply.” “Aha!” I thought, “Here it is; he’s going to explain to us why, in historical terms, Calvin felt compelled to state things this way, about the context of anti-papal polemics and so on.” Alas, no. VanDrunen proceeded to explain Calvin’s view in terms of other theological commitments of his, with absolutely no mention of the historical, polemical context.

This approach explains why VanDrunen finds himself so flummoxed when he comes to the fact that, in actual practice in Geneva, Calvin did not seem to abide by the radical disjunction that he had asserted in the Institutes; in fact, even in the Institutes, Calvin appears to contradict himself, very quickly moving to give civil magistrates charge over religious affairs. We can see this same phenomenon, even more vividly, in the work of Bullinger and Vermigli--they will make the most shocking, unqualified statements about the incommensurability of civil and religious affairs, of church and state, on one page, and then, a couple pages later, they’ll be saying how silly people are who think that spiritual and ecclesial matters aren’t the province of the civil magistrate. Part of the explanation for this lies in understanding the polemical context. They don’t like the way in which the popes and the Catholic Church have claimed a plenitude of power over all affairs, spiritual and temporal, so that the Church has become in many respects indistinguishable from a worldly kingdom. In reaction to this, they will in certain contexts argue forcefully for the separation of civil and religious affairs, but then it becomes clear, when they turn to consider the civil magistrate, that they don’t want anything like a complete separation. Rather, they want to separate civil affairs from ecclesial authority, but they don’t necessarily want to separate ecclesial affairs from civil authority; the independence of the Chruch is simply not a high value for them at this point. We all do this sort of thing all the time, and in the polemically-supercharged setting of Reformation theology, it stands to reason that they did it even more. VanDrunen, though, gives almost no attention to the historical context or causes of the claims Calvin makes, a critical oversight in a book purporting to give us a history of Reformed social thought.

Now, all that was prolegomenal--good heavens! I told you this would be a long review.

Pursuing Strangers

2010-05-05T15:49:00.000+01:00

May 5, 2010

In Rom. 12:13, Paul tells us to “seek to show hospitality”--we tend to brush this sort of command aside as less relevant in a modern setting of ubiquitous motels and safe modes of travel, or else to water it down to “make sure to have other people in the Church over for dinner from time to time.”

Origen’s commentary, however, suggests challenging contemporary relevance for any Christians in modern cities:

“We are not just to receive the stranger when he comes to us, but actually to enquire after, and look carefully for, strangers, to pursue them and search them out everywhere, lest perchance somewhere they may sit in the streets or lie without a roof over their heads.”

Taking Ramsey to Task on Just War

2010-05-04T22:17:00.001+01:00

May 4, 2010
I’ve been suspicious of Just War theory for quite a while now. Some of it has to do with the pacifistic inroads Hauerwas and others made on my thinking, and some of it just has to do with the theory’s terrible historical track record. The Just War theory has much more often served as a way of providing a justification for desired wars than as a criterion for refusing wars. By reducing the requirements of justice in war to a convenient little list of criteria, the just war tradition has made it all too easy for politicians to spin the facts and stoke up the rhetoric so as to give a passable imitation of having met the criteria. And so the most absurd prideful bloodbaths get whitewashed as “just wars”--the Civil War, World War I, the Iraq War.

And so, as I said, I’d become suspicious, skeptical--not hostile, mind you, just dubious as to whether the theory actually enabled us to fight just wars and refuse unjust ones. And so I thought, in all fairness to the tradition, I ought to hear its ablest defenders speak, and I planned to read Paul Ramsey’s The Just War and O’Donovan’s The Just War Revisited. I haven’t gotten to the latter yet, but we were assigned portions of the former to read for class this past term. I was, I am afraid, sorely disappointed--my hopes in the abilities of modern just war theorists to effectively challenge our warmongering societies were quite dashed.

Paul Ramsey, you see, chooses not merely to major on, but to pretty much exclusively deal with the ius in bello criteria, in my mind the less significant part of the just war tradition; ius ad bellum, in his mind, is essentially useless.

Let me take a moment to elucidate the distinction. The criteria for just war that the theory has developed can be classified under these two headings, which may be translated as “justice toward war” and “justice in war.” Under the former heading are the principles of just cause, legitimate authority, right intention, probability of success, last resort, and proportionality, principles that help us figure out whether a proposed or contemplated conflict can indeed be justly entered into. Under the latter heading are the principles of discrimination--no intentional targeting of civilians--and (again) proportionality--using no means or targets that are likely to cause excessive suffering and death that far outweighs the envisioned benefits. Without ius in bello, we’d be two pugilists whose friends restrained them from fighting 90% of the time, but who could haul out machine guns and chainsaws once they had a chance to duke it out. Without ius in bellum, we’d be allowed to fight whenever we wanted, but would have to do it with one hand tied behind our backs. Perhaps then I wouldn’t want to say that ius in bello is “less significant,” but certainly ius ad bellum has to come first.

Why then does Ramsey want to leave it out of the equation? O’Donovan explained it this way: Ramsey was fed up with the Church’s increasingly powerless naysaying. By refusing to be pacifist, yet indignantly protesting every particular war that came up as “unjust,” the Church was just making itself look ridiculous. Why? Because the questions of ius ad bellum are hazy ones, that depend on weighing many different facts and interpreting them in ways that are ultimately somewhat subjective. So the Church can come across as always just second-guessing the more well-informed politicians. The questions of ius in bello, on the other hand (or at least regarding the first criterion), can be pared down to a rather sharp moral decision for every soldier and politician: “Will you intentionally target civilians? Will you take all reasonable steps to avoid unintended civilian casualties?” These questions the Church can insist on continuing to raise, and can hope to be heard--here, the Church has sufficient expertise to address the conscience, expertise that it cannot expect to have on the complex questions of international diplomacy surrounding ius ad bellum.

Ramsey’s concern here is understandable, of course. The Church can make a fool of itself when, without taking a principled pacifist stance, it instantly cries foul whenever a war is declared. Even in a matter as important as war, we should not hastily rush to assume the worst of policy-makers, but should allow the possibility that they have accurately construed the situation, and it is one that justly calls for a military response.

However, I am skeptical that this is really the biggest problem for us today. In my background, at least, it is much more common for the Church to uncritically assume that the war is just than to uncritically assume that it is unjust. But even if that were not so, Ramsey’s approach seems to leave a huge hole in our responsibility to witness Christ to our society; it leaves the Church as no more than a referee at a wrestling match, blowing the whistle whenever the combatants start fighting too dirty. Do we really want to consign ourselves to the position of submissively nodding our heads whenever our politicians want to go to war, however unjust, and merely speaking up from time to time to try to keep the war from becoming too bloody? Let’s look at the ius ad bellum criteria a bit more closely, with the Iraq War as a case study, to see if they are really as useless as Ramsey seems to think. I will consider only just cause here, to try to stay concise; the other criteria, it seems to me (aside from legitimate authority), are the sort of thing that Ramsey could legitimately object that would be very difficult to judge, and on which we might to some degree have to just give our leaders the benefit of the doubt. However, even here, the Church ought to ask hard questions of our leaders, rather than accepting vague reassuring declarations of justice--we should at least ask our leaders to make a convincing case to us that they are acting with the right intentions, as a last resort, with a high probability of success, and with proportionality--that is, a likelihood that the harm would not outweigh the benefit. If they barely even try to make such a case, then we should immediately assume that something is not right.

But now, let’s look closely at just cause: properly, just cause means innocent life must be in imminent danger and intervention must be to protect life. It cannot mean merely a defense of national interest, or a defense of property, nor can it be simply for purposes of retaliation. That is to say, the mere fact that someone else fired first doesn’t mean you can go after them with everything you’ve got--you have to be able to show that they continue to pose a threat. The notion of pre-emptive strike is debated, but the general consensus is that pre-emption can only be just when the other party has literally pulled out theirs weapon and aimed them at you with clear and imminent intent to fire.

Now, to be sure, it can be very difficult to ascertain for certain when there is in fact just cause, since, for example, it may look like we have been attacked first, when in fact our leaders secretly incited the other party to attack. So we should be hesitant to ever affirm just cause without reservation. But there are many times when we can be quite clear that there is not just cause, and the Church is responsible to speak up in such situations. It should generally be fairly obvious to the citizens of a country whether or not they are under attack, or under the threat of imminent attack, by a hostile foreign power that is determined to kill them. It should have been clear at the time, for instance, that the US had no just cause to engage in World War I, and it shouldn’t have required any detailed inside information to make that judgment. World War II is a more difficult case, and I can understand Christians at the time who thought the US was just to engage. Vietnam was obviously fought without just cause; so obvious that it’s remarkable to me that Ramsey, writing on just war theory during the Vietnam War, did not see any opportunity for Christians to speak against this failure of ius ad bellum.

In the age of the War on Terror, this criterion has been deliberately obfuscated. We are told that we are not dealing with hostile nations anymore, but with hostile groups of individuals who hail from many different nations and derive their support from many different nations, and who are liable to attack us at any moment. It thus becomes a matter of secret intelligence, rather than visible reality, as to whether our lives are imminently threatened, and if so, by whom. Christians should know enough to be suspicious about claims made in such murky waters. But even if we had to withhold judgment, and trust our leaders to do right whenever there was uncertainty (and I can’t see where Christian citizens are called upon to give their leaders such a huge benefit of the doubt), there was still ample basis to call the invasion of Iraq unjust. For one thing, there was the constantly shifting story as to why we were supposed to attack, with multiple conflicting rationales being thrown around. This should’ve been an obvious red flag. If there was a compelling just cause, it should’ve been focused on, to the exclusion of other issues.

What were some of the reasons given? 1) Saddam was killing innocent Kurds and his own people. 2) It would be beneficial for the nation, and for the region, to have a democratic government. 3) They had harbored and possibly funded Al-Qaeda members at various times, possibly the same ones as had attacked us. 4) They were developing weapons of mass destruction, that they might someday use against us, or give to someone else to use against us. Let’s cross-examine these.

What about #1? Assuming this was happening, and to some extent we would have to take the word of our leaders on this point, though we have a responsibility to look at other sources as well, does that constitute just cause? Well, just possibly, if you believe that defending other people’s innocents, not merely your own, can be a just cause. This is a debatable point, but I am inclined to say that it may be in situations where the situation is dire, and the innocent and the murderers are clearly discernable--the only situation like this I can think of off the top of my head is the Rwandan genocides. 90% of the time, though, either the plot is much too thorny to justly and successfully intervene from a distance (both sides are at war and guilty of atrocities), or else the murder and oppression is on too limited a scale to justify invasion and the horrors of war, which would kill at least as many innocents as they would protect (here, the criterion of proportionality comes in). In Iraq, I think both of these ambiguities were clearly operative, which should have made us deeply skeptical that #1 could constitute just cause.

#2 doesn’t even make an attempt to satisfy just war criteria, and seems to stem from the school of thought that treats war as “politics by other means”--a useful tool for accomplishing any beneficial purpose, not a means of last resort for preventing mass murder.

#3 has a vague aura of justice about it, but when you look closely, this aura disappears. Nowhere in just war theory does it say that anyone who has at any time been friendly to an enemy of yours is a just target for invasion, and I can’t imagine how one could begin to justify such a broad rationale. Even if it were conclusively shown that Iraq had directly and intentionally aided those who carried out 9/11 attacks, that wouldn’t suffice for just cause, since just cause does not mean retaliation, but protection. The Bush administration would have had to show that Iraq was currently offering direct and significant support to people who were currently attacking, or imminently planning to attack, innocent Americans. I don’t even recall them trying to claim this, and even if they had, we would’ve then turned to the criterion of proportionality, and so it’s hard to imagine how such support could have justified a massive invasion.

#4 also has a vague aura of justice, since it makes it look like we’re defending ourselves. But this strains the notion of pre-emption well beyond the breaking point. So far as I recall, not even the wildest rhetorical excesses of the lead-up to war tried to show us that they were clearly armed and preparing to attack any day--it was all based on foggy fears about the future.

Now, what are we to make of this? Of the four criteria, #2 could not possibly comprise a just cause, while #3 and #4, although lying in the general neighborhood of a just cause, could not themselves, as they were presented in the lead-up to the war, comprise just causes. Only #1 could have, in theory, comprised a just cause, though it seems almost certain to have failed the test of proportionality, and, in any case, would have failed utterly to move public sentiment to war.

All of this suggests that, leaving out the benefit of hindsight and considering what was publicly known at the time, there was ample cause for the Church to stand up and say, “This appears to be an unjust war; as it stands now, Christians cannot support it.” This would be no pouty pseudo-pacifist naysaying of the sort Ramsey derides, but an objective, principled, thoroughly defensible stand that could have prevented a great deal of evil. I would thus suggest that, if we are to revive the just war doctrine, it is both crucial and practicable that we revive, and insist upon to the best of our ability, ius ad bellum, rather than merely trying to referee the brawl after its already started, as Ramsey would have us do.

Lutheran Cherry-Picking (VanDrunen Review II.2)

2010-05-02T21:48:00.000+01:00

May 2, 2010

(This post is actually short!)

In the last section of the chapter, “Precursors to the Reformed Tradition,” VanDrunen examines a figure whose name is regularly identified with “two kingdoms” theory, though rarely with the concept of natural law--Luther. He seeks to show that both of these ideas played a crucial role in Luther’s political theology, which was in close continuity with the catholic strands he has already identified, and which set the stage for a more mature and systematic development in Reformed thought.

Before turning to briefly consider this discussion, I wanted to add one more thought to the previous post. I’d mentioned some key distinctions in patristic and medieval political thought that VanDrunen glosses over, and I wanted to add one more--which person of the Trinity is seen as the source of political authority? This was an important variation within the broad “two swords” stream. Some medieval thinkers, such as the Carolingians (if I remember rightly), saw the prince as a vicar of Christ--just as Christ was prophet, priest, and king, so, in his Church, some were called upon to imitate his prophetical office, preaching the word, some were called upon to imitate his priestly office, administering the sacraments, and some were called upon to imitate his kingly office, administering civil justice. In such a conception, the “two swords” did not correspond to a neat division between creation and redemption--rather, both were operative in the sphere of redemption. Other versions of the doctrine saw the prince as the vicar of God, receiving his role from God the Father, the creator, and thus, to a certain extent at least, independent of Christ’s redemptive work. This version is much more congenial to VanDrunen’s project, but a better historical sketch would have taken note of both versions.

Now, what about Luther? VanDrunen turns to Luther’s classic treatise On Temporal Authority to consider his two kingdoms doctrine. For Luther, civil authority had been established by God since creation. Those who are in Christ are members of his kingdom, which needs no temporal sword, and so for themselves, they never wield it, but they do wield it for the sake of unbelievers, those who live still in the kingdom of the world. In the second half of the treatise, Luther argues that the temporal authority must never extend to rule over spiritual matters, or to exercise any coercion over faith.

VanDrunen calls our attention to several salient points: first, there is a strong antithesis between Christians and the world, not merely eschatological, but ethical. Second, there is a large area of commonality--both Christians and non-Christians live under temporal authority and both can wield it, though, significantly, “Luther does not treat it as a morally neutral realm, but gives civil rulers strong exhortations to exercise their sword with justice and within the limits of their authority” (60). Luther moves beyond Augustine in treating coercive temporal authority as something good and God-ordained, and in insisting that the Christian is really and truly a citizen of both kingdoms, rather than, as with Augustine, only one. (At this point, I sense that VanDrunen is interpolating aspects of Luther’s later treatise The Sermon on the Mount, since, in On Temporal Authority, he certainly seems to speak as if the Christian is a citizen only of one kingdom, and simply works as an alien within the other.) VanDrunen concludes here by saying that the Reformed view generally follows the lines that Luther has sketched, though with three differences: 1) a different use law-gospel distinction, 2) a difference in what is placed under each jurisdiction, and 3) a difference regarding the use of coercion in matters of faith.

Van Drunen’s discussion of Luther on natural law is structurally similar to his discussion of Ockham on the same issue--the main point is simply to demonstrate that, contrary to popular stereotypes, Luther cheerfully employed this category in his ethical and political thought, and that he equated the Decalogue with the natural law. VanDrunen does not go much beyond demonstrating this, and again leaves out of consideration any further questions, such as about how the natural law relates to the evangelical law. So, as before, I feel that VanDrunen hasn’t yet shown us much of significance, though perhaps that was not his intent at this point.

A couple of critical remarks are also in order regarding the discussion of Luther on the two kingdoms. First, I still see nowhere (even in the footnotes) a recognition that many scholars now argue that “two kingdoms” is simply a mistranslation (and hence, a misunderstanding) of Luther’s view, which should rather be rendered as “two regiments.” This seems a much too significant issue to simply leave unmentioned. Second, VanDrunen asserts that On Temporal Authority can be taken as representative of Luther’s political thought as a whole, and yet there is a considerable difference between its viewpoint and that of later works, such as The Sermon on the Mount. For example, Luther does not seem to have remained consistent in his initial insistence that spiritual matters lay outside the purview of the magistrate. Admittedly, Luther is not meant to be the main focus of the book, but this oversimplistic engagement with him makes it look as if VanDrunen is simply picking and choosing the version of Luther that fits best into the rest of his narrative.

Natural Law and the Two Somethings (VanDrunen Review II.1)

2010-05-01T18:03:00.000+01:00

May 1, 2010

To write a chapter called “Precursors of the Reformed Tradition” seems a rather risky way to proceed, as it invites the criticism that you have set up the Reformed tradition as the perfected endpoint, and have scripted all of previous Church history into a narrative of development towards and imperfect realizations of this ideal. Indeed, it is perhaps inevitable that this structural decision will lead to a somewhat imperfect and one-sided treatment of the history. But I confess that VanDrunen does quite a good job (at least, so it seems on a first reading) of steering clear of the pitfalls that accompany this approach. I was impressed and (I must confess) surprised by VanDrunen’s careful, even-handed treatment of the history, allowing each author to speak more or less for himself, rather than forcing him into the preconceived schema of what he was going to try and prove later, and by his sympathetic use of medieval Catholic sources, treating them as part of the single, continuous heritage of the Church’s teaching.

I say “surprised” because this has not been, in my experience, typical of what you expect to find from Westminster Seminary professor, but perhaps times are changing. Moreover, from my experience with Darryl Hart, I’d come to expect his brand of “spirituality of the church” advocate (as I’d perhaps over-hastily classified VanDrunen) to imaginatively project their idiosyncratic view backwards onto other figures with rather different views. But, in any case, on the basis of chapter 2 I repent somewhat of these negative stereotypes. This is not to say that I don’t have some lingering questions and objections, but on the whole I must admit this chapter to be coherent, balanced, and enlightening.

In it, VanDrunen examines five variants of the “Two Cities” and the “Two Swords” doctrines of the Patristic and Middle Ages, considering them to each be, in certain respects, precursors of the mature “Two Kingdoms” doctrine. Then he looks at the use of natural law in the three leading medieval philosophers: Aquinas, Scotus, and Ockham. Finally, he argues that both of these strands are picked up by Martin Luther in his political theology, which provides the direct precursor to Reformed political theology.

Let’s look at each of these three sections in turn.

A criticism immediately suggests itself regarding the first section. Has not VanDrunen simply taken up every different sort of “Two somethings” theory in Church history and treated them as variations on a theme, so that he can then portray the Reformed Two Kingdoms theory as the heir to and perfection of this continuous tradition? No doubt he would deny that this was his purpose, but it is hard not to feel that something of this sort is going on. The Epistle to Diognetus, Augustine, Gelasius, Boniface VIII, and Ockham all get discussed in turn, all as having articulated some form of duality between Church and State, or Church and world, and all (except perhaps Boniface) as having some positive features that VanDrunen wants to pick up on. Political-theological models that have often been treated as starkly contrasting or even standing at opposite poles are here narrated together as variations on this duality theme. However, this exercise is prevented from becoming irresponsible or absurd by the fact that VanDrunen examines each of these models carefully on its own terms, and with attention to varying scholarly interpretations. He then considers carefully how each one relates to and differs from the others that he has considered.

Particularly satisfying was his engagement with Augustine, whose City of God has often been distorted to represent a varied array of mutually contradictory political theologies. Although, in my estimation, VanDrunen is too much indebted to R.A. Markus’s saeculum reading, he knows better than to follow it too far, and tempers it with a healthy dose of O’Donovan. I don’t think that he sufficiently recognizes the ramifications of O’Donovan’s adjustment to Markus’s thesis, and so he lives us with a reading of Augustine that is rather murky and undecided on some of the key disputed issues. This is fine, of course, as long as VanDrunen does not want to use Augustine as a key pillar later on his argument. For that, we’ll have to wait and see.

From the “two cities” doctrine, espoused in some form or another by Augustine and the “Epistle to Diognetus,” VanDrunen derives the idea of “commonality amid antithesis.” Christians are fundamentally and unavoidably different from the surrounding culture of unbelievers, characterized by a different love and a different end, and yet they are inextricably intermingled in the present age, such that the Church is able to make use of, and even participate in to a limited extent, the goods and institutions of the earthly city. Civil government, in this picture, belongs (though somewhat ambiguously) within the province of the earthly city--ultimately condemned, though it serves limited goods for the present. VanDrunen is particularly pleased with the way that Augustine “refused to embrace an idyllic, theocratic, or Christianized view of the world. Christians here on earth are a people on pilgrimage, their citizenship and their hope lying in an everlasting, heavenly city” (32). In other words, he like Augustine’s amillenialism. This unspoken eschatological commitment of VanDrunen’s is worth keeping in mind. VanDrunen’s main complaint against Augustine is that he “does not emphasize the legitimate and God-ordained status of civil government as a positive matter” (32).

VanDrunen thus examines the “two swords” doctrine, which differs significantly from the “two cities” in that it conceives a unified Christian society with two types of rule, rather than two different societies living side-by-side. This idea is of course associated first of all by Pope Gelasius, who asserted that the Christian society was ruled by two authorities, the “spiritual” and the “temporal,” each with their proper functions upon which the other ought not to encroach. VanDrunen notes that this distinction covers somewhat different ground than Augustine’s distinction: “Augustine’s two cities are first and foremost eschatological concepts, with present institutional expression in church and empire only a secondary matter. Here, in contrast, Gelasius’s two swords doctrine is specifically institutional in its focus. This fact cautions interpreters not to be hasty in setting these two models in opposition to one another, for the ‘two cities’ and the ‘two swords’ had slightly different referents in mind” (33-4). Having established this caveat, he draws the following comparisons: the Gelasian doctrine sees none of the antithesis that the Augustinian does between church and world, since the world is now conceived of as Christian; second, Gelasius gives the state a specific institutional legitimacy that Augustine did not give it.

He briefly sketches Boniface VIII’s alteration of the Gelasian doctrine, which made both swords the proper domain of the church, yet such that the church delegated one to the civil authority. Needless to say, VanDrunen does not have much use for this view; he mainly introduces it, it seems, to provide the backdrop for William of Ockham’s doctrine of Church and State, to which he gives a few pages of attention. He is particularly interested in Ockham’s teaching that “true lordship of temporal things” and “true temporal jurisdiction” existed among unbelievers, such authority was thus part of the natural order, and did not depend upon the Pope or the Church. Temporal authority, on this view, is established directly by God, as a separate, yet complementary sphere of authority to that of the Church. Ockham’s view, VanDrunen believes, puts him in many ways alongside Gelasius, but with the important different that “whereas Gelasius’ model seems to presume that there is one body of people being governed by both powers, with both powers mutually submitting to each other, Ockham seems less tied to such a vision. The idea of a Christian empire, even one not entirely controlled by the pope, seems to play no essential role in Ockham’s political thought” (40-41). Therefore, for Ockham, as for Augustine, we may speak of the realm of temporal authority as a realm of overlap, of commonality between believers and unbelievers. But unlike Augustine, he sees this realm as a positive good, rather than as something shadowy and suspicious. It is clear that VanDrunen has considerable sympathies with this Ockhamite synthesis.

At this point, VanDrunen turns to consider medieval doctrines of natural law, but let us pause a moment to see what has been gained from the foregoing. First, we have seen that the Christian tradition has been in broad agreement that there is an inescapable duality in the Church’s life in the world, a recognition that two different types of authority hold sway in the present life--”spiritual” and “temporal.” Second, we have seen that the best thinkers in the tradition have recognized that the Christian’s relationship to the unbelieving world is one of “commonality amid antithesis,” fundamentally different orientations toward shared settings, goods, and even institutions. Third, we have seen that, for many in the tradition, civil authority is not just something we have to live with, but is a positive good instituted by God for ruling the temporal realm, and VanDrunen prefers this conception.

Now, this isn’t much, I think we will agree--it’s all quite vague and underdetermined. Many key questions remain unanswered. For instance, what is the relationship between “spiritual” and “temporal”? Is it a spatial relationship, or a, well, a temporal one? That is to say, do we conceive of the two realms as occupying two different spheres of social “space” at the same time, or of occupying two different “times,” so to speak, as the common language of “temporal” vs. “eternal” would imply? This distinction makes an important difference when considering some Patristic and medieval writers. And what do we mean by asserting that temporal authority is something that is “common” to both believers and unbelievers? We could say that worship is common to believers and unbelievers, in the sense that all men worship; they just differ in what they worship. Or we could say that food is common to believers and unbelievers, in that both believers and unbelievers eat basically the same things in basically the same way. In which sense is civil authority common? Clearly VanDrunen wants us to think in something much more like the second sense. But is that what all these writers intend? Indeed, by attempting to point us toward this notion of “commonality amid antithesis,” I can’t see that VanDrunen has told us anything at all, for what Christian would deny that a Christian’s relationship to the world is one of “commonality amid antithesis”? But, to be fair, VanDrunen is merely laying groundwork at this stage, and so we should not ask too much. Nevertheless, these remain distinctions he will have to flesh out at a later point in order to put forth a coherent political theological proposal.

Now, what about natural law? Here VanDrunen turns first, of course, to Thomas Aquinas, and then seeks to show that, contra standard stereotypes, much the same concept is operative in Scotus and Ockham. The account he gives of Aquinas is fairly standard and uncontroversial. Natural law is “the rational creature’s participation of the eternal law,” it is the rational principles by which nature is meant to operate, reflecting the nature of God its Creator. Mankind has been created able to ascertain these principles, and so to know how to conduct himself, and though his reason is distorted after the fall by sensual impulses, it is still able, in principle, to understand the natural law. Human law is a particular determination of natural law to address particular circumstances.

Before moving on from Aquinas, he mentions briefly the relationship between divine law (divided into Old Law and New Law) and natural law, listing Aquinas’s four reasons for the necessity of the divine law. He then discusses the relationship between the Old Law and the natural law (namely, that the moral law, summarized in the Decalogue, can be equated with the natural law), but he does not at any point discuss the relationship between the New Law and the natural law, which seems to me a very serious omission, given that how we articulate this relationship is utterly crucial to the matter at hand--namely, the relationship between the Church, ruled by the New Law, and the civil authority, ruled by the natural law.

His purpose in looking at Scotus and Ockham is not to develop their views of natural law in depth, but simply to show that, despite what we might expect from their voluntarist metaphysics, they retained the category and it played an important role in their ethics and political thought. I don’t know enough about either of these figures to challenge VanDrunen if he has misconstrued or omitted something, but his account here seemed persuasive. This argument allows him to move into the Reformation having established that “Whatever medieval school or schools may have influenced particular Reformers, therefore, natural law was part of a common, catholic theological inheritance” (55).

Now, one brief comments about this section. I have the same concern as I raised in the previous section--namely, that he has only established vague generalities so far. The fact that there was a pervasive doctrine of natural law in the late Middle Ages, which was understood to be a crucial source for civil law, really tells us very little about the questions at hand--namely, how civil law is to relate to the Church and to what extent natural law, or at least its application in civil law, are to be transformed by Christian faith. If grace perfects nature, does the evangelical law of the gospel perfect or transform in some way natural law, so that a Christian state would look very different fron a non-Christian? Careful attention to Aquinas’s views of the relationship between the New Law and the natural law could have helped move us toward some answers to this question, but VanDrunen simply omitted this. Frustrating, but again, we are only at the groundwork stage, so I will merely flag this question for later.

In the next (considerably briefer) post I will look at VanDrunen’s discussion of natural law and the two kingdoms in Luther.