Our Historical Impasse Caleb Stegall Following up…

Caleb Stegall

Our Historical Impasse
Caleb Stegall

Following up on my last post, I want to specifically make what is I think the most important yet typically overlooked point for these kinds of discussions. It is very easy for such discussions to move into the comfortable realm of theological abstractions. As Bill commented below: “does the Bible teach that Jesus Christ is King over the Nations in His mediatorial offices or in His essential being as the second person of the Divine God-head?” This question may be worth pursuing, however, to be honest I’m not really sure what it means nor do I have a great deal of interest in the possible answers. This may be because in part I do not think the Bible will shed a great deal of light on the question, but it is also because such questions direct us away from the most important consideration which is, I think, history itself.

Augustine’s notion of the two cities was formed at a time of imperial collapse and oppression (or potential oppression) of the people by barbarians run amok. Augustine clearly saw both the instability of empire and the essential goods of security, peace, and order that it protected. He argued thus for a decentralized system of small states organized around communal loved things held in common—a community of communities, just as a community is a gathering of families—existing under the “sacred canopy” provided by the church. This is essentially the model achieved in the middle ages.

Consider Luther on the other hand. He developed a similar system of two kingdoms arguing that civil government is a result of sin yet the order it provides is such a good that insurrection against its evil, even in extreme forms of civil tyranny, is not permitted. But as a friend of mine recently pointed out to me, Luther’s two kingdoms is situated is a vastly different historical context: ascendant centralizing empires cut loose from the sacred canopy and oppressing the citizenry. What difference does that make? A difference of the whole, I suggest.

Simply put, the difference between Augustine and Luther is the Reformation. It is imperative in this discussion to come to terms with and to understand the Reformation not as a theological or even ecclesiological event, but primarily as a political event. In Debora Shuger’s excellent book on the English Reformation called Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance she quotes Paul Tillich’s statement that “the Middle Ages were dominated by one problem, namely, to have a society which is guided by a present reality of a transcendent divine character. … This was the problem of the Middle Ages — to have the holy present.” Shuger goes on to describe how the medieval church was attacked in the Reformation precisely at those points of most clear visible manifestations of holiness. She then restates the matter:

Viewed one way, Protestantism represents a denial of the need for visible, institutional holiness. In opposition to Catholics like Sir Thomas More who stressed the visibility and continuity of the Roman church, Protestants tended to redefine the “holy, catholic, and apostolic church” of the Creed as the invisible church of the predestined. Thus the church could not be identified with any specific historical church: it was not an institution but “the whole multitude of the faithful.” The split between Spirit and structure appears most clearly in the Radicals, who, according to Luther, supposed they had “swallowed the Holy Spirit feathers and all,” and therefore denied the need of any official (that is, clerical) church.

The great unsolved catastrophe of the Reformation as a political event, however, was that the largely successful attack on the medieval locus of transcendence did not obviate the need within society to have some point of contact with the holy and divine; or with what Voegelin called the “ground of being.” Historically the Protestant church has tried to relocate the ground of existence in one of two places: either in a secularized institutional form, usually the state, or in the radically atomized heart of every individual. As a result, the history of the Protestant church is in part one of being manipulated by and put in the service of either state or individual. This has repeatedly led, in simplified terms, to either some form of collectivism or some form of liberalism, each tending towards more radical expression over the course of time.

Either way the Reformation ended the decentralized community of communities envisioned by Augustine and paved the way for centralized nation-states which have, over the last 500 years, negotiated the tension between radical collectivism and radical individualism by becoming both: the modern managerial therapeutic bureaucratic state we now inhabit. The churches were first manipulated into organizations of nationalistic fervor with the end result of massive state interference in church matters as was experienced by the Scottish Covenanters, and later manipulated into organizations of individual retreat and self-actualization with the end result of creating docile citizens well-suited to inhabit the centralized state.

By the time the churches realized what political earthquakes had been set off by the Reformation, the Covenanters and other oppressed sects had little choice but to rebel and radicalize in either a Donatist (Anabaptist) direction or a Constantinian/New Israel (Covenanter/Puritan) direction. Both are radicalized against the Augustinian penitent political theology because neither can afford to admit any notion of “relative justice” in a world of loved things held in common which is passing away. Both are further radicalized into a unique doctrinal amalgam of authoritarianism-and-personal freedom that has yet to really be resolved, but is, in my view, the particular bane of the evangelical church today.

All of this is, of course, by way of my off-hand summary and certainly oversimplifies and fails to account for many things I’m sure. I have a great deal of sympathy for the impossible historical situation of the Covies. And I think it is fundamentally the same situation we find ourselves in today.