Perils of the Constitutional Church and recovering friendship as the first political virtue

Caleb Stegall

But Littlefield’s great value was as a spiritual example. Despite his strange learnings he was as strict a Presbyterian and as firm a Republican as George F. Babbitt. He confirmed the business men in the faith. Where they knew only by passionate instinct that their system of industry and manners was perfect, Dr. Howard Littlefield proved it to them, out of history, economics, and the confessions of reformed radicals.

- Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt

It is written, When the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch: wherefore, in such circumstances, may it not sometimes be safer, if both leader and led simply–sit still? Had you, anywhere in Crim Tartary, walled in a square enclosure; furnished it with a small, ill-chosen Library; and then turned loose into it eleven hundred Christian striplings, to tumble about as they listed, from three to seven years: certain persons, under the title of Professors, being stationed at the gates, to declare aloud that it was a University, and exact considerable admission-fees,–you had, not indeed in mechanical structure, yet in spirit and result, some imperfect resemblance of our High Seminary. I say, imperfect; for if our mechanical structure was quite other, so neither was our result altogether the same: unhappily, we were not in Crim Tartary, but in a corrupt European city, full of smoke and sin; moreover, in the middle of a Public, which, without far costlier apparatus than that of the Square Enclosure, and Declaration aloud, you could not be sure of gulling.

- Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus

I have been observing the discussion here over the past few days with interest, and it has occurred to me that there a few things which need to be said. These things may at first seem unrelated, but I hope by the end the connections will be apparent. Warning: this will be long. I will try not to inflict many more words on readers of this blog from this point forward.

First, several postings have attracted the insistent chatter of a few theonomists who would like to see Catholics and Mormons run out of the country and, presumably, gallows on every corner for the multitude of Thomas Aikenheads in our midst. These kinds of comments cannot be repudiated strongly enough. They are premised on faulty philosophy, faulty exegesis, faulty theology, faulty anthropology, faulty history, and lead to disordered souls derailed from and in revolt against the truth.

Second, many commenters have appealed to the sphere of marriage/family for the claim that Christian law can be extended outside of the church. However, these comments do not properly reckon with the way the law of the spirit as initiated by Jesus and interpreted by Paul does not include marriage or even family as we understand it. Marriage and family arise under what I have been calling the “law of nature” (or Lewis’s Tao)—this is basic self/tribe preservation stuff, be fruitful and multiply, etc. The law of nature in situations of Bedouin scarcity even permits polygamy as a means of increasing the tribe. But Paul/Jesus’s treatment of marriage and family comes in the form of an almost grudging concession to the ongoing debt we owe the law of nature, but it is a concession which will not be carried over with the full coming of the kingdom of the spirit.

Jesus says there will be no marriage in that kingdom. Even now, Jesus demands loyalty to and identity with his kingdom, a loyalty which clearly trumps family/tribe loyalties which are the highest bonds of the law of nature. Paul cements this in his battles over circumcision with Peter and James. That battle, properly understood, is all about which law is superior, the law of nature or the law of the spirit. Had Paul not prevailed, it is unlikely Christianity would have ever emerged from the shadow of Judaism. By the same token, Paul allows for marriage but says he wishes everyone would be single because that would be so much better, and marriage is really just an outlet for the spiritually weaker (who he realizes are most of us). To be unmarried is superior. In this, he again follows Jesus’s lead. Paul strikes me as a man struggling to reign in his impatience, knowing as he does that not all men are capable of living as spiritually intense lives as he, but all the same wishing that they could. Still, Paul knows, or suspects, that he cannot abandoned any concern for faithfulness across generations (Jesus may not be coming right back). So he salvages marriage by imbuing it with the spiritual metaphor of Christ and the Church, however, even this may jeopardize the generational and tribal function of marriage and family under the law of nature (see falling and failing Christian birthrates as a result of overemphasis on the spiritual significance of marriage).

Just as the church cannot urge everyone to follow the Sermon on the Mount to the letter, the church also cannot urge everyone to celibacy. The very human law of preservation dictates that all cannot live under the full glare of spiritual intensity created by the law of the spirit. The church would collapse. Who would pay the pastor!? This is pretty fundamental to my argument and is why Christianity has to be understood as eschatologically impatient, and why we have to insist that Christians are not wrong to submit to the law of nature, which is a concession to the contingencies of time and a restraint on impatience.

My third, related observation has to do with the language and symbols of this discussion and what I take to be a particular weakness of modern theologies, theologians, and the Reformed church in general. (Let no one say I aim too low).

Much of the discussion uses terms like “natural law” which we assume refer to “real” “objects” or things that are “out there” and can be perceived if only the right tools are applied. This problem is symptomatic of the larger disease of modern theology (which, incidentally, is also the problem with our modern jurisprudence): that its practitioners believe their work uncovers something called “Truth.” Whether it is a liberal, progressive, evolving, small-t truth or a calcified, objective, unchanging, capital-T “Truth,” the resulting pathologies are at root the same: God becomes a laboratory specimen with a DNA to be either mapped and guarded or mapped and modified. It goes without saying, of course, that the lab technician remains untouched by either procedure.

The practice of the theologians, as it has always properly been understood, is not to uncover and defend truth (that is the sole province of the Church), but rather it is a process of discreet uncovering of oneself and others in service of wholeness, health, and prudential wisdom. In classical understanding, theologians knew that they were in the business of creating secondary inspirations that served as “filters” through which the faithful (themselves included) could be exposed to the rawer and more immediate human experience of THE inspiration that Jesus is Lord (and I am not). So long as the secondary inspirations (such as the entire theological scaffolding erected around “the law”) restore and preserve a faithful openness and proper tension in the soul towards The Inspiration while also insulating us from its terrifying implications, they produce health and wholeness. Which is to say, they produce the strength to suffer in faith, hope, and love. We cannot all be Desert Fathers, and if we could, there would be no need for theology. Even Moses, after all, saw only God’s hindquarters.

Theology departments and religious colleges (and blogs which aspire in some ways to do the same thing) cannot operate this way. The derailing pressures of these “discursive” endeavors can hardly be overstated. They are birthing centers for atheists: both the practicing kind and those in denial. They can only be saved if they become monastic communities (there goes the blog), scrap systematics, and teach history. Not until students achieved a high level of orthopraxic ascesis and a solid grounding in historical reality would they be allowed to study the classic theological texts.

Here is an observation about the declension from Calvinism to Atheism which was occasioned by being a veteran of many “evolution vs. intelligent design” battles. Upon reflection, it occurred to me that Intelligent Design, with its demiurge designer deity, is an attractive heresy principally to those Christians with a reflexive and unreflective Calvinist streak (neocalvinists, anyone?). ID tries to establish philosophically a case for deism, with the idea that one need not stop there theologically.

With its proto-modern anthropology and weak ecclesiology, Calvinism tends to divorce the community of men from one another and from God the father, promoting instead an intense focus on individual sin under the judgment of an all-powerful and inscrutable God. The problem, of course, is not a recognition of divine wrath and judgment, or the acknowledgment of individual sin, or that God isn’t inscrutable, but that all those things (which are all related to how we understand the law) can become horribly twisted when preached from a standpoint of enlightenment anthropology and ecclesiology.

Historically, this is how things have played out: Calvinism bred Deism which bred Atheism and a multitude of ever more marginal reaction and reform movements seeking secure ground in and between the extremes of neo- and paleo-Calvinism, with Evangelicalism arising as a somewhat post-Calvinist solution that sometimes borrows from both ends.

Bernard Cottret, in his biography of John Calvin,

portrays Calvin through the eyes of the harassed Genevans who resisted and opposed him, either by breaking wind and playing skittles during his sermons, or by opposing “f***ing predestination.” “This is undoubtedly the most perfect summary of Calvin’s theology: God speaks, God chooses, God summons,” he says. “Calvin’s God was an absolute sovereign,” choosing and rejecting arbitrarily. This God, “equipped with a square and a compass,” paved the way for the God of the Deists. “Calvin’s God was a tidy God” for whom “cleanliness was next to godliness,” giving rise to Puritan concerns for purity.

Popular reception of Calvin and the various reformational splinters of the 16th Century gives a very different picture from the received wisdom of the “history of ideas” approach which narrates the reformation through a few leaders and big books. Of course this messy patchwork was itself the seedbed giving rise to the reformation. The situation of huge diversity in belief and practice all over Europe as key intellectual issues came to a crisis amid mass publishing, urbanization, and state centralization was both the genesis and mode of discovery of disunity.

The paradox of the reformation was that new instruments of control and communication made unprecedented levels of unity conceivable and possible, thereby rendering the old unified-pluralist order of Christendom eradicable and thus unacceptable. That is to say, it could be refused and so it was. The end result was the amplification of old divisions, and not a few new ones, arising out of the quest for unity. The catholic church can’t be understood as ‘christian’ or ‘united’ in the protestant, legal-textualist sense, and protestant unity devolved to mutual acquiescence in necessarily legal confessions: the advent of the Constitutional Church; the church as an “idea” rather than a fraternal existence with one another and with God under his will.

Calvin’s big error wasn’t theological per se. Theology is always secondary. It was political, anthropological, and ecclesiological. His soteriology was essentially Augustine’s, and could have fit quite comfortably within the forgiving confines of Romish unity (and still does in some forms). It was Calvin’s insistence on the possibility of a real break from Rome without claiming catholicism (as Luther and the English did), resulting in a constitutionalized faith, which played into the hands of the burgeoning deism of enlightenment philosophes, especially the moderate Anglo-American ones who didn’t themselves believe but continued to push protestantism on the masses as a good thing to inculcate the democratic ideals of the new constitutional man, keeping him working hard, and within the confines of the law. The result is depleted theology wherein God’s main role is “Guarantor of the Moral Order.” Which is, coming full circle, exactly the purpose to which most Christians attracted the ID deistic designer put him: to maintain a legal ground from which to condemn homosexuals, etc.

The following account of this theological declension and deformation by an Anabaptist scholar and friend of mine, Thomas Heilke is instructive. Heilke’s account of Calvin’s recovery of institutional community following the disruptions of the reformation is a description of the constitutionalizing of all modern relationships:

Calvin appears unable to conceive of friendship as something more than a relation of pleasure or utility in the course of a life in which we move not toward moral excellence and maturity in that excellence, but toward the overwhelming experience of the grace and election of God that descends upon the solitary individual.

To be sure, friendship, like justice, temperance, fortitude, and prudence, are means by which God preserves society, even through the unbeliever, but these good works can all be executed through bad motives, and none are worthy of regard apart from the grace of God. In what way friendship preserves order Calvin does not say. His recovery of a language of politics from its Lutheran demise is a recovery toward authoritarian forms of rule, both in his ecclesiology, as I have noted, and in his account of civil government in the final chapter of the Institutes. The vocabulary of that chapter includes rule and magistracy, law and obedience, sovereign decree and individual conscience, but rarely concord and never friendship. Government may exist to promote piety, but this promotion is doctrinal and institutional, not convivial, effected through common peace and security, and laws that safeguard public manners.

It is possible, finally, to be admitted to [the] friendship of God, but not by any action that we may undertake. On the contrary, though we may be redeemed by Christ, still, until we are engrafted into union with him by the calling of the Father, we are darkness, the heirs of death, and the enemies of God. What the substance of friendship with God, once we are elected to it by God, consist of Calvin does not say. Indeed, Calvin leaves his reader with the distinct impression that friendship is nothing other than that status of election itself. It is in its motives, not its outward appearance, that a deed of virtue, including friendship, is distinguished from one of vice. The friends and family of God are the Church, which has this status by dint of God having elected each individual member individually to divine grace. The substance of such friendship is exhibited in specific acts of obedience, but these acts do not bring us closer to a sovereign, omnipotent and omniscient God in the way that common experience tells us acts of mutual kindness, support, or understanding can deepen or solidify friendships. We cannot be fellow-workers of God except in the sense that God imputes to Himself any acts of His people that display His benevolence. [….]

One might summarize the Protestant socio-political and ecclesiastical problem by suggesting that it reduces to determining how to bring Protestant man back to a consciousness of community after having first encouraged his individualism. In this Luther was largely unsuccessful, but Calvin was not. With his conception of a triangular relationship of ruler, people, and the law, he was able to re-establish the idea of the institutionalized community, but, in my estimation, this idea never recovered the substance of the friendship idea that had animated so much of earlier political conceptions. [….]

In the conceptions of political friendship that take their cue from Aristotle and even the Stoics, virtue friendship is understood to be an activity of improvement—friends make each other better, more complete in virtue. For Calvin, and especially Luther, the sphere of politics can play no such role; oddly (at least until we consider carefully their theologies of divine grace), the church cannot or does not fully play such a role, either. In the accounts of friendship that Aristotle and Aquinas have left us, “the quality of our friendships and the quality of our moral lives are inseparable.” Calvin or Luther may have believed this, but they don’t say so, and I suspect that they did not, in fact, believe it. Their estimation of the quality of a moral life was bound up in the terms of duty, law, command, and grace, not in accounts of a friendship with God or of human beings one with another in which one could give a narrative account of the constitutive elements of one’s own or another’s good and in which that good is understood as something attained in the ongoing development and practice of virtue. Absent an account of human telos that contains a developmental narrative and not merely grace-infused, rule-bound acts in response to commands, the “quality” of a friendship may be judged in utilitarian terms, but not under the terms of its effects on the moral quality of a moral life.

So too is the quality of man’s relationship with God reduced to utilitarian terms by Christians when they are intent on showing acts of God as fully consonant with the heavenly constitutional order, and in turn showing this deistic God’s dutiful submission to the divine calculus of sin and punishment as the necessary support undergirding our own mortal constitutional order.

To pile irony upon irony, the end result of Calvin’s denuded accounts of man, God, and the law, is a declension not just of religious man, from Christianity to various post-Christian deisms, agnosticisms, and atheisms, but also of political man from self-sufficient freeman and bulwark of a convivial order of fraternal interdependence to dependent and servile victim and suckler on the constitutional teat. To be a member of the post-Christian constitutional community is to be saved not by friendship but by election, which quickly becomes entitlement and birth-right. Such a political order must, by necessity, end in the many universalisms of the protestant church, both outright religious universalism and the more restrained universalism of civil religion which stops at national borders. The lesson remains that inevitably, any theology separated from the church and the sacraments and the hard-assed structures and communities of praxis goes rotten. And so we come full circle back to Aristotle and Augustine.