Reformation, Readers, and Circumstance
Editor’s note: This article is part of a symposium on the current state and future of Protestant retrieval in response to John Ehrett’s article, “The End of Protestant Retrieval.”
Over at Commonwealth, John Ehrett has written a piece provocatively titled, “The End of Protestant Retrieval.” As he explains in this podcast, the word “end” in the title refers not to the cessation of Protestant retrieval, but its purpose, particularly in the realm of politics.
Ehrett argues that unlike the Reformer’s statements about theology proper, “Reformation-era claims about social and political order are in general more likely to be contingent and time-bound” and that therefore he does not think that “there’s a good reason to grant normative priority to the Reformers” claims about social and political order simply because they were the Reformers’ claims.
This does not rule out reflecting on Reformation-era political material, Ehrett argues. Rather we must recognise that the social and material conditions under which they worked have passed and that, therefore, those that appeal to them for political guidance today should realize that “their imaging of ideal political orders ought rightly to be understood as a devotional act, and less as a political program translatable into direct action.” Is then the real purpose of retrieving early-modern Reformed teaching on social and political issues merely to offer a genuflection of filial piety towards our spiritual forefathers, while recognising that their actual ideas have long since passed into antiquarian redundancy?
In responding to Ehrett’s piece, let me begin with some warm agreement. I concur with him that the Reformer’s political discussion needs to be distinguished from their discussion of eternal truths like divine simplicity. All political discussion must have a keen awareness of the contingent and circumstantial nature of political reasoning. That was why I always felt there was something leaden-footed about appeals to the Reformed tradition, whether Richard Baxter or the Book of Homilies to justify compliance with the COVID regulations imposed by various governments, especially when it turned out that many of those regulations were themselves illegal and harmful. The same tradition that contains injunctions to civil obedience also contains reflection on the need to defy and restrain civil power when that power oversteps its authority. The question is always which aspect applies in this contingency and these circumstances. During COVID-times, some appeals to the Protestant or Reformed tradition failed to do this adequately and were misguided as a result.
Ehrett is right, therefore, that we cannot apply the Reformers political insights in a wooden and maladroit way to the contemporary world. Nevertheless, Ehrett’s piece left me with an uneasy feeling that, as commonplace as his observations are at one level, something has been missed in his description of the task of Protestant retrieval. We can address this unease under three headings, the Reformers, their readers, and the circumstances in which live.
Reformers
First, the Reformers. Ehrett is undoubtedly right that political theory, unlike say Trinitarian theology or mathematics, deals with the contingent and the time bound. We must, therefore, always have an eye to the circumstances and conditions under which it was written. But one can’t help thinking that at times Ehrett is rather selling the Reformed-tradition short as he makes this argument. At one point he speaks of the “Reformers’ context-specific musings on political order.” Musings? Really? The Reformers and their successors were not livestreaming. They were not dispensing their hot takes on a Discord server. While no doubt their writings contain some ephemera, they have bequeathed to us significant works of political theory, like Althusius’ Politica and carefully argued justifications for their political action, like Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos or Lex Rex for which the authors risked, and sometimes lost, their lives. Nor are these texts merely a collection of ad hoc observations and post hoc justifications for their political manoeuvres. As David Henreckson has demonstrated in his book Immortal Commonwealth, Protestant political theory developed a coherent framework based upon exegesis of Scripture and perennial principles of anthropology, philosophy and theology. To call these “context-specific musings” rather suggests that Ehrett has not engaged with the material he is attempting to describe.
Further, the distinction that Ehrett makes between “the retrieval of ‘theology proper’” and the “the retrieval of certain social and political doctrines,” while sound, is not as straightforward as one might imagine. If the Reformers were anything, they were Augustinian, and Augustine’s insight was that the theological horizon conditions everything, especially the political. Rowan Williams, comparing Augustine’s great trinitarian treatise On the Trinity with his work of political reflection City of God comments that
“It is a huge mistake to imagine that [On the Trinity] and [City of God] are only tangentially related; what the former has to say about common desire and about the character of justice is only one indication of the parallel nature of the two great treatises. We ought to be able to discern that [On the Trinity] is a treatise about politics, just as [City of God] is a treatise about Christology.”
In the end, since politics is, as Ehrett says “concerned with the common good” it must, therefore, involve reference to the highest good. Politics and theology cannot be disentangled so nearly and so cleanly as Ehrett seems to suppose. It is no surprise that if we discover that the twentieth century had lost its grasp of various theological principles that this entailed the loss of certain political principles along with them. The Reformers, like their own forebears, sought to integrate the theological and the political, the highest good and penultimate goods, the eternal and contingent. And while they made many missteps, they did so with some success, and we continue to benefit from their labours in the political orders we inhabit today.
We ought, therefore, to use the Reformers, not as a “quasi-magisterial sort of authority,” as Ehrett fears we might do, but in the same way that the Protestant tradition has always used any writers worthy of respect, in the same way that Ehrett deploys figures like Alasdair Macintyre and Johannes Zachhuber in his own piece, as ministerial authorities who can teach us to read the Scriptures and understand the world better. But we will only be able to do that if we open ourselves up to the idea that the Reformers may have more to teach us than merely “context-specific musings” on long dead political controversies.
Readers
Ehrett’s concern is that many contemporary appeals to the Reformers are thoughtless and inept. His article is designed to puncture the balloon of simplistic and crass appeals to a sixteenth and seventeenth century texts to justify contemporary political positions. His concern, therefore, is not so much with the Reformers but with their readers. Are we really up to the job of sifting through what is context specific and what is useful for our modern age? Have we attained to the “maturity under modernity” necessary for the task of retrieving the Reformers?
As I indicated above, political retrieval can be done ham-fistedly. No doubt, many readings of Reformed and Protestant texts will be shallow, contextually under-determined and perpetuate misunderstand as a result. Mistakes will be, and have been, made. It is embarrassing when an oaf on the internet cites your theological hero or preferred ecclesial tradition to make their embarrassingly partisan political point. But idiots on the internet will use famous words as mulch in which to grow their flowers of folly.
Personally, I’d probably prefer it was Calvin or Althusius. Dimwits and midwits will always be with us. But what is the answer to this? The antidote to bad reading is better reading rather than no reading at all. For all I nod along with Ehrett’s cautions I find myself thinking, is the need of the hour really less Reformed Orthodoxy? Do we really need fewer voices from the past to teach us? Doubtless, Ehrett has good reason to argue for “a more modest use of the Reformers’ social and political teachings.” Modesty on our part as readers is certainly called for: we moderns have forgotten so much that even the simplest, most milquetoast observations of our forebears strike us as radical and counter intuitive. I would suggest, though, that rather than such modesty preventing us reading and learning from the Reformers, it should make us docile and humble students of those that grasped so much more than we do.
Circumstances
Much of Ehrett’s argument hinges upon the observation that political and social conditions have changed significantly since the time of the Reformers. So, Ehrett argues,
“To call for a restoration of “Reformational” patterns of social order … under circumstances where those patterns would—if revived today—necessarily be disembedded from the material and social context that was operative in the Reformers’ day, is not really to call for a return to tradition, but for the creation of something entirely novel and untried.”
He concludes therefore that “it does no good to claim that simply because Luther or Calvin or Althusius said something, that necessarily settles the matter for today.” At one level, this claim is so self-evident that one wonders who could possibly dispute it. Nevertheless, in the way that the observation operates in the argument, one feels that there is a tacit premise in the argumentation. Not only have the material and social context changed but, in the words of Kamala Harris, “we are not going back.” That is to say that the social changes over the last 50 to 100 years are so irrevocable that to imagine they might be reversed or previous social circumstances retrieved is a failure to show “maturity, under modernity.” There is a great chasm set between the world of the Reformers and us, and no one can cross from one to the other. Those appealing to the Reformers for social and political guidance simpliciter are like Homer Simpson refusing to throw out his old calendars because “Sure, it’s not 1985 right now, but who knows what tomorrow will bring?” Of course, at a superficial level this is true, I don’t expect that the arrival of electricity, say, will be reversed. But the claim is that the conditions of modernity, however defined, are somehow made inevitable by mere chronology is not so much a clear-eyed assessment of reality as a failure to think historically.
In 1928, the British Parliament, through an alliance of evangelicals and non-conformists, voted against a proposed revision of the Book of Common Prayer on the grounds that it was too Anglo-Catholic. As I write, the British Parliament is voting on whether to, effectively, repeal the law against murder. The point of the comparison is not to assess the merits of either development but simply to show that, in less than 100 years, almost everything about political circumstances can change. Claims of historical inevitability for any movement or social arrangement should, therefore, be viewed with scepticism. How many parliamentarians of 1928 would imagine the political conditions in which their successors in 2024 operated? Very few, if any. Appreciating the contingent aspects of the Reformers’ political works should remind us of the contingent aspects of our own political moment. The contingency of their situation is easy to recognise because it has passed and is gone, remembering that ours is contingent also is rather harder because it remains. But remember it we must. And as we remember we open ourselves up to the possibility that a new configuration of the temporal and the eternal might be possible. Political orders and arrangements that now seem ideal and impossible might one day become concrete and practical. To think this is not pollyannaish optimism but a clearsighted perception of the nature of history, the contingent order in which we all live. It is to refuse to allow the present to loom too large in our thinking (for instance, by thinking that one set of ideas have ‘endured’ when they are scarcely 75 years old) and instead to consistently relate the contingent to the perennial. Such is the abiding challenge of Christian political thinking. It is no modest task, though those who attempt it must be. In pursuing it, we must avail ourselves of every resource we find available, not least the example of those that went before us.
I have no doubt, from this piece and others of his I have read, that Ehrett and I agree on most things of substance and significance. Indeed, I agree with much of what he says in this particular piece. Nevertheless, I fear that the result of this article will be the opposite of what is needed at this hour. Writing on a different topic, C.S. Lewis famously wrote, “The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts.” I do not think our great need at this time is to cut down thickets of immodest retrieval of Reformers: rather it is to irrigate the desert of modern political discourse with the refreshing water of Christian theological reflection. Such water may bring with it spills and puddles and mud but, along with them that which is most needful: new life.
