For Politics: The Christian, the Church and the State
Published by Ezra Press, a ministry of the Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity, PO Box 9, Stn. Main, Grimsby, ON L3M 1M0 By Joseph Boot. Copyright of the author, 2021. All rights reserved. Material in this book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without the written permission of the publishers. Unless otherwise stated, Scripture quotations are from the Holman Christian Standard Bible (HCSB). Copyright © 1999, 2000, 2002, 2003, 2009 by Holman Bible Publishers, Nashville Tennessee. For volume pricing please contact the Ezra Institute: info@ezrainstitute.ca For Politics: The Christian, the Church and the State ISBN: 978-1-989169-15-5
For Politics: The Christian, the Church and the State Chapter One: The Rule of Christ or Cult of the Expert The Problem Stated The Self-Anointed The Foundation of Wisdom Intellectuals, Reason and Worldview A Basic Difference Between Christian and Secular Political Thought The Cult of the Expert or the Worship of Christ Prophetic Thinking in Politics
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Chapter Two: The Church, the State and the Kingdom of God The Practical Reality A False Dilemma Confusing the Role of Church and State What is the Church? The Church and the Kingdom The Proper Relation of Church, State, and Society
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Chapter Three: State Absolutism, Sphere Sovereignty & the Limits of Political Authority State Absolutism The Sovereignty of God Sphere Sovereignty Ecclesiocracy or Theocracy? The Coercive Character of the State
Notes
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“Christian political action in the scriptural sense…is a battle for a political order that is in conformity with the divine order of creation (sphere-sovereignty), an effort at fundamental and integral reformation or renewal of our political life from out of the Word of God.” – H. Evan Runner
Chapter One: The Rule of Christ or Cult of the Expert THE PROBLEM STATED
A sober look at contemporary Western thought in the wake of both the Renaissance and Enlightenment reveals that René Descartes’ dictum remains as relevant as ever: “There is nothing so absurd or incredible that it has not been asserted by one philosopher or another.” Because ideas have consequences, the ideas of thinkers and philosophers are eventually applied in cultural life. If these are not made subject to the Word of God, they can have disastrous outcomes because they manifest fallen man’s rebellion against God’s law-order. Today, we live in an era of perpetual revolution manifest by an intense intellectual activism in all cultural and political life. This requires, indeed demands, a distinctly Christian response. But herein lies a serious problem. From where can that Christian response come? What is the basis and foundation of a distinctly Christian response to the socio-political crisis of our time? That question is the subject of this monograph. 6
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THE SELF-ANOINTED
Because of the steady triumph of pagan humanism in the West, the modern world has seen the re-emergence of many archaic oddities, one of which is a self-anointed elite class – the intelligentsia – a secular substitute for pastor and priest. The first truly modern intellectual, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, set a recognizable tone for the emergence of a self-righteous secular elite, making much of loving an abstraction called “the people,” freeing them from the shackles of civilization and tradition, and establishing their “general will.” But in the end, he could not disguise his disdain for humanity and likened the masses of ordinary people to “a stupid, pusillanimous invalid.”1 A more recent defining example of this new class – still celebrated amongst cultural elites today – is George Bernard Shaw, the Irish playwright and public intellectual prominent in the first half of the twentieth century. Beyond writing plays, Shaw held forth on all kinds of cultural and political subjects and made grand sweeping pronouncements about his fellow human beings. Like many British intellectuals of the era, he was a Fabian socialist who nonetheless regarded ordinary working people as contemptible with “no right to live.” He wrote, “I should despair if I did not know that they will all die presently, and that there is no need on earth why they should be replaced by people like themselves.”2 Shaw was also an admirer of dictators and political dictatorships precisely because he resented ordinary people influencing culture, believing they could not make sensible decisions. On leaving London for an African vacation in 1935, he remarked, “It is nice to go for a 7
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holiday and know that Hitler has settled everything so well in Europe.”3 Though Hitler’s antisemitism eventually made it untenable for Shaw to support the national socialism of the Nazis, he remained keen on Stalin and the Soviet dictatorship.4 Jean-Paul Sartre, another twentieth-century Western intellectual with a massive cult following – well-known for seducing his young female philosophy students with the help of his lover, Simone de Beauvoir – like Shaw frequently involved himself in cultural and political affairs of which he clearly had no adequate understanding. A man addicted to fornication, alcohol and barbiturates, Sartre proved incapable of maintaining relationships with male intellectual peers who might actually challenge him, and like his radical compatriots, was unable to bring himself to condemn Stalinism or the Communist Party – though he remained gregariously antiAmerican. He was still publicly defending the Soviets in the 1950s and warmly praising Mao’s China. For Sartre, the remnants of an existing Christian political order in the West was simply ‘institutionalized violence’ that required ‘intellectual activism’ and ‘necessary violence’ to overthrow it.5 In our own time, a majority of Western intellectuals have followed in the wake of thinkers like Sartre and groups like the Frankfurt School, hastening Western culture down into ever deeper levels of depravity, confusion, irrationality and self-immolation.6 We are forced to ask as Christians, what has gone wrong?
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THE FOUNDATION OF WISDOM
It is a regularly observed phenomenon that many otherwise brilliant people appear utterly bereft of wisdom or judgment in the vital affairs of cultural and political life. In response to such imprudence and recklessness, this short work is an effort to articulate a foundation for a distinctly Christian view of politics. In order to do that, and to solve the paradox of cultural and political folly amongst much of the intelligentsia, it is first critical to realize that all cultural and political thought inescapably rests on a given foundation – one religious worldview or another is the frequently unacknowledged basis of all forms of political philosophy. Ultimately, from the scriptural standpoint, either Christ and His Wordrevelation provides that foundation, or the thinking of elites and their revolutionary ideals will assume the role of biblical authority. In the older testament, the great Hebrew thinker, politician and teacher, King Solomon, gives us the key to understanding why being intellectually gifted is no guarantee of true insight, wisdom or sound judgment: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge; fools despise wisdom and discipline … for the Lord gives wisdom; from His mouth come knowledge and understanding” (Prov. 1:7, 2:6). If the true foundation of wisdom is missing, if the principal part of knowledge is neglected, then any knowledge structure built upon it is inherently unstable. It may appear elegant and wellproportioned, but when the winds of the real world blow against it, it will be found wanting.
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Clearly, intellect, intelligence and wisdom do not always coincide, are certainly not identical, and should never be conflated. A person may have the ability to grasp complex ideas (intellect) and even have the capacity to understand their relevant implications for a given area of thought (intelligence), but wisdom is of another character altogether. As Thomas Sowell points out, “wisdom is the rarest quality of all – the ability to combine intellect, knowledge, experience and judgment in a way to produce a coherent understanding. Wisdom is the fulfilment of the ancient admonition, ‘With all your getting, get understanding.’’’7 INTELLECTUALS, REASON AND WORLDVIEW
In the occupational construction of political and cultural ideas, the modern intellectual is usually (there are always exceptions) a person who claims allegiance to a particular kind of thinking and a commitment to the use of certain analytical tools and evaluative frameworks. Within these frameworks, ideas that are viewed as progressive or nuanced, novel, enlightened or artistically complex, tend to be applauded whereas ‘traditional’ ideas are largely dismissed as reactionary, simplistic or outmoded.8 I remember some years ago a friend who was studying at a Christian university made the traditional assertion that Moses was the author of the first five books of the Bible, to which the instructor replied in a kind of stage whisper “what year is this?” It is perhaps not surprising that few openly and authentically Christian thinkers are welcomed into the exclusive chambers of orthodox intellectual elites. 10
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In contemporary academia, this exclusivity, resting upon a claim of intellectual superiority, presupposes an idea going back to the Enlightenment – that there is an autonomous standard of self-regulating thought (i.e., secular reasoning), protected by an elite class, before which all ideas must present themselves for judgment. Here we encounter the philosophical assumption that human thinking can function as the lawgiver of the world, prescribing from thought a law to nature. This claim of radical autonomy involving the idea of freedom from anything coming from outside the human subject is the basic idea of Western humanism since the Renaissance. It implies a total rejection of a divinely given order for creation. Contemporary trends in this form of thinking that now dominate our culture hold to a social construction theory of reality – we can create the world we live in by our thought and language, right down to our sexuality and identity. Today we see it expressed throughout the humanities, in economics, politics and law. It is not unusual for intellectuals to then protect these various judgments of their enlightened thought with the claim of neutrality, while those who disagree are regarded as uninformed, prejudiced, or hopelessly biased. However, to make this appeal to a supposed neutrality, the basis of which is nothing but an established consensus amongst elites, is to assert that our rational behaviour is selfnormed. This is something the true Christian is obligated to reject because, from a scriptural standpoint, the criteria for rational communication are given with creation, and hold for all rational pursuits. The criteria for meaningful discourse cannot be derived from the participants but must hold for 11
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them if there are to be universal normative standards for rational behavior. However, such an assertion of universal normative standards for thinking immediately threatens the pretended autonomy of the secular intellectual’s thought – including his political thought. In other words, the question arises, how can human thinking be a law unto itself if it is bound by normative standards given with creation? Both convictions cannot be true at the same time. To make this point clearer, it is important to recognize that there is a difference between a norm or law, and that which is being subject to that norm or law. For example, there is a law for the functioning of human cells, but the various individual cells are not identical with the law for the cell, neither do they generate that law, because laws are the conditions which hold for the existence of something. In a similar way our thinking and discourse (analytical and logical activities) are being subjected to norms constantly – in fact political debate presupposes that subjection. The crucial issue becomes: what is the nature of those norms? Are they generated by the thought of elites (i.e., laws for rational thought and thought itself are identical) or are they divinely created, supra-individual normative standards? With this question we are confronted with what the South African philosopher Danie Strauss calls “direction-giving ultimate commitments transcending the realm of rationality itself, since they are embedded in some or other world-andlife-view.”9 This immediately exposes the non-neutrality of all thought and shows that replacing revelation with a prevailing trust in autonomous ‘reason’ is not itself rational, 12
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but makes its appeal to beliefs and convictions that transcend the rational aspect of life. Another important observation relevant to this discussion is that logical principles themselves do not provide the grounds for believing the content of certain arguments to be true or false; they can only help determine if the structure of a given argument is valid i.e., whether or not certain fallacies are present. As Karl Popper once put it, “[Since] all arguments must proceed from assumptions, it is plainly impossible to demand that all assumptions should be based on arguments.” Which is simply to say, we already have to believe in something to begin to justify something else. Christians must always keep in mind that it is not thinking that thinks, but human beings – who are much more than their analytical function – that think. All human beings nurture basic beliefs and religious motives that give direction to their thinking, shaping the socio-political vision they advocate, and which inescapably inform the sociopolitical solutions they offer. As Thomas Sowell points out: Intellectuals do not simply have a series of isolated opinions on a variety of subjects. Behind those opinions is usually some coherent over-arching conception of the world, a social vision. Intellectuals are like other people in having visions – some intuitive sense of how the world works, what causes what… At the heart of the social vision prevalent among contemporary intellectuals is the belief that there are ‘problems’ created by existing institutions and that ‘solutions’ to these problems can be excogitated by intellectuals. This vision is both a vision of society and a vision of the role of intellectuals within society.10 13
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The conception of the world dominant in our time has a lineage which stretches back via the Enlightenment to the Renaissance in its revival of pagan Greek thought. For a time, the biblical movement of the Reformation pushed back against this essentially neo-pagan tide by confronting people with the living God and His Word in its central religious significance. But with the protracted religious wars, disillusionment set in regarding the Christian church and so humanism revived and was emboldened by its new alliance with the rise of modern science – despite the development of the sciences being indebted to and dependent upon an essentially biblical view of reality.11 The subsequent Enlightenment era doubled down on the assumptions of the Renaissance and as a movement had much wider and greater penetration into the various aspects of people’s lives. Christian resistance to the spread of unbelief again appeared with the evangelical Great Awakening. As is clear from the journals, letters and writings of the great men of that remarkable revival, though the period saw incredible fruit in evangelism and the development of personal piety, it lacked the rigor and theological depth of the Reformation era and generally missed the cultural scope of application for the Word seen amongst the Puritans. It gave preeminent attention to individual salvation of the soul with very little said about the cultural and political life of the nations. The later twentieth century development of Christian Bible colleges and seminaries (and in many cases Christian universities) did not have a rootand-branch reformation in thought and culture in view, but the protection and training of youth for a particular denomination or doctrinal loyalty. H. Evan Runner’s analysis is telling: 14
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Failing to confront humanism in any central and comprehensive way, the Evangelical Revival stemmed the revolutionary tide less than the Reformation had done, and in fewer places. The Western world was rapidly becoming postChristianly pagan. By the middle of the nineteenth century the educated class of Europe had broken overwhelmingly with any Christian point of view. In this way we can understand that humanism has been the dominant cultural driving force or mind in modern Western civilization, which, by taking possession of the hearts of untold millions, and by gaining control of our centres of authority and education, has undergone development and been given expression in and through the successive experiences of western men… Protestants came to withdraw either into a very restricted world of theological argument and investigation or, pietistically, into their private personal lives of ‘devotion,’ failing to understand that the Word of God was given as light under which man was to live his life by on this earth… In none of the Protestant groups was the central “word” of Christ taking on flesh and blood as it was being related to the conditions of our creaturely existence in the continuing experiences of men through the modern centuries.12
Few things could be clearer in the early part of the twentieth century than the urgent need for a comprehensive, scripturally rooted development of the Christian mind, and the application of this perspective to all of life, including the sphere of the state and political life. The Christian mind must not look at the world as the unbelieving thinker does – as a 15
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conundrum to be reduced to manageable basic components and “built anew” by our cognitive efforts. Nor must we regard our inherited institutions as the root of all evil in need of revolutionizing in terms of the euphoric visions of intellectuals. Sin is buried deep in the heart of man himself, not rooted in human institutions that can simply be reimagined by man’s autonomous idea to cleanse away evil (Matt. 15:18-20). With this in view, we will explore why the gospel of Christ must not be regarded or treated as an inspirational ‘idea’ that offers immediate ‘solutions’ to various societal ‘problems.’ Rather, the gospel declares the kingdom and power of God manifest in both the creative and redemptive work of Jesus Christ, which transforms the heart of man, and in so doing makes a new creature out of him. The fruit of this transformation is a Spirit-given vision for Christ’s kingdom to come and the will of the Father to be done in every aspect of creation. This God-ordained vision calls not for self-anointed experts, but for faithful and Spirit-anointed servants committed to the lawWord of God for creation and culture and to excellence in each sphere of life for the glory of God. A BASIC DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CHRISTIAN AND SECULAR POLITICAL THOUGHT
We have already seen that the foundation for thinking between the Christian and non-Christian is radically different. One professes autonomy (self-law), the other theonomy (God’s law) – meaning a total surrender to the law-Word of Christ in creation and Scripture, in whom are hidden all the treasures of 16
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wisdom and knowledge (Col. 2:3). This theonomic orientation is lucidly described by Runner: God’s Law is God’s Word. Because God is God, His every Word is Law. From the very first words of the Bible we hear, “And God said, Let there be” this and that. All such creative words are the Law. The Law is what causes creatures and the whole creation to hang together; it determines the conditions of all creaturely existence. It is itself concentrated in the religious law of life: Walk before me according to my commandments and live. Here we have the heart of the creation. The Law determines what it means to live before God, or to die before God.13
In the fantasy of autonomy, the modern intellectual, embodying the spirit of our times, essentially pretends to the realization of a new priesthood within society, incarnating a new source of ultimate authority by setting aside the prophet, priest and king, Jesus Christ and his kingdom people. Such intellectuals as a class tend to regard themselves as representing a concentration point of human knowledge and understanding. As secular bishops, they mediate their ideas by influencing and shaping those who will then proclaim and disseminate their vision for them – a kind of substitute clergy in media and education, law, politics and arts known as the intelligentsia. Only by a deliberate and purposeful act of submission to God’s Word-revelation can the Christian thinker avoid the conceits of a godless intelligentsia. This submission to God’s Word must in turn lead to the development of a coherent and systematic Christian world-and-life view that serves the kingdom of God 17
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by mediating not man’s word, but the Word of a comprehensive gospel, to every aspect of human life in all creation. Second, because of a submission to God and His Wordrevelation, not only is the Christian thinker totally subject to Scripture, he or she is also accountable to the normative structure of created reality as God has ordained it by His LawWord. This means that true Christian thinking is willingly and joyfully submitted to God’s Word in creation and does not attempt to remake it after human imagination. Rather than submitting to revelation, from the time of Plato and Aristotle, intellectuals have tended to engage in abstract thought-experiments making playthings of the lives of people in the name of their greater insight or apprehension of ‘natural law.’ From Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Politics to Sir Thomas More’s Utopia and Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, Western civilization has been profoundly impacted by different styles of social thought-experiment that deal with people, politics and culture in the abstract – as these thinkers would prefer persons and the world to be – but which do not really grapple with the world and history in its givenness. Outside of the laboratory of the mind, however, such thought-experiments have real-life consequences. The atheistic materialism of Marx’s thought, with its abstract revolutionary masses throwing off the evils of wage labor and private property, supposedly leading mankind toward total freedom in a stateless and work-free world, has cost millions of people their lives. During the age of the Enlightenment philosophes, Rousseau attacked Christian civilisation and idealized the ‘noble savage’ whilst abandoning all of his own children to a hospice where they almost certainly 18
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died. In more recent decades John Rawls described a ‘veil of ignorance’ in contractarian political theories of society, positing imaginary worlds free from metaphysical beliefs or cultural history. All such abstractions are erroneous in large measure because they are inattentive to the human condition and social reality. One of the important differences between the occupation of intellectuals and that of the engineer is that engineers find themselves constantly accountable to the real world if they make mistakes. If I make a mistake with a historical or philosophical reference in one of my articles or lectures, I may get a kind (or angry) email from a reader pointing out my error, but if my brother Daniel who is a heating engineer (designing and installing complex heating systems in commercial properties) makes a serious mistake, real college dorm rooms or somebody’s office will be flooded, or catch fire, or explode. There is an immediate accountability here in the concrete world of experience – an external standard of accountability. An engineer whose designs and work prove to be a repeated failure will not long be in the industry. Yet if an intellectual has a grand new idea, happens to be or become influential and the idea is applied but fails, that thinker is often seen as a brave pioneer or prophet out of time. At other times, as so clearly manifest in Marxist social theory, the blame for the failure of the thinker’s ideas is placed on ‘society’ or others’ ‘faulty interpretation or application,’ and not infrequently on the stupidity of the masses for the philosophy not working. Take current gender theories like those of Judith Butler which assert that sex is ‘fictive’ i.e., a creation of political 19
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language regimes forming perceptions of the body as having male and female identity, but which are in fact just forms of oppression. Or consider feminist theories seeking to level all distinctions between men and women, and various other forms of deconstructionist critical theory. External tests in the real world that would be applied to the engineer don’t seem to apply here. The only test that seems to matter is what other feminists, queer theorists and critical theorists amongst the intelligentsia think; do they find the ideas original, appropriately subversive of authority, or progressive and imaginative? When the lives, education and socio-economic future of children, families and society are destroyed by the application of these intellectuals’ nearunintelligible word games, the blame is placed on societal taboos, the patriarchal family, traditional institutions, structural inequality and systemic racism for things not working out well. The givenness of creation and God’s lawword for society, which is what invariably frustrates their purpose, is dismissed as simply a power-structure to be revolted against. Consider again the various shades of Marxist political philosophy that have been tried numerous times on various continents with the same devastating and tragic results; the repeated failure doesn’t stop intellectuals committed to an abstract ideology continuing to venerate Marxist social theory whilst blaming a faulty application or nuance of interpretation for the economic devastation or vicious death of multitudes. This is because their criteria for judgment is essentially internal, not external – which is 20
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to say man must prescribe, not discover and acknowledge, the normative structures for human life. Thus, in the name of intellectual freedom, unaccountability becomes a hallmark of the occupation of both the intellectual and the intelligentsia which follows them. The noted British intellectual, John Stuart Mill, went as far as to argue that intellectuals should be free even from social standards, all the while setting those standards for others.14 It is existing institutions and traditions, norms and standards that must change to accommodate the intellectuals’ ideas, not the thinker who must be subject to laws and norms in the created world. In marked contrast, the Christian must submit their thinking to Scripture and explore the various spheres of the creation order as revelation from God. Together, these have a ‘norming’ impact on Christian thought, giving concrete direction to the believer’s labors in every sphere – including the political. The thought-products of Christians can then be judged by and made accountable to an external standard, just as the prophets in Scripture were judged in terms of their faithfulness to the Word of God and accuracy of their description of God’s historical activities. THE CULT OF THE EXPERT OR THE WORSHIP OF CHRIST
One of the besetting sins of professional intellectuals as a class is believing that, because they have a particular depth of knowledge or strong ability in a given area, they can then generalize their narrow knowledge and ability into the 21
