A Massively Possessive Experience? Caleb Stegall …

Caleb Stegall

A Massively Possessive Experience?
Caleb Stegall

I find myself in a great deal of sympathy with Darryl’s post below, though I approach these topics as a trained lawyer rather than a trained theologian (is there really a difference?).

Covenanters have historically been tempted by a kind of Gnostic immanentization of the eschaton through their particular understanding of Kingship, a certain “lust for a massively possessive experience” to use Voegelin’s terminology. The Covenanters were the original Whigs, after all, contra Dr. Johnson. It was the execution of Thomas Aikenhead (a 19-year old theological student who had committed blasphemy by allegedly saying that he would have preferred the weather conditions in hell to one particularly chilly Scottish night) in 1696 by overzealous Covenanters anxious to implement the Kingship of Christ in the wake of Charles II’s vengeful killing times that turned Scottish opinion against the Kirk and Covenant and opened the door for Locke and the eventual Scottish Enlightenment.

In fact, historians have long argued that this turn from Kirk to Enlightenment was the natural result of an underlying Whig idea of history which is at root, progressive. For example, Arthur Herman argues in his recent How the Scots Invented the Modern World that “fundamental to the Scottish notion of history is the idea of progress. The Scots argued that societies, like individuals, grow and improve over time. … [The] fundamentalist Calvinist Kirk … actually laid the foundations for modern Scotland, in surprising and striking ways.” Without a clear understanding of our own Covenanter history, it will be difficult to come to grips with the historically contingent complexities of these issues. As I have summarized elsewhere: “It makes for a fascinating history—agrarian low class Scotts throwing off the weight of religious tradition; turned prosperous industrial Yankees in the new world; turned agrarian sod busters on the American frontier in service of Christian progressivism; turned tiny suburban enclaves in nearly placeless America holding onto tradition as a life raft against wave after wave of anti-Christian progressive reform. It’s the American religious story in a nutshell.”

I had an on-air conversation recently with Gary Wills and Harvey Cox to discuss Wills’s new book, What Jesus Meant. I was struck by how the ultra-progressive Wills and Cox both essentially shared a “muscular” approach to Christ’s Kingship. Both asserted that if Christ really is Lord, then of course this requires a whole raft of political policies covering the policy arena—from universal health care to full emancipation of homosexuals. Regardless of how one views “Jesus’s politics,” the fact is that any aggressive implementation of them in the immanent world will be progressive at heart in that it is an attempt to force the kingdom of heaven into this world. I commented to Wills and Cox that what I thought was missing from their formulations was any strong sense of ecclesiology, of respect for the tradition of the church. I argued, essentially, that Christ’s Kingship must always be mediated to the world through his Church, an institution which approaches history with the patience of millenniums. Christ’s Kingship is mediated to the world through the centuries by the corpus mysticum which understands that the full expression of Kingship lies over the eschatological horizon. For this Wills called me an idolator.

The key figure in this discussion remains, so far as I am concerned, St. Augustine. The political theology he “discovered” remains the single most important breakthrough in Christian history on this issue. I have written about it elsewhere in response to a particular “Girardian” view of history which seems to be taking hold over at First Things (a view which it may be beneficial for us to discuss), and the summary may be of use to our discussion:

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In practical terms this becomes a problem of the conflict between worldly political powers subservient to the law of nature on the one hand, and the covenant of grace made between God and his universal people through the incarnation on the other. How ought the incarnational revelation of right order under the will of God be brought to bear on the instruments of power and those who wield such instruments? The resolution of this problem is first proposed by St. Augustine and went something like this:

The City of God, his chosen people (the church), live scattered and intermingled within the City of Man (mankind as a whole). As such, they are exiles in a world which takes on the Hebraic symbol of a new Babylon. It is of vital importance to understand and keep in mind that Babylon is not a symbol of disorder—rather it is the symbol of mankind in the drama of life under the will of God absent the special revelation of the covenant. The City of God shares in and has a special role to fulfill in this drama—it participates in the natural drama of life ordered under the will of God within the City of Man. Neuhaus draws on the Augustinian imagery for his project by citing Augustine’s exhortation to the church (quoting Jeremiah quoting God exhorting the exilic Jews): “Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its peace you will find your peace.”

The City of God must pay its debt to nature, but it tempers its participation with the covenantal experience of knowing that this mixing of the cities will not last forever and that there remains a higher law of the spirit; it places hope for its full historical satisfaction beyond the eschatological horizon. While the covenantal representative can participate with the city of man in the struggle for order under the law of nature, he does so knowing that the process involves him in compromise and disorder when measured against the covenantal revelation of grace in the Incarnation. By necessity, the covenantal representative can pursue cosmic justice under nature’s laws but never without generating the experience of tragedy by which the natural law is leavened with Christian guilt, responsibility, confession, penance, mercy, and the symbolic drama of participation in the sacramental overcoming of evil with good which represents the final reality of that conquest which is yet to come. Augustine writes, “How much more mature reflection it shows, how much more worthy of a human being it is when a man acknowledges this necessity [such as war and torture made necessary by life under the law of nature] as a mark of human wretchedness, when he hates that necessity in his own actions and when, if he has the wisdom of devotion, he cries out to God, ‘Deliver me from my necessities!’”

… By recognizing and articulating clearly the source, location, and function of both the natural law and the Christian law, and by understanding them as mixed in an age that was passing away but which contained “loved things held in common,” Augustine made a key breakthrough in the development of political theology which in its fundamental form remains valid today—a penitent, tragic political theology bound to pay an ongoing debt to nature yet cemented by a love that is both universal and particular: it transcends the City of God and orders all mankind; it is also concerned with the things of this world—“the things which are passing away”—and not with the things to come. However, this Augustinian balance has always been precarious. When the tension between the natural law and the Christian law collapses, the result is a disordering pressure either towards a rolling back of the protective shadow of the Christian law and engagement in the world wholly under the stark glare of nature which rewards only power and results in open tribal and political conflict, or towards a Gnostic denial of the reality of the law of nature and ideological attempts to remake the present age into the age to come.