As regular readers are no doubt aware, my sympathies in this discussion lie with Darryl’s thesis, especially with respect to the dangers of theocratic and Kuyperian dreaming. However, I keep coming up against what appears to me to be a contradiction within that thesis which, as I see it, risks allowing Darryl’s admirable body of work to bleed out rather slowly. In the comments below, Darryl sums up the creed of the hesitant or conflicted Christian liberal rather succinctly:
Is the church today any worse off than at the time when Paul was telling Christians to be subject to the authorities God had ordained? This question isn’t about the health of the church. It’s about the freedom of Christians to worship and serve God as they seek. The fairly obvious answer is that Christians enjoy far more freedoms and benefits than the early Christians did. … Yes, liberalism has its problems, as did Nero’s government. Do I like cell phones, air travel, or bans on smoking? Of course not. Even worse, do I think abortion is a terrible evil that even pragmatically makes no sense given the bloated budget lines sustaining middle-class entitlements? Yes, emphatically. But despite all of modern liberalism’s woes, I am hard-pressed to understand how the current state of affairs restricts the ministry of word and sacrement, the discipline of the church, the catechizing of covenant children, or the administration of diaconal assistance, the things that Scripture calls Christians to do while waiting for the return of their Lord.
Actually, I rather think the question is about the health of the church, and about the manner in which liberalism undermines that health. I haven’t seen an adequate account of or even a grappling with the deep ways liberalism is antithetical to Christianity in Darryl’s rendering of the church/politics question. Rather, the account we have seems to boil down to: liberalism gives the church freedom to worship and preach, and even though it also gives freedom to abortionists, etc., it is the best possible arrangement in this world through which we are pilgrims. From that point, the discussion almost always focuses on the latter half of the liberal bargain. And I agree with Darryl that the freedom liberalism grants to wrongdoers is not an existential threat to the church. But what gets missed in this discussion is what is, to me at least, the far more important question which concerns the first half of the bargain: is the form of freedom offered the church by the liberal order good for it? I don’t mean to reduce the question to a simple contrast between 21st Century America and Nero-style persecution, here, but rather to ask: is the order of the liberal soul compatible with Christianity?
To this question, Darryl seems to take the side of American whiggish thinkers (who seem in most senses not to be his natural allies) such as RJ Neuhaus and Chuck Colson who say, basically, with a few caveats here and there, “yes,” it is compatible. In my observation, these are thinkers who, when asked to survey the health of the American church, will by and large affirm the basic health of large-tent evangelicalism in its current form. This is, I think, the only tenable position to take: if you are basically comfortable with the liberal order, then you better be willing to accept the current evangelical mish-mash of the American church. The two are joined at the hip. However, I don’t think it makes any sense to affirm the former and lament or reject the latter. Here is a passage worth considering:
Shannon would no doubt agree with Allen Guelzo who wrote in a recent Books & Culture review of John T. McGreevy’s Catholicism and American Freedom that “Catholics might be better advised to forget assimilation to a culture drunk with autonomous individualismâ€â€“culture as choice–“and be content with Catholicism’s own authentic strangeness.†Guelzo comes close to suggesting what Shannon might have added himself: the “secular†norms of “individualism†and “choice†have such purchase among conservative, observant Protestants–the sort who are often keen to denounce “secularism†and “liberalsâ€â€“that Alan Wolfe is correct in The Transformation of American Religion when he deems them “harmless†to the dominant liberal order.
Readers of The New Pantagruel will not be surprised to find that Wolfe’s thesis finds little resistance here. Father Richard John Neuhaus, captain of the First Things ship, however, has consistently railed at Wolfe, calling him “the Alfred E. Neuman of the sociology of American religion.†Neuhaus has also suggested more than once in “reviews†with very little analysis that Wolfe’s perceived failure to understand his subject inheres in his status as “a secular Jew.â€
I agree with Neuhaus, pace Wolfe, that the assimilation of traditional Christians to the secular status quo is not a good thing for either the Church or the culture. Nevertheless, with serious questions about the integrity of religious traditionalism in general and of Protestant Evangelicalism in particular emerging in First Things and fellow-traveller publications, Neuhaus might do well to ask if he isn’t rather prejudicially shooting the messenger. But no–even when the otherwise admirable David Brooks failed to trash Wolfe’s book in The New York Times, this was clearly due to some lapse on Brooks’ part, and it became another occasion for Neuhaus to snipe at Wolfe. Playing the resentful victim who can never be understood by “outsiders,†Neuhaus’s animated reactions to Wolfe’s presumed “snobbery†resemble the reactions of other cultural minorities who seethe at any criticism from outside the family–criticism that they are quite able to accept from “their own people.â€
As Neuhaus observes in his review of The Transformation of American Religion, “thoughtful evangelicals readily admit that their religious world offers a target-rich environment,†and Wolfe’s book “contains considerable truth.†Nevertheless, it is enough of a “caricature†to be dismissed as “superficial sociology of superficial religion–or, more precisely, of religion that the author is determined to construe as superficial.†Or–maybe Evangelicalism really is superficial! Considerably superficial? Nuance and self-critique is not the forté of what McCarraher has called “the embedded intellectual.†Signs of malaise and ideological familiarity indeed!
The sickness reaches also to Books & Culture editor John Wilson as he gushes over Robert Putnam, Lewis Feldstein, and Don Cohen’s book, Better Together. Writing in Christianity Today, Wilson claims that Better Together’s study of Rick Warren’s Saddleback megachurch indicates “[t]he unmistakable conclusion … that evangelicals can be trusted at the civic table.†They’re generating social capital, and what’s more, they’re still maintaining evangelistic agendas. This is supposed to silence the cautionary critics, “notably disciples of theologian Stanley Hauerwas,†who hold that Evangelicals “have been co-opted by the imperial state.†In a complete non-sequitur which does violence to the real arguments offered by Hauerwas and others, Wilson closes his article by posing Jesus–“a man who dined with tax collectors and all kinds of riffraffâ€â€“as a “precedent†over against those who don’t “believe that [Christians] should strive to have a place at the civic table.†I suspect that the civic tables Wilson, Warren, Neuhaus and other Christian culture elites sit at are not populated by riffraff. More appropriate would have been a response to Wolfe’s sense that Evangelicals are selling out their patrimony.
I am under no illusions concerning Wolfe’s place in this debate. He is clearly of the mind that the civic table is a good and necessary thing; a “civilizing†influence on the fervent passions that are prone to grip sectarians such as Hauerwas. Thus, like Neuhaus and Wilson, Wolfe dislikes Hauerwas’s adversarial rancor. Wolfe much prefers what he calls the phenomena of Evangelical “Salvation Inflation.†In an interview with Michael Cromartie for the March/April 2004 issue of Books & Culture, Wolfe says that in the Rick Warren mode of post-traditional Protestantism, “more Americans than ever proclaim themselves born again in Christ, but the lord to whom they turn rarely gets angry and frequently strengthens self-esteem.†“People confess fewer and fewer sins, and are rewarded with more and more.†This, to Wolfe, represents a positive development within Christianity, making its adherents better civil citizens of a pluralistic democracy. Wolfe’s manner is strikingly reminiscent of a colonial governor writing home with condescending delight to describe the natives’ halting embrace of the modern world.
Accompanying the Books & Culture interview, Wolfe received an appreciative but anxious review of The Transformation of American Religion from R. Stephen Warner. Warner prompts readers to avoid Neuhaus’s histrionics and give Wolfe a charitable reading in the I’m OK-You’re OK Evangelical way where every critic is ultimately an okely-dokely heckuva nice guy. (Translation: we ignore whatever he says that rubs us the wrong way or try to put a positive spin on it.) For in Warner’s review, truth and accuracy in analysis take a back seat to pop psychology’s language of diplomacy: Wolfe is “well-intentioned,†he has “new evangelical friends,†and he does a fair job of understanding them. Wolfe is “sensitive to [Evangelicals’] vulnerability to his scorn.†Hence, when Wolfe uses negative terms to describe Evangelicals, it is because he “respects†them “too much not to share with them his disdain for the way many of their number flirt with the worst of American pop culture.†On the other hand, Warner wishes that Wolfe had talked about other, more progressive Evangelicals, such as those who took in Central American refugees in the 80s and helped “delegitimate Reagan-era counterinsurgency policies.â€
Warner’s review works the way he thinks Wolfe’s book works–not primarily as a real analysis but rather as a negotiation between secularists and Christians. Warner’s main anxiety about Wolfe’s book is not that its analysis of Western Christianity is badly mistaken but that it is inconvenient for the cultural-political agendas of Christian “movement†literature like Books & Culture: “Wolfe’s well-intentioned purpose to allay mutual fears and disarm recriminations on the part of his two audiences would have been better served if the theme of capitulation had not been such a relentless drumbeat. As it is, he lends support to those who see an eschatological slippery slope instead of a perennial tightrope in every instance calling for their cultural discernment.â€
Again, perhaps the point is capitulation, and perhaps it is an accurate point. Can it penetrate the hardened positions and hardened arteries among movement personalities–the passive-aggressive approach at Books & Culture on the one hand and Neuhaus’s aggressive-aggressive approach at First Things on the other?
This is hitting below the belt. But let me gird up my loins and try to offer a response, even if high-pitched.
On the one hand, my defense of the liberal order is designed to out would-be transformationalists and theocrats about their own comfort with such an order. If they don’t want to shut down Mormon temples or Roman Catholic cathedrals, then their lament about liberalism and secularism strikes me as inauthetic, bordering on kvetching.
On the other hand, I would hate to be seen as a shill for evangelicalism or in bed with Colson, Wilson, Neuhaus and company in celebrating a social order that enables evangelicalism. I concede Caleb’s point that autonomous individualism is not good for genuine Christian devotion of any paleo kind. The freedom to choose is at odds with Christ’s yoke. And I think I am as close to being opposed to modernity as Caleb is (though I have to admit his living in Perry involves more anti-modern umph than my residing in Philadelphia).
Yet, I am not sure what the alternative is. That is, I have trouble conceiving any social order that comports with the Calvinist soul. Is it Geneva circa 1560, Edinburgh circa 1700, or Philadelphia around 1785? It certainly wouldn’t be Geneva in 1450, Edinburgh in 1550, Paris in 1680, or Rome anytime prior to 1850. And that is the rub. Whenever you have toleration for Calvinism, you also have toleration for other faiths and a recognition of individual autonomy of some kind. I see no way around this dilemma, unless Caleb wants to offer Kansas in the era of Carrie Nation as a fitting environment for Reformed faith and practice. Good luck getting a drink.
One of my cheers (totaling two) for liberalism is that it grants autonomy not merely to individuals but also to mediating institutions like families, neighborhoods, churches, schools, etc. In which case, I’d argue that the Stegal household is not a bad environment for the Stegal boys to grow up. Take the Stegal family and put them in the Low Lands in the 1680s and I’d worry about the viability of the Stegal parents to rear their children in the faith once delivered to John Calvin.
Liberalism has done better and worse with mediating authorities. During the time of the Articles of Confederation and the U.S. constitutional order prior to 1865, families and local authorities had more power than after a Civil War that launched America’s rise as a super power. So while I see the problem of liberalism, I also think the liberal social order has different expressions and that some of those are better for Christians than others.
But in the end I am enough of an amillenialist to affirm that Christians will not be at home in any social order this side of glory. We are pilgrims and strangers and neither a monarchy, a republic nor a liberal democracy will provide Christians with a home in which they are completely at ease. I am of the opinion that efforts to Christianize the social order or to recussitate Christendom will lead Christians to be more at home in this world than they should be. I hope this does not make me a cultural relativist. I believe I can recognize the superiority of times and places. But none of those times or places approximates the new heavens and new earth.
One last thing, yes, evangelicalism has thrived on modernity. But modernity was also witnessed the flourishing of Old School Presbyterianism in ways that the old world could not imagine. (I would even venture the suggestion that Covenanters have fared better in the New World than the Old.) My hope is that Christians, with the liberty they enjoy, will use it to form strong families, communities and churches that will contrain their freedom. That likely sounds naive. But without that hope, I can only despair.
Darryl, it was not meant as a cheap shot!
I hear what you are saying, but I think the “what other alternative is there?” response is somewhat toothless in the face of what I would suggest is an existential threat (what I am calling the liberal soul). I do think the hope that the church can cobble itself together in any healthy way with men whose souls are strenuously pressured towards disorder six days of the week is vain.
The alternatives are not as limited as Christendom vs. A Secular Faith. You write that you have trouble conceiving any social order that comports with the Calvinist soul, and link this with the idea of church as a “mediating institution” within the liberal polis. Isn’t this the failed Berger/Neuhaus gambit? There is at least one other possibility that has not been fully vetted (at least in the conservative Calvinist (back)waters of this discussion). That is the “church as polis” view of theorists as diverse as Hauerwas to David Schindler. In this view, the church itself is the “social order” within which men develop Christian souls. I suppose the most talked about advocate of this is the neo-benedictine Alisdair MacIntyer. This posits a church which is, as Guelzo put it above, content with its own authentic strangeness. Perhaps Calvinism with its long remembered antipathy to everything smacking of Anabaptistry and Papistry is incapable of anything but theocracy or a fully secular faith (both of which I fear are destined to be overrun–history backs me up on this claim, does it not?).
Where did my other reply go?
I will have to spend more time on this forum to get a broader understanding of where people are coming from and what has gone on before, but at the risk of deviating from the central point of discussion on this topic, I wonder if the assumed definition of theocracy as mentioned by Mr. Hart is that all of God’s law should be imposed and arbitrated by the civil magistrate.
I am very partial to a theocratic perspective, though one more akin to the Reconstructionist model than anything in what I have seen identified as Kuyperian or “neo-conservative” (c.f. in Canada the work of the Work Research Foundation), the latter giving far more lattitude to the jurisdiction or sphere of the civil magistrate than I can justify from my understanding of Scripture.
The argument I make is that a Christian theocracy is the rule of God’s law, not the rule of a person or group of people who hold absolute power as the sole interpreters of God’s law. I maintain that, as derivative of the Biblical truths of God’s sovereignty and man’s depravity, civil government must be structured in some way that reflects the principles of the division of authority and diffusion of power – essentially a “presbyterian approach,” I suppose. By the interpretive principle of “good and necessary inference” from Scripture, we can maintain that this is a Biblical demarcation between Biblically acceptable and inadmissible structure of social order.
So, while most people, including most Christians, treat the language of theocracy as synonymous with, or inherently implying, some form of dictatorship, centralised governance and even tyranny, I would argue that a Biblical “theocracy” would reflect “democratic” principles and a very non-centralised form of civil-social structure.
Whether advocates of Christian theocracy who deny the state’s role in prosecuting open false worship are right or inconsistent is a separate question. Inconsistency or fear in our current cultural and moral milieu of articulating all the logical/Biblical implications of one’s premises does not, therefore, demonstrate the insufficiency or falsity of the model being proposed, a position that could perhaps be derived from Mr. Hart’s comment that “If they don’t want to shut down Mormon temples or Roman Catholic cathedrals, then their lament about liberalism and secularism strikes me as inauthetic, bordering on kvetching”.
Caleb, no offense taken even if your shot did register pain below the belt.
I have some admiration for the church as polis model. I have in fact read Hauerwas for a higher view of the church and McIntyre for a richer understanding of tradition. But in the end, I’m neither a Roman Catholic who wants to repristinate Christedom nor an Anabaptist who thinks of the church as the only legitimate government.
I am a Protestant, a Reformed one at that, and as much as I’d like to see the church take on bigger fish to counter the acids of modernity, I can’t square it with Scripture. This is where my convictions about the sufficiency of Scripture and church power kick in. The church as polis model leads to the church making rules and laws that Christ himself has not commanded in his word. I know that sounds biblicist — which I despise — and even overly rigid. But for the church as polis to work, I’d have to grant the church authority over all sorts of affairs that I can’t square with the New Testament. Even H. Richard Niebuhr conceded that Jesus and Paul essentially had a program of religious reform, not one to overhaul all of Israel’s social, cultural and religious life.
At some point, I have to trust that Christ knew what he was doing when he only gave the church a limited set of responsibilities. I concede that it looks toothless. But I still believe that even the gates of liberalism will not prevail against the church. In the meantime, I try to be as faithful as I can be and encourage those in my congregation and communion to such faithfulness.
To Mr. Bloedow, the prosecution of false worship by the Christian magistrate may be a separate question from a democratic theocracy, but it is still the question I’m asking. And whether or not a theocracy is democratic or monarchical, I’m still not sure it will tolerate Mormonism or Roman Catholicism.
Darryl, a polis is not primarily (or even secondarily) a legislative body. It is a membership, and the church is also a membership. Or if you prefer Augustine’s definition, a polis is a group of people united by a shared love.
I have a hard time accepting your recourse to scriptural limits in this instance. Paul’s body metaphor, Peter’s “holy people” talk, the author of Hebrews describing the great cloud of witnesses: this all appears to me as setting apart the church as a distinct “people of God.” A membership will always have a particular telos which will order the membership externally and which will also order the souls of those who are members. This ordering only rarely comes in the form of positive law.
Further, it seems to me that many early Calvinists shared this view of the church as a polis, so recourse to “but I am neither anabaptist nor catholic” doesn’t seem to settle the matter either. Besides, it was never promised that the gates of hell or liberalism would not prevail against Reformed Protestantism.
All that said, I appreciate very much your humble approach, and imagine that your church and your acts of faithfulness within your church are much more like a healthy polis than you may care to admit in open argument!
Again, the discussion is confused by various shades of meaning being attached to “polis”. Caleb’s latest post has helped clarify the issues in a helpful way. If the Church is Christ’s Kingdom, the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, of course it is a polis. Membership in the church is membership in Christ’s Kingdom and subjection to His saving rule. It is the proleptic experience of our citizenship in eternal glory. Membership has its privilages… and duties.
Of course, to say the church is a polis does not destroy that fact that another polis also commands our loyalty and love. We are citizens of the city of man. Hear again, membership has its privilages and duties.
In Samuel Rutherford’s day, the lines of jurisdiction between the two kingdoms were clearly drawn but they covered the same geographic territory. Augustine would not have blinked at such a sitution. Geographic and territorial expressions of the visible church were assumed within the realm of Christendom (Roman and Protestant) and to deny them was to side with the donatists and the anabaptists.
Even in the American Colonies, even in the early American nation, church’s tended to be less gathered and more territorial. The community lived together the last 6 days of the weeks and gathered together to worship in the church on the 1st. The lines of distinction were not physical or geographic but spiritual and jursidictional. This made the christian life more organic and provided authentic community. No need for “small group” fellowships in such an environment.
As for liberalism, I cannot reject it whole cloth. I like liberty. At the heart of the liberal experiement is the pursuity of liberty. We Reformed Protestants helped birth such liberalism but, like Frankenstein’s monster, we were unable to control it.
I think this quote from Wilfred McClay is helpful:
“There are consequences to this mistaken belief. Consider some of the pathologies afflicting the world we now live in: its hard and inhuman techno-rationality; its growing disregard for the instrinsic value of human life; and its fanatical desire to conquer and manipulate nature for no proportionate purpose. Consider its shameless compulsion to make private what should be public, and make public what should be private; its willingness to put a price tag on anything for which there is a potential buyer; and its inability to conceive a higher calling in life than the pursuit of individual pleasure.
One could go on. The point is that these pathologies represent a grotesque intensification of tendencies and values that were benign, even admirable, so long as they were embedded in and restrained by a deeper set of metaphysical convictions, particularly convictions that stressed the human being is created in the image of God and is ultimately answerable, in some way, to the Creator. Virtues become vices when they are disconnected from their proper point of reference. This is precisely why experimentation cannot be a sufficient end to itself (Wilfred McClay, Is America an Experiment; Vital Remnants: America’s Founding and the Western Tradition, ed. Gary Gregg II, pg. 26-27).”
Bill, I like the McClay quote, and I don’t disagree with its point. One quibble I have is that I have come to suspect the “embedded in and restrained by” language as I think it represents a conceptual error which may account for the failure of McClay-style arguments (if you are familiar with the whole First Things corpus, this is their basic argument as well) to gain much purchase.
This way of posing the issue conceptually posits liberalism and those “deeper sets of metaphysical convictions” as essentially friendly partners in a united soul (both individual and national soul) which function like different parts of a coherent whole; parts whose functions complement one another and do not fundamentally threaten each other.
This is wrong, and I think it is important to be somewhat more Madisonian and Tocquevillian and talk about these two forces as opposed to one another and as establishing a tension within which we must live.
Bill, I too like the McClay quote. Caleb, I also think your critique is valuable and I need to think more about it. But I think you’re right.
As to the question of polis, I will concede that I may have been overly juridico-centric about it, like any good sectarian Presbyterian. I’m willing to think of it as a community of love with membership at its core. But I think Bill is right to bring up talk of territory and so bring down the membership of love to a physical entity like a place. In which case church as polis makes no sense in a car culture when Christians are no more members of a place than they are of a communion of spirit. Church as polis would seem to require churchmembers as real and literal neighbors. So unless we are willing to call Christians to live in proximity to each other, I think we should abandon the language of church as polis. Voluntary association works better (he wrote, tongue in cheek).
So unless we are willing to call Christians to live in proximity to each other
I am willing
Darryl,
You’re probably right about a genuine Christian theocracy not being able to tolerate Mormonism or Roman Catholicism, or any other false religion.
I maintain that Christianity is the source of the best civil-social model of liberty – not absolute liberty, of course; no worldview proposes absolute liberty, including libertarianism, which has some dishonest advocates in this respect – but maximum liberty in an ordered and just framework (that of God’s law, faithfully applied). Much of this is worked out by way of a decentralised, “localist” model of social order. These decentralised structures provide resistance to the non-Christian tendency (regardless of religious particulars) towards centralisation in social order (in every area of life, then tension of “the one and the many” always results in unity eventually gaining traction over diversity because diversity without a God who exists outside of the created order to hold all things together, implies anarchy, and except for the very small minority of unusual libertarians in the world at any given time, the large majority of people are terrified of anarchy and recoil from it).
Another foundational premise before I get to my point: Reformed Christians should never be debating whether or not we support the idea of theocracy. Christ is King. We live in a theocratic order, period. The issue is how does God want us to acknowledge His theocratic rule in terms of our civil-social order. What does Christ’s theocracy look like in this world? Does Christ’s kingship tolerate public expressions of idolatry and blasphemy in civil governance? It might in a Baptistic, anti-covenantal worldview, but I can’t fit such a conclusion into a covenantal paradigm.
I believe that freedom of conscience is a Christian concept. We don’t evangelise by the sword, as other religions do. The weapons of the Christian’s warfare are the Word of God and arguments that tear down intellectual and spiritual strongholds. So one can’t force people to believe the truth. But I am quite willing to accept, with further study, that faithful Christian public ethics includes the banning of at least some public expressions of false religion and even an explicitly Christian oath for public office.
The point here is that, if genuine Christianity is the best – by a country mile! – worldview implemented in culture for maximising individual liberty in an ordered and just fashion, then with the erosion of Christianity as the source of ethics for law and public policy means an erosion in individual liberty including such values as freedom of religion – as we are seeing today with the rising influence of Secular Humanism. Hence, it appears to me that we have 2 real-world options before us, either one has some restriction on religious liberty or one has the restriction of religious liberty: either that restriction on religious liberty comes at the front-end of the development of a Christian civil-social order to advance the propagation of Christendom, or one experiences the restriction on religious liberty (usually particularly Christian liberty – and Christian liberties) by non-Christians as they use liberty granted them by well-meaning, but erroneous, Christians to build up their own power and influence in the culture to the point that they start changing the laws, and doing so in a way that undermines liberty and strengthens civil-social centralisation, usually under the State.
In other words, to answer what may be the concern behind your concern, I don’t believe that Christianity champions the cause of absolute religious liberty, and Christians need to have the courage and theological clarity to be able to make this point and defend it – showing that the anti-liberty orientation of every other religion and worldview is even more ominous than the supposed threat posed by a robust Christian approach to religious liberty and public faith.
Tim, isn’t the answer to “What does Christ’s theocracy look like in this world” one word? Israel.
i.e. the Church? Tim, take a look back a couple months and read The True and Only Theocracy. Let me know what you think.
Which category will I find that under, Bill? I don’t see it ID’d as a category of its own in the list of categories on the site.
To Darryl: Not necessarily.
Tim, http://deregnochristi.org/?s=True+and+Only+Theocracy
Or just search True and Only Theocracy
Bill,
The link you gave me had a few blog submissions listed prior to the one titled “True and Only Theocracy” and I read and comment below in the order of the articles listed.
Very interesting article and helpful insights for me in “Solidarity W. H. Chellis My Brother’s Keeper? Wh…”. From a different direction, you arrive at the same principle I argued as necessary to “Christian theocracy” – division of authority – as God divided man by language, race and geography. I came at that via the principle of the Sovereignty of God and, therefore, by derivation, the claim that it would be wrong to have a political system that was hierarchical (just as we Presbyterians argue in terms of ecclesiastical structure – though I know that’s not our only argument, and perhaps not the primary one).
I will slip in here that a very helpful book I read by Gary North made a strong case for a federal relationship between nations as the alternative Biblical model to the centralization, UN structure and one-world government mentality that dominates today. I had to read the book twice to grasp much of the argumentation and should read it again, but it is certainly a model and argument that Christians in vocations where this issue is relevant should examine seriously.
You say that the example of Achen’s sin and the way it was dealt with was extraordinary because of Israel’s theocracy, but then you go on to point out that the representative nature of civil magistrates (CMs) to the people, and vice versa is an abiding principle (cf. Nineveh) – and here again I have personally benefited greatly from numerous articles and studies by Gary North where he talks about the various ways in which the principle of representation works in civilisation and does so by virtue of being a Biblical principle – so in what way, then, is the handling of Achen’s sin extraordinary?
In “RE: Agreeable to the Natural LawW.H. ChellisI h…” you mention leading a study in Proverbs in the context of your moving away from a theonomic ethic. Interestingly I was reading in Proverbs this morning as well. And there are lots of genuine equity principles there. A false witness will not go unpunished (19:9). But who should punish him? Nobody? Leave it up to God? Scripture interprets Scripture. We learn earlier that in the context of court cases, a witness who lies in court, if found guilty, must be punished with the same punishment that the person he was lying about would have received for the crime he was charged with if found guilty. Now, just because that is in the Mosaic section of the Bible, do we shun it as an inherently illegitimate application for today, or do we say, OK, we have a justice system in Canada that also depends in part for its integrity on the honesty of witnesses, so we should establish the same law to punish lying witnesses? And if not, why not? Or is the real issue simply the theoretical matter of not asserting that such an approach is THE ONLY Biblical application of the principle of punishing witnesses today? Sometimes one gets the impression from some Christians that, if an application of the moral law is found in the Mosaic law, then by definition, that is a necessarily inadmissible application outside of Israel. I’d like to put an armour-piercing bullet right the heart of that notion.
I also get the impression that some critics of theonoy, when they approach theonomy, and they see, for example, the law about putting a fence around the edge of your roof so people don’t fall off – often criticism of theonomy that I have heard suggests that those critics think that such a law requires all Christians to live in flat-roofed houses. Of course, that is nonsense: that law would apply only to those who happen to live in flat-roofed houses, which perhaps is everyone in that part of the world, and further, it is an application of a broader moral law related to our responsibilities to, with the best of our knowledge and ability, take measures to enhance safety. Most people, including Christians, would argue that such an application flows properly out of God’s moral law, hence those who don’t take such a measure deserve to face criminal sanctions and lawsuits, and probably even church discipline if they’re church members, if someone has an accident due to the lack of such a safety measure.
What about insurance? The kind of insurance options available today didn’t exist when the Bible was written. But what ethic does the concept of insurance flow out of? I know some fundamentalist Christians who think insurance is wrong because you’re not supposed to worry about tomorrow, blah, blah, blah. Yet does not the principle of insurance flow out of a recognition of the fallenness of creation and, perhaps more particularly, our human inability to know the future and, therefore, a voluntary – well, it used to be voluntary – agreement among people to attempt to manage risk? A similar realm of ethics out of which flows the previous point. I expect a theonomic and “general moral equity” reasoning process would look pretty similar on this issue and would arrive at a similar application, although there may be debate as to whether any or all insurance should be enforced or voluntary and how much insurance is “enough.”
I find your comments about the risk of a theonomic ethic being too strident and disruptive for civil governance application interesting. I suspect that such concerns flow primarily out of the hot-headed language and behaviour of some of the early recons. like North and Rushdoony than out of what they actually said. And I say this for several reasons:
1. The Recon. theonomic ethic probably advocates less civil government involvement in society than any other model of civil governance except libertarianism so it isn’t about imposing a whole bunch of laws on people that they don’t want. The only exception is the exception that divides Christians from Secular Humanist “theocrats”, and that is sexual ethics. (Sure, there are a few other things too, like the decriminalisation of some drug use, but the real conflict today and in recent decades has been over sexual permissiveness). And in this area, Christians wouldn’t find much objection from non-Secularist non-Christians – Muslims, for example. But for the most part, the theocon ethic places a primacy on self-government, and it also defines the legitimate spheres for family gov’t and church gov’t too so that a society with sufficient people committed to this ethic wouldn’t leave a whole realm of morality ungoverned (which I think is the primary misconception by Christian and non-Chr. alike, but rather governed by non-CM governmental authorities.
2. The Recons. never talk about imposing their vision on society. If someone advocating such a vision articulates it honestly in an election campaign and he wins office, he has the moral obligation by way of the ninth commandment to advocate for the values he told his electorate he would promote. And if enough people with this vision get elected to impact legislation and public policy, then they have the democratic right and responsibility to do so. In practise, in reality, this development would typically happen gradually and probably only in conjunction with a re-Christianisation of culture by way of Revival and Reformation, and that’s what Recons. who I have read suggest, so I don’t get where this spectre of tyranny and bull-in-a-china-shop approach comes from.
3. You say, “Theonomy is strong medicine. Instead of calling us to shore up a weakening Christendom it calls for radical reconstruction.” Yes and no. It advocates capital punishment – but for some crimes that still hold such a punishment at least in some states in the U.S. It advocates the criminalisation of stealing, rape, etc. that most Canadians and Americans already think should remain against the law. I know Bahnsen argues that child sexual assault should be a capital offence. I don’t know if that is universal thought in recon. theonomy, but I can hardly imagine a general uprising in either of our countries if such a penalty was imposed on child sexual assault. Particularly if it was implemented in stages, applying first to the most heinous offences. If theonomists started deregulating numerous areas, getting rid of minimum wage laws, getting out of the way of landlord-tenant relations, repealing KKKalifornia’s anti-emmissions regulations, gutting building codes, etc., they will raise the ire of a massive “anti-poverty” lobby, but any observer of politics knows that if politicians show backbone, these people soon back down. If you cut their gov’t funding, they have no grassroots support to generate the money they need to keep organising protests and shouting into the media.
Other things they could do early on that would generate far less and less broadbased opposition would be to cut spending of taxpayer dollars in all kinds of areas and reduce taxes – terminate all taxpayer funding of abortion and other services that subsidise sexual pervesion with tax dollars, including HIV-AIDS drugs (that would quickly cut the # of people practising homosexuality too), cut taxpayer funding for business, for education, for gov’t-to-gov’t foreign aid. Cut their donations to the UN. There are lots of non-theonomic people advocating for these things too. Such moves would engender new opposition, but also new support. And you don’t just do these things haphazardly. You do them progressively and thoughtfully. Just because theonomists talk the way they do, at least among what is supposed to be friendly circles, doesn’t mean they would go out and apply their ethics in the same blunt manner. Maybe some would. They probably don’t have the public face necessary to win the support in an election anyway. Critics of theonomy need to project all this discussion of theory into the real world just as much as some theonomists do instead of taking the exact subtance, tone and nature of internal theoretical debate and plonking that down conceptually in the middle of Congress and thinking that that’s how it’s going to be realised. Of course, critics and others would flee from the kind of image that conjurs up. But most people are very weak at converting theory into real world scenarios. I spend an extensive amount of time doing this and I think I do a pretty good job of thinking through and fleshing out what a real world working out of different theories, including those that may seem radical and extreme, would work themselves out in the real world and what is necessary to accomplish such goals. I think my book does that within the framework of the subject matter, and the broad-based compliments on the material and presentation from many non-reformed and certainly non-theonomic people I think attests to that fact.
I almost forgot the most important application of a family-government-respecting civil-social order: the complete elimination of all measures that impede firearms ownership.
And an additional point: consistent with the decentralised vision of recon. theonomy, many of the possible reforms I have highlighted above probably wouldn’t take place at a national level at first anyway. Fleshing out a real-world scenario, they would far more likely to take place at a state or provincial level and a local or municipal level. This is good because it would provide real-world case studies for neighbours to examine to see if they like what they see. I want to see the concept of gov’t-controlled health care rot in hell. As one who had to take his wife to the U.S, and pay out of pocket for health care because the diabolical and hellish gov’t monopoly system we have here couldn’t diagnose a double-hernia after 13 months of tests, etc., advocacy for free market health care is one of my hobbyhorses and probably will be till I die. (Another good application of Biblical ethics.) But you see ex-Soviet states in East Europe experimenting with low- and flat-taxes and seeing the benefits of it, and others seeing the benefits and competing for lower taxes because they see how they attract more business and revenue.
So, all that to say that while there may be theological concerns about the theonomic model and how theonomy understands the applicability of Mosaic law in the civil-social arena (which is still an area I have to do more study of myself and which I haven’t interacted with here), I think a strong case to counter those for whom a theonomic approach to civil-social reform strikes terror into the core of their being can be made and I think I have indicated this with my comments here.
I may say more later, I still haven’t read your actual submission titled: “The True and Only Theocracy W. H. Chellis America…”
Bill,
Where do you get the typology of Christ as Isreal in Matt. 4:1-11 – from your True and Only Theocracy post?
I don’t know if this is of interest to illustrate further the application of my worldview. This is the Commentary that I just completed and sent out as part of the bi-weekly e-letter I produce and distribute through my http://www.christiangovernment.ca website.
Commentary – German cases illustrate the threat of Secular Humanism
There’s no shortage to the reports which expose the true ruthless nature of the Secular Humanist ethic and agenda. You can see some more examples in the “Views and News” section of this newsletter.
One of the most astonishing examples of Secularism’s threat to liberty and civilization in recent months has been the German State’s attempts to enforce Hitler’s legislation against home schoolers, particularly against the Busekros family, kidnapping one of the children from her parents. Even after the issue was somewhat resolved and civil government officials backed off, the Prosecutor was still reported as wanting to throw the parents in jail.
This is a diabolical example of the State illegitimately interfering in the rightful jurisdition of family government. These parents were not guilty of assaulting their children or depriving them of the necessities of life. In terms of Biblical ethics, no lawful basis has been reported for the civil government to interfere in this sphere of family government whereby the parents are accountable directly to God for the training, nurture, discipleship and education of their children.
That’s why I call the State’s action kidnapping. Many people may feel uncomfortable accusing the State of kidnapping, but that’s exactly what took place – because the agents of the civil magistrate took the child out from under the lawful authority of her parents for no lawful reason. Not only did they do that, but they put her in a more high risk and threatening environment than what they took her from. Such is the blindness of ideology, especially anti-God, Secular Humanist ideology.
(Keep in mind that Hitler’s Nazi government was also known as national socialism. Hitler and his gang were a bunch of leftists, notwithstanding the massive political myth that has developed around the Nazis that identifies them as far-right. That’s pure, unadulterated hogwash. Hitler was a socialist. That shouldn’t be surprising.)
I’m not done yet! In the context of the unfolding of this outrageous story of the German government persecuting home schoolers, I came across another story which, when contrasted with this home schooling story, makes you wonder whether Germany deserves to be recognised as part of the civilized world today.
On March 26, I came across an article distributed through the Christian Worldview Network. It was titled “Citing Islamic law, a German Court Rejects a Petition by an Allegedly Battered Woman,” and was written by Steven T. Voigt of Foundations of Law .
This is what he reported (also footnoting a March 23 Associated Press article titled “Judge Tells Battered Muslim Wife: Koran Says ‘Men are in Charge of Women’”):
“Earlier this year, citing the Koran and Moroccan culture as bases for her decision, a German judge denied the petition of a German of Moroccan descent married to a Moroccan citizen for an expedited divorce proceeding on grounds that she was abused by her husband. In rejecting the petition, Judge Christa Datz-Winter reasoned that in Moroccan culture it is common for husbands to beat their wives and the Koran provides that ‘Men are in charge of women.’
“Understandably, Germans have expressed outrage over this decision. One German lawmaker commented ‘The legal and moral concepts of Sharia [Islamic law] have nothing to do with German jurisprudence.’ Nonetheless, in this instance, the German court’s socialist zeal to display inclusiveness toward all cultures and practices, no matter how barbaric, caused the court to effectively sacrifice its own values at the courthouse door.”
So, let me get this straight: At the same time that the German civil government is sending new-styled “Gestapo” agents after home schoolers, it is surrendering its legal and moral authority to an uncivilized Islamic law code that says a man has absolute authority over his wife, accusations of physical assault notwithstanding – because such assault happens to be part of their ethnic tradition!?!?
As Mr. Voigt noted, this decision flows out of a socialistic ethic. Secular Humanism lacks the energy to inspire faith and vision in its adherents. It’s an ideology of spinelessness. That’s why it has such a short life-span and you see it succumbing today to the multiculturalistic notion of cultural equivalency and the subsequent rise in influence of Islam in many Secularist nations and even the rise of occultism in places like England (cf. two of the stories in the “Views and News section”).
Somebody energised by a genuine Christianity moral impulse would not have succumbed to Islamic ethics, perceived or real, in this court case. Mr. Voigt noted in the conclusion of his article: “we must acknowledge that this incident in Germany is shocking to us as Americans and as Christians only because our sense of morality springs from Christianity, just as the Christian faith is the cornerstone upon which our civilization was built and today rests.” Christianity, including a Christian model for civil governance, is the only solution against the immoral and destabilising pressures from Secular Humanism and Mohammedanism.
Some may try to argue that a model which esteems family authority high enough to charge the German government for kidnapping when it takes a home schooled child away from her family would also be likely to rule in favour of an abusing spouse such as in the case noted here. But that is not true. Religion is not generic. And the theological and ethical nature of Christianity is markedly different from that of Mohammedanism. I conclude with some specific references to the Christian ethic listed by Mr. Voigt that are pertinent to the Moroccan divorce case: “See 1 Corinthians 7:3 (‘The husband should fulfill his marital duty to his wife, and likewise the wife to her husband.’); 1 Corinthians 13:5-7 (Love ‘is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.’); 1 Peter 3:7 (‘Husbands … be considerate as you live with your wives, and treat them with respect …’); Proverbs 31:30-31 (‘Charm is deceptive, and beauty is fleeting; but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised. Give her the reward she has earned, and let her works bring her praise at the city gate.’).”
That’s the ethic against which Atheist extremists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens have declared war. Do we really want to experience the “neo-barbarian” ethic they want to put in its place?
The first theonomist saved the lives of a lot of Christians!
Ambrose
In A.D. 390, a riot occurred in Thessalonica and the Roman governor, Botheric, was killed. Theodosius, the Roman emperor at the time, invited the people of the city for games and entertainment in the Hippodrome, and then had 7,000 of them slain. Ambrose, the Bishop of Milan, rose to the role of the good shepherd ready to lay down his life for his sheep. He wrote to Theodosius and told him to publicly repent for the evil he had done. Roman emperors were not in the habit of humbling themselves, and Theodosius refused Ambrose’s demand. That set the stage for the high drama that ensued. As Theodosius attempted to enter the church he attended, Ambrose literally interposed himself between Theodosius and the entrance (and hence the people, the church). Ambrose firmly believed that the emperor was under God’s law and should humble himself and serve that law. By the grace of God, Theodosius yielded. He stripped himself of his imperial insignia, entered the church and publicly called upon the Lord to forgive his sin in the matter. And the good news kept coming–Ambrose became an unofficial counselor to Theodosius, and was thus in a position to have a hand in rewriting Roman law to provide for what we now call due process. Ambrose believed, and happily Theodosius concurred, that the law of God is over the king because the King of kings of every realm is King Jesus, the one to whom the nations of the earth have been given. Who was Ambrose in the eyes of the world to stand up to the emperor of Rome? Yet Ambrose knew that God uses the weak things of the world to manifest His might. Ambrose did not know ahead of time the outcome of the stand he took, but he knew that he had to be faithful to God who is in charge of all circumstances. Because there are still influences of the common law in the United States, we are still being blessed by what Ambrose did centuries ago.
From:
The Christian Statesman – September – October 2001
Thy Kingdom Come
by Larry Pratt
Ambrose can harldy be called an adherent of Theonomy. Application of the Old Testament case law in minute detail? Not in light of the early church’s opposition to the death penalty!
Rather, a kind of national confessionalist? Silly to try to apply labels backwards. Yet, Ambrose certainly did believe that Christ’s Kingship made claims on the magistrate and his legacy is to be honored for his impact on Western Christendom.
Oh, I know it’s silly. Very this-worldly in applying Kingdom principles, though, which is also an emphasis that has been criticised here in recent days. One sees the real-world implications of good vs. bad theology with incidents like this. Also last night I read the article on Bill Edgar’s site about the RP church’s opposition to slavery. I won’t go cutting and pasting sections now, but the theology behind the stand reflects very similar thinking and, in fact, at one spot, as Bill Edgar presents Alexander McLeod’s position, he writes: “Paul’s comment that the law was made for the ‘lawless and disobedient, for menstealers,’ (I Timothy 1:9) confirms the Mosaic precept. McLeod observes: ‘He who acknowledges the morality of the eighth precept of the decalogue, will not require another proof…If he who steals my purse, my coat, or my horse, be guilty of an immorality, he cannot be innocent who robs me of my father, my brother, my wife, or my child.’13
“The Mosaic precept” – so perhaps not in “minute detail” – but not without continual moral suasion or authority. I suppose one area of debate between a theonomist and a non-th. would be whether the Mosaic capital penalty for man-stealing would be binding today.
I like the rest of Pratt’s article too. Unflinchingly post-mill, and he talked about a fellow called Jehle who I think is tied in now with Doug Phillip’s work at Vision Forum and that vision for multi-generational discipleship and cultural reform.
Although, re. eschatology, I really haven’t done a careful examination of the diff. categories and perspectives since abandoning Pentecostalism and dispensationalism years ago. So, I just loosely assume post-mill since that seems to be the only eschatology that fits with the theon. social theory.
After first being introduced to it a couple of years ago, and then putting it down for a while, though, I am re-examining the Preterism from Gary DeMar and others.
Bill,
Follow-up on True and Only Theocracy… I’m not familiar with the typology of Christ as Israel. I’d have to see what the Scriptural basis is and exactly what the nature of the type is because a type has parameters. The Church is the new Israel, so in whatever way Christ might be a type of Israel, it couldn’t be in the same relationship in which Christ is seen as Israel – Israel in relation to Israel?? That would appear to be an important point to resolve or be convinced of to deny the theonomic position.
Also, as I wrote some time earlier, unless one is a Dispensationalist who belives we are living in a paranthetical period in which Christ is not reigning as King right now in any way (apparently a lot of Dispy’s are today moving away from this position too), then we’re living under a theocracy now, and always have and always will be. The issue, then is not whether or not we live in a theocracy, but rather, how are Christians to apply in our daily lives the theocracy under which we and all creation exist? And in particular to the context of the current discussion, how does one apply this reality in our civil-social arrangements.
Bill, you conclude that article with: “In victory, Jesus Christ gathers to Himself a people to be a true theocracy. This nation is especially honored to submit to Jesus Christ as Her King and lawgiver. A holy nation, the New Covenant theocracy is privileged to acknowledge the constant covenantal presence of God. This nation, the first fruits of the new creation and a present experience of the Kingdom of God, is no longer tied to one geo-political entity. Rather, it is an international assembly inviting all nations to participate in her splendor. The theocracy of the new covenant is the Church of Jesus Christ. She is Christ’s holy nation and the fullness of our present participation in the Kingdom of God.”
I don’t see why that position is exclusive of the concept of establishing Biblical laws within national parameters. If a nation is a Biblically legitimate category (as opposed to one-world human gov’t) (just because the Church is a holy nation, does not mean that God has done away with the concept of nations as a lawful means by which people should order their civil-social lives – or to put it another way, nationalism is a sinful concept, but patriotism is not), then just as we want to govern our families and our churches and our personal lives by God’s law, we should also want to govern our nations in like fashion. Perhaps it’s the word theocracy that gets in people’s craw. I don’t know. We don’t call the rule of God’s law a theocracy in reference to church gov’t or family gov’t, even though one probably could, so maybe we shouldn’t in ref. to civil governance either. I don’t know. Those who oversee these governmental responsibilities: civil magistrates, elders and parents, do so as representatives of Christ, whereas the ultimate theocracy that you speak of is that overall reality which acknowledges the ultimate rule by Christ.
Also, without a dominion mandate, and responsibility for active moral engagement (which is basic to what cultural engagement is) does not exist for Christians living in this world, then exactly what does it mean to be a king? I thought good reformed doctrine said that all believers are prophets, priests and kings under Christ. We are vice-regents on this earth. Certainly as a Dispy, I didn’t know anything about being a vice-regent under Christ. (What does Luther say?)