The Glory of Kings: A Festschrift for James B. Jordan

Fyodor Dostoevsky
(Christian Encounters Series)

Athanasius
(Foundations of Theological Exegesis and Christian Spirituality)

The Four: A Survey of the Gospels

Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom

From Behind the Veil: The Epistles of John

Deep Exegesis:The Mystery of Reading Scripture

Jane Austen
(A Biography)

Solomon Among the Postmoderns

The Baptized Body

1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary

The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter

A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons

Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature

Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen

The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism

A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel

Against Christianity

From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution

Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy

Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper

A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament

Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature

Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays

Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life

The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church

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Politics: Empty continent

In his recent Republic of Grace, Charles Mathewes describes the widely known but still startling demographic crisis of Europe: “By midcentury, including immigration, Europe’s population is projected to be 13 percent smaller, with the working age population declining by 27 percent, and the median age increasing by a third, reaching fifty years. . . . compared to the rest of the world, European shriveling is even more prominent.  By 1950, the population of Europe accounted for about 22 percent of world population; today it is about half that, 12 percent; and by 2050, Europe’s population is expected to be about half again – 7 percent of the world. By 2050, the population of Yemen – Yemen! – is expected to exceed that of Russia.”

The continent in emptying, and aging: “Today about one-sixth of Europe’s population is sixty-five and older, but by 2030 that will be one-fourth, and by 2050 almost one-third.”  What happens to the generous pensions of European social democracies then?

Politics: Islam and Secularism

Elizabeth Shakman Hurd (The Politics of Secularism in International Relations) notes the role that Islam plays in Western views of its own secular order: “More than any other single religious or political tradition, Islam represents the ‘nonsecular’ in European and American political discourse.  This is because secularist traditions, and the European and American national identities and practices with which they are affiliated and in which they are embedded, have been constructed through opposition to Islam. . . . Opposition to the concept of Islam is built into secular political authority and embedded within the national identities with which it is associated and through which it is expressed.”

As a result, “attempts to explain relations between Europe, the United States, and the Islamic Middle East and North Africa through recourse to fixed and objectively given state interests, the characteristics of individual leaders, bureaucratic politics, the international system, or other traditional explanatory vehicles are important but insufficient. . . . secularist authority is a productive part of the cultural sensibilities and normative foundation of contemporary international relations.”  Dealing with Islam thus involves contests about the modern West’s identity, and also makes it difficult for the West to deal with what Islamic regimes actually represent.  On secular premises, the Iranian “revolution was unacceptable because it imported religion into public life,” but the revolution also reinforced Islam’s status as the Western other: “the revolution confirmed the existence of ‘natural’ linkages between Islam and theocracy in contrast to alleged natural linkages between Christianity and democracy.”

Politics Theology - Christology: Eusebian political theology

Anatolios (Retrieving Nicaea) admits that “we should not leap to the conclusion that a trinitarian theology based on ontological subordinationism, with Father and Son relating within a hierarchy of will and obedience, will necessarily lead to a monarchical political theology.”  Yet, “in Eusebius this is exactly what happens”:

“Eusebius’s account of the relation between Father and Son extends seamlessly into a comprehensive vision of reality in which the chain of being coincides at every level with a chain of willing, of command and obedience. The metaphysical, cosmic, and worldly spheres can all be encompassed by the conception of good government. Good government begins with the sovereign willing of the Unbegotten, which manifests the goodness of his nature. The primordial act of this wiling occurs when the father brings forth the Son and ‘cast[s] in him the seeds of the constitution and government of the universe.’ As the Son is vice-regent of the Unbegotten Father, so it the emperor the vice-regent of the Word. Reality is pervasively a monarchy, ordered by a chain of benevolent command a freely embraced obedience. The rupture of this order by sin has been repaired by the incarnate Word, and the emperor presides over the continuance of this redeemed order.  Earthly government now once again images the orderly hierarchical stream of divine generation.”  He cites Eusebius’s oration in praise of Constantine, chapter 3, in support.

Politics Theology - Christology Theology - Eschatology: Politics of Advent

My musings on the political import of Advent at the First Things site this morning: http://www.firstthings.com/

American Religion Politics: American political eschatology

Schmemann says that the distinctive mark of the converted Roman Empire, and of the Byzantine order, was the “state’s” acknowledgement that the end of the church was the end of all things, also then the end of the state.  The state no longer existed to promote its own ends, but to serve the end of the kingdom of heaven.

When the eschatology changes, the whole political system changes.  When America was founded on the conviction that it represented the novus ordo saeclorum, it abandoned the political eschatology of Western Christendom and Byzantium both.  Instead of promoting the transcendent and genuinely eschatological end of the kingdom of God, a nation founded as the new order of the ages can only promote itself.

In American political eschatology, we are the already. The rest of the world is the not yet.  And here we come.

News Politics: Pro-Empire Multitude

Smith argues that Hardt and Negri’s proposals for resistance to empire are insufficiently radical (FL is “libertarian freedom”):

“what the multitude desires is absolute freedom, and what the multitude opposes in Empire is its repression and restriction of freedom. But just what concept of freedom is operative in their proposal? It would seem clear, given the negative mode of formulation (freedom as a freedom from restrictions), the concept of freedom that drives both their critique and constructive vision is a most radical version of FL. But if, as I’ve tried to demonstrate above, Empire—as instantiated in the ‘world market’ and served by American foreign policy—is itself rooted in FL, then it would seem that Hardt and Negri’s alternative vision is still nourished by the same libertarian well. And for just that reason, their alternative is insufficiently radical insofar as it does not really oppose the root (radix) of Empire. If the injustices of Empire are in some significant way the fruit of FL, then it’s hard to see how further radicalizing FL will redress this situation of injustice.”

Occupy Wall Street is in secret cahoots with Wall Street.

Politics Theology: God and freedom again

Smith’s article sums up David Burrell’s argument that we cannot have freedom at all without a Creator as a final cause.  Burrell writes:

“if I cannot be pushed to will something, but only drawn to do so, not even God can cause me to do something freely, if we are thinking of an efficient cause.  Yet God, as my sovereign good, could so draw my will as to bring me freely to consent to the end for which my nature craves. So freedom is less a question of self-determination of what otherwise remains undetermined than it is one of attuning oneself to one’s ultimate end.”

In thinking of God as “cause” of all that comes to pass, has Reformed theology been sufficiently clear about what sort of cause He is?

American Religion Politics: God and freedom

In a 2009 essay in Political Theology, Jamie Smith notes the difference between libertarian freedom and the Augustinian notion of freedom to pursue and do the Good.  He puts the matter starkly: Quoting David Burrell, he argues that libertarian freedom “demands ‘that a free agent parallel a creator ex nihilo. What the Christian (and Jewish and Muslim) theological tradition ascribes to the Creator, modern libertarian accounts of freedom ascribe to creatures.”  He adds that “to affirm libertarian non-teleological auto-sovereignty . . . requires rejecting the Creator – or, at least, rejecting the theological claim that there is a determinate Good for human freedom which is specified by the Creator; in other words, it requires rejecting anything more than a deist creator.”   The “Creator” invoked in American public statements must be the deist creator, since the freedom he underwrites is a freedom without any determinate telos.

The usual way to deflect such a theological critique of modern political freedom – from both the left and the right – is to distinguish different senses of freedom.  In liberal order, individuals and “mediating” communities pursue their own substantive ends; no such end determinate end is allowed for the polity as a whole, since that would endanger the freedom of lesser communities to pursue their own ends.

This argument has a certain power, but it ultimately fails in various ways.

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Politics: Grace-infused politics

Robert Dodaro’s take on Christ and the Just Society in the Thought of Augustine confirms Bowlin’s criticisms of Markus.  Late in his book, Dodaro summarizes Augustine’s correspondence with Macedonius, vicar of Africa, written in 413/14.  Starting from an appeal for clemency for someone on death row, the letters turn into an early “mirror of magistrates.”  Dodaro summarizes:

Augustine “explains how the virtues of faith and hope transform the way in which civic virtues like fortitude and justice are understood in the earthly city, by harmonizing them with the way they are understood in the heavenly city.  He describes in detail how this transformation occurs through hope. . . .

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Politics: Loving Coercion

In a 1997 articles in the Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics, John Bowlin critiques the accounts of the “contradictions” or “tensions” between Augustine’s overall political theology and his advocacy of coercing Donatists into the church.  Bowlin takes on RL Markus (Saeculum) and Milbank, who for different reasons think Augustine inconsistent at this point.

On Bowlin’s reading, Markus admired Augustine mainly for the “secular, pluralist, and autonomous politics that he finds in Augustine’s mature theology of the saeculum.”  Coercing dissenters conflicts with these main themes.  Over time Augustine abandoned the semi-Eusbian enthusiasm for the Christian empire, and also came gradually to abandon the notion of a tempora christiana, a distinct phase of “sacred history” within the new era after Christ.  These earlier convictions would have supported a religiously coercive civil order, but Augustine abandoned these convictions without revising his views on coercion accordingly.

Bowlin doesn’t find this convincing.

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Politics: Liberal virtues

Early on in Politics & the Order of Love, Eric Gregory comments, in response to anti-liberal Augustinians like Milbank and Hauerwas, that “theological orthodoxy and political liberalism are not alternative answers to the same question.”

Analyzing Gregory’s work in the Journal of Religious Ethics, James KA Smith offers this rejoinder, which dovetails with my brief criticisms of Gregory yesterday: “Gregory’s account of liberalism fails to appreciate the extent to which liberalism is not just forming penultimate habits, but ultimate loves; that is, I take some of its practices to be ‘trumping’ practices that constitute rival liturgies, not just penultimate (‘earthly’) procedures for organizing ‘secular’ life. In this respect, I think his account of liberalism has problems similar to those of Jeffrey Stout.”  Liberalism has its own rites that inculcate its own virtues, which are not necessarily compatible with Christian ones.

Politics Theology: Use and Enjoyment

One of Gregory’s contributions is to show the central relevance of Augustine’s distinction of use and enjoyment to political thought.  He notes early on that “Arendt recognizes that Augustine’s greatest question may not be that he became a question to himself.  Rather, the ‘magna quaestio’ he asks is ‘whether humans should enjoy one another or use one another, or both’ – or put differently, ‘whether one person should be loved by another on his own account or for some other reason.’”

Politics: Politics of love

Eric Gregory’s Politics & the Order of Love is challenging, witty, beautifully written.  He interrogates various versions of political Augustinianism, especially Augustinianism in relation to liberal order – the Augustinian realism of Niebuhr, a Rawlsian Augustinian procedural liberalism, a virtue-oriented Augustinianism from Elshtain and O’Donovan, and an anti-liberal Augustinianism from Milbank & Co.  Gregory’s book aims to defend “Augustinian civic liberalism, with its emphasis on love and civic responsibility,” which he claims “succeeds in exposing weaknesses in Niehburianism, Rawlsianism, and in Radical Orthodoxy.”

As he sees things, the key issue in Augustine is the relation of love and sin.  A sin-centered Augustinian liberalism is realist, pessimistic, tempered; a love-centered Augustinianism is perfectionist and (as Gregory’s attention to Hannah Arendt shows) potentially totalitarian, love tragically collapsing into pragmatism and violence.  Gregory says, “the error of both views is a failure to relate love and sin to each other in ways that constrain both appeals. Left unconstrained by sin, a first paradigm of politics appeals to love (and related notions of friendship, fraternity, care, community, solidarity, and sympathy) in ways that have justified antiliberal perfectionist politics – indeed a theocratic one, if possible.  Left unconstrained by love, a second paradigm of politics relies on realist appeals to sin (and related notions of cruelty, evil, and narrow self-interest) in ways that have justified essentially negative forms of political liberalism.  Both outcomes, arrogant perfectionism and negative liberalism, are normatively inadequate.”

Gregory’s initial superb summary of Augustine’s story is as follows:

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Politics Theology - Ecclesiology: Cathopolitics

Figgis notes that all the great questions of political theory from the late middle ages to Locke and beyond were first formulated with reference to the church: “Whatever we may think now, there is no doubt that such words as king, republic, aristocracy, and the maxims of the civil law, were then regarded as applicable to the concerns and constitution of the Church.” Comparison of Locke to Gerson shows “how great is the debt of the politicians to the ecclesiastics.”

One of they key contributions of the conciliarist debates was the universalization of political theory: “The arguments fro constitutional government were stripped of all elements of that provincialism, which might have clung to them for long, had they been concerned only with the internal arrangements of the national State.  The theory of a mixed or limited monarchy was set forth in a way which enabled it to become classical.”

The shift with modern political theory, of course, is the abstraction of this universal theory of politics from any actual catholic political body.  Modern political thought is left with the tension between universal ideal theories and the actual traditions and structures of particular nations.  By what alchemy of abstraction does an argument for the supremacy of the Council over the Pope in the catholic church become a general argument for constitutionalism?

History Politics: Politics as church history

Figgis again: “when all reservations have been made, there can be little doubt that it is right to treat the growth of political ideas, during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as a branch of ecclesiastical history.  With a few exceptions religion or the interests of some religious body gave the motive for the political thought of the period; to protect the faith, or to defend the Church, or to secure the Reform, or to punish idolatry, or to stop the rebellion against the ancient order of Christendom, or to win at least the right of a religious society to exist; this was the ground which justified resistance to tyrants and the murder of kings; or on the other hand exalted the Divinely given authority of the civil rulers.”

These centuries were still medieval in the sense that political theory was a branch of theology.

History Politics: Wycliffite politics

Figgis has his Catholic prejudices, but he’s on to something in this summary of the political ecclesiology of Wyclif, forerunner of teh Reformation:

“Scholastic in form, Wyclif’s writings are modern in spirit.  His de Officio regis is the absolute assertion of the Divine Right of the King to disendow the Church.  Indeed his stated theory is more Erastian than that of Erastus.  His writings are a long-continued polemic against the political idea of the Church or rather the political claims of the clergy; for his State is really a Church.  How far his communism was more than theoretical is very doubtful. In practice, and now and then in theory, he was the sup0porter of aristocratic privilege.  Yet he asserts the duty of treating all authority as a trust, and there can be little doubt that he recognised the dignity of every individual as a member of the community in a way which we are apt to regard as exclusively modern.  Wyclif indeed was in many respects more modern than Luther, as he was a deeper thinker – except in his entire lack of sentiment.  His world of thought is the exact antithesis of medieval ideals, in regard to politics, ecclesiastical organisation, ritual and external religion.”

The combination of concerns in the last clause is worth pondering.

Politics: Significant Dullness

JN Figgis (Political Thought From Gerson to Grotius) writes, “The normal value . . . of political theories is a ‘long period value.’ The immediate significance of an Algernon Sidney or an Althusius is small and less than nothing as compared with a practical politician, like Maurice or Jeffreys. But his enduring power is vast. Hildebrand, Calvin, Rousseau, were doctrinaires, if ever there were such.  Yet neither Bismarck, nor even Napoleon, has had a more terrific strength to shape the destines of men. In literature as in life, the thinker may be dull; but it is with a significant dullness.”

Politics: Universitas/Societas

Louis Dumont (Essays on Individualism) notes that “the word by which the old scholastics designated society, or corporations in general, [was] universitas, ‘whole.’” By this they referred to the institutions, values, concepts, language that was “sociologically prior to its particular members, the latter becoming human beings only through education into and modelling by a given society.”  Within the universitas was a variety of complexly connected societies, so that Althusius could speak of a “consociatio complex et publica,” which he described as both as universitas or a consociatio politica.”

Moderns by contrast employ the term societas, by which they often mean a “partnership” established by “a contract by which the individuals composing it have ‘associated’ themselves in a society.”  Society as a whole is conceived of as a voluntary society, a very large club.  The individualistic conception behind this notion of society created problems for early modern thinkers.  Starting from isolated individuals, it is very difficult to describe how we get to societies with unequal distributions of wealth and power.  If everything is contract, then there must first be a Genossenschaft, a strictly “social” contract establishing association among individuals, and then a Herrschaft, a political contract by which the formerly equal members of the society consent to submit to a ruler.  Individualism undermines hierarchy and rule, other than the hierarchy of sheer force (as in Hobbes).

Dumont neatly traces the career of societas to the period after the French Revolution.  He sees the Revolution as the extreme result of individualistic notions of society, and in reaction thinkers like Hegel attempted to recover universitas, though without ignoring the Enlightenment development of societas and the individual.

History Politics: Church as State

JN Figgis (Studies of Political Thought From Gerson to Grotius) writes, “In the Middle Ages the Church was not a State, but the State; the State or rather the civil authority (for a separate society was not recognized) was merely the police department of the Church.  The latter took over from the Roman Empire its theory of the absolute and universal jurisdiction of the supreme authority, and developed it into the doctrine of the plenitudo potestatis of the Pope, who was the supreme dispenser of law, the fountain of honour, including regal honour, and the sole legitimate source of power, the legal if not the actual founder of religious orders, university degrees, the supreme ‘judge and divider’ among nations, the guardian of international right, the avenger of Christian blood.”

This is the opposite of the Yoder thesis: Not the church becoming an arm of the state, but the state of the church.  Not that this form of church-as-polis would make Yoder happy.

History Politics Theology - Ecclesiology: Farewell to Gelasius

Dumont argues that the Gelasian “two powers” theory is often misread.  The theory is not a simple hierarchy, the state subordinated to the church, but a “hierarchical complementarity.”  Priests are indeed superior to kings, but they are “subordinate to the king in mundane matters that regard the public order” and thus are “inferior only on an inferior level.”  By the Gelasian theory, “if the Church is in the Empire with respect to worldly matters, the Empire is in the Church regarding things divine.”

Things are quire different with Stephen II and Leo III.  By the ninth century, the complementary hierarchy has been replaced with Papal assertions concerning their supreme political power, their sovereignty in mundane worldly matters: “the Popes have, through a historical choice, canceled Gelaius’ logical formula . . . For Gelasius’ hierarchical dyarchy is substituted a monarchy of unprecedented type, a spiritual monarchy.”  The two powers differ “not in their nature but only in degree” and the “field is unified, so that we may speak of spiritual and temporal ‘powers.’”

The intention is to assert the superiority of the Pope and the church, but the effect is more ambiguous, and in some respects the opposite:

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