Politicking Under The Influence

Available Updates On Political Theology

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Photo by Megan Nevils

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I wrote an article a year or so ago called “The Nature of State”, which was kind of a giant salad of thoughts, helping me work through my views on questions of Christian civics. Since then I have hit upon some helpful insights which I wanted to share here. This one won’t be nearly so long.

To help orient you in this landscape, I highly recommend watching Joe Rigney’s talk here:

I am a Reformed Baptist, and I would fall somewhere between the Baptist and the Classic Reformed view that he lays out. I do not agree with the Magisterial Reformers where they believed in (or were okay with) something like an established state church to govern hand in hand with the secular government. So I skew Baptist in this regard. But at the same time, I am not against the explicit acknowledgment and influence of Christian principles for governors. In fact, I’m downright for them. The overt “mere civility” and strong separation of church and state that a Roger Williams would espouse is not for me.² In that vision, no mention of the Bible or Triune God should be made in any public legislation or political reasoning.

But the line between establishment and acknowledgment does get blurry. In fact, it’s so blurry that I can’t in good conscience call it a line. It’s more of a ramp or a dimmer switch. Think of it like driving for hundreds of miles on the same road and seeing the country gradually change from close-growing pines to farmed hills. As you drive, you pass from civic systems in which a) the state has the Ten Commandments on the law books, to ones b) having an established state church, to ones that c) have founding documents which acknowledge Christian truths, to ones d) that acknowledge only theistic truths, to nations e) merely founded by Christians and which host a Christian-inflected culture, and on down the road toward totally secular and atheistic states. I would be against options a and b: I believe they are unwise and lead to all kinds of evils. How are you going to police covetousness, for instance?

State churches can quite easily become sinful, and I think are always foolish. Picture specifically Roman Catholic, or Presbyterian, or Baptist laws on the books, in such a way as to violate the consciences of faithful Christian citizens. I don’t want to ban infant baptism from the land when I could have many good Presbyterian citizens of my country. The other major consideration is that I don’t want my political leaders in charge of the official, approved, doctrines. I don’t want secular or lay leaders meddling in Church affairs. If your politicians have the ability to determine orthodoxy or legislate the Christian religion on the basis of their interpretations of Scripture (which, again, allows them to violate Christian consciences), you are not in a very secure situation; such leaders are far from safeguarding peace and righteousness in the land.

And this is the main thing. The Bible as well as the Great Christian Tradition present rulers as having the responsibility to wisely pilot the ship of state and seek safe harbor. They do this by punishing the kinds of wrongdoing they are competent to punish, where doing so will not lead to worse evils—evils such as excess strife, sedition, civil war, and so on. They are to do this by forming laws wherever possible which lead to virtue, and by promoting truth however they can, and this includes religious truth.

The primary responsibility of rulers is thus not the same as that of pastors or private Christians. Their responsibilities do not overlap at every point. Rulers (a broad term which includes any kind of legislator, governor, politician, or even citizen in a democracy like ours) are called to glorify and honor God just as much as everyone else, to be sure, but this will work itself out differently in their case.

And not all nations, not all cultures, can be governed the same way. So the wise Christian ruler of one nation might not legislate the same way as the wise Christian ruler of another nation. This is basic stuff, and was well articulated by many of the Classic Reformed thinkers, such as Althusius and Turretin, not to mention earlier thinkers like Aquinas and Augustine.

So to summarize what I’m saying so far:

1. It’s hard to draw hard lines between Christianity and the state, but we can certainly rule out legislating each and every matter of Christian conscience, and we can rule out state churches.

2. I believe in the classical idea that a governor is to promote virtue and restrain vice in his society wherever possible, and this can rightfully be done with explicit acknowledgment of Christian truths and convictions.

3. This must be done with wisdom, since the primary task of rulers is to promote justice and peace in their societies. Soul care is not the primary responsibility of politicians (or governors, citizens, and so on, as before), although if they are Christians, it must enter into their work.

These are among the insights I’ve gained recently. The final and most important insight came from, I suppose, two things: the end of Johannes Althusius’ Politica, and an article by Doug Wilson. Here’s the bit of Politica that did it:

We have said that absolute power is tyrannical. … Clearly, whoever wishes law to be superior to the king, and the king to be subjected to law, or as we have plainly said, whoever considers justice and God himself to be the supreme lord, must also grant to the associated body those things that we have attributed to the ephors. . . .³

It clicked for me that if tyranny is the will of any human person or group made absolute, then this is a blasphemous state of affairs. No king or queen, no majority of citizens, can make their will law. The wills of every person and faction in a society must be subjected to actual laws, which must stem from the Natural Law and God’s Word (two sides of the same coin, based on the twin lights of natural revelation and special revelation).

Doug’s article made a similar point, in relation to the English King and Parliament before the American Revolution. He writes:

For Christians, only God is unlimited. Because man is both finite and fallen, he dare not take upon himself the role of governmental omnipotence. But in his hubris, he keeps trying.

Some Christians are fond of saying that Christianity has nothing to say about this form of government or that one. “The church is the church, and we can function equally well under any political order.” This is radically false, because all notions of unlimited human government are essentially idolatrous. They all, by design, will set up some version of Nebuchadnezzar’s statue, and they all summon the musicians to play so that we might all know when to bow down. And when, by act of Congress, they make the statue bigger, or decree that the musicians play louder and longer, some Christians circulate in the crowd, handing out copies of Romans 13, edited and redacted, and they accuse the people who are still standing up of advocating for Christian nationalism.

To which the reply should be, “Well, I am against pagan nationalism, so yeah, you got me.”

Every Christian refusal to bow down is simultaneously a religious act of devotion to Jehovah and a political act of defiance. It all goes back to the Council of Chalcedon. Because the church at that time confessed that the union between the divine and human was found in the Lord Jesus Christ, and nowhere else, this closed off every attempt to arrange for the apotheosis of the State, the Dear Leader, the Voice of the People, or the Right Side of History. Christian political theory demands that all human governments be bounded, limited, constrained, defined, circumscribed, checked. Why? Because God is God and man is not. God is good and man is not.⁴

The whole article is worth reading.

But the idea that an unlimited human government is in its very essence idolatrous was new to me, and really got me thinking hard. It is the same insight that Althusius offers, and it’s really been the most profound thing for my political theology that I’ve probably ever come across.

1. The influence of Christianity, of course.

2. I learned of his view in Baptist Political Theology, Ch. 3.

3. Pg. 200 of Politica.

4. The full article can be found here.