A Response to John Ehrett
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.”
Growing up during the height of the young, restless, and reformed movement (YRR), I was blessed to benefit from the proliferation of digital resources dedicated to articulating a robust vision of historic Christian doctrine and practice. I remember in my early childhood the “mere Christianity” of certain evangelical institutions that reduced Christianity to a therapeutic relationship between you and God brought about by a basic prayer. It wasn’t religion, it was a relationship. It was simple and effective in reaching the masses but shallow. As I matured, I began to feel this shallowness. I benefited from the litany of ministries—Desiring God, The Gospel Coalition, and Ligonier, to name a few– that promoted Calvinism, the doctrines of grace, the sovereignty of God, and a high view of Scripture. They were how I came to learn about John Calvin, Jonathan Edwards, and Francis Turretin. Their views on man and God formed my intellectual life.
However, missing from this formation was a substantial account of political and ethical life. The first time I read that politics is for the common good, that government should conform to natural law, and that the state should have an interest in the spiritual life of its citizens was not from any of those institutions but from my “Classics of Social and Political Thought” professor who assigned Aquinas’ Treatise on Law and De Regno (On Kingship). Until then, I did not know there was a connection between classical theology and political thought.
The fact that I learned pre-modern political thought from a classics course instead of ministries committed to retrieving a thick account of orthodox, confessional Christianity is emblematic of the crisis of reformed retrieval. The genesis of reformed retrieval, spurned by YRR, has resulted in considerable investment in resourcing the theological views of the Puritans, Reformed Orthodox, and their influences. However, the loss of confidence in the current system of procedural liberalism to uphold civic virtue and maintain Christianity’s influence in American society has driven Christians to look to the same tradition for authority on political and ethical matters. And yet, when the need to look to these sources has become more urgent than ever, there has been little investment in forming the political thought life of evangelicals outside of the same framework of neutrality that managed their retreat from public influence. The crisis of Protestant Retrieval is that its followers must play catch-up because its forefathers did not think it profitable to bestow the Reformed Tradition’s political and ethical vocabulary in their churches, books, and institutions.
Any account of the method and purpose of retrieval must consider this lacuna and generational crisis. Here, John Ehrett’s piece on the goal of Protestant Retrieval is an instructive interlocutor. Ehrett cautions against proscribing the same weight of authority to Protestant forefathers in matters of politics compared to, for example, theology proper. He makes a division between timeless perennial truths such as the simplicity of God and “contingent aspects of human experience.” Hence, Ehrett distinguishes between the “timeless principle’ that the good sought in politics is, in fact, the common good” and the contingent, non-normative, “Reformers’ context-specific musings on political order.” The Reformed here might reflect perennial principles in some cases but not in always. For obedience to their views on contingent matters then “actual normative demonstration, not merely proof texting, is required.” So, he calls to “treat the retrieval of “theology proper” differently from the retrieval of certain social and political doctrine” and “argue on a case-by-case basis about the correctness of the Reformers’ views on the role of women in society, the feasibility of democracy, the relationship between Christianity and continuing Judaism, and so forth.”
Ehrett’s piece has generated the reaction it has because he is, intentionally or not, redrawing the same division of doctrine and political thought that generated this crisis of retrieval in the first place. The lack of the retrieval of political thought was in many ways justified by creating a chasm between timeless truths of doctrine and contingent political and ethical commitments. If one accepts this division again it will leave Protestants again with no tools of their own to understand social and political life.
Further, Ehrett’s division is not as clear as he suggests. For one, eternal truths are derived from observation and reflection on created things, the natural order. Aquinas says, “Our natural knowledge begins from sense” (ST I. q.12 a. 12), and since our senses cannot see God in essence, we can know Him through his effects. That is to say, the truths about God, which we say are timeless, come from reflecting on created things we sense. In our reflection, we ascribe certain perfections to God through the process of making Him the cause of every good, removing any imperfection, and finally saying he holds every perfection supereminently.
For example, on our reflection of wisdom in the created order, classical theologians go on to call God since he is the cause of wisdom; he lacks no imperfection to wisdom and holds wisdom above and beyond what we know. God has always been wise, but we come to know God is wise through this process of removal, eminence, and causation—”we” know God by creatures. This point implies that if we get our understanding of creatures, our understanding of reality wrong, then we can get our understanding of God wrong – and vice versa. For example, if we consider love an excessive emotion of affection, we will face troubles in ascribing love to God because God’s love is not fickle. Our view of the world colors how we view God.1 Likewise, our understanding of God colors how we understand our social and political order. To go back to an earlier example, in De Regno, Aquinas roots his understanding of the duties of the king from examining God’s act of creation and government—”it” seems best that we learn about the kingly office from the pattern of nature’s regime.” From examining God’s acts, Aquinas draws an analogy between God and nature to the king and his kingdom: “let the king recognize that this is the office which he undertakes: namely, to be in the kingdom like the soul is in the body, and like God is in the world.” Further, the king is to, like God, exercise judgment and “acquire the gentleness of clemency and mildness when he considers as his own members those individuals who are subject to his rule.” Hence, for Aquinas and the pre-modern tradition, there is a continuity, by analogy, of God’s government of the world and the duties of human government. In Ehrett’s words, this is a perennial principle that forges a link between God and the social order.
In fact, this perennial principle was built upon by the Reformers through their development of the covenant idea in Scripture. The Reformation sparked newfound reflection on the texts of the Holy Scripture. From that reflection, the Reformation placed importance on characterizing the relationship between God and man as a covenant. The reflection of the biblical data and the theological idea of covenant developed into the Reformers’ reflection on human authority and covenants. Historian David Henreckson: “In early modernity, covenantal language could evoke biblical, theological, contractual, or political themes—often all at once.” the covenant idea was “employed to speak in political terms about theological relations and norms…and to speak in theological terms about the political order”2 A notable example of this fluidity comes from Althusius. Althusius’ Politica took on a canonical status in later political thought, and the center of his thought is the idea of consociation, sometimes translated as associated. The first sentence of his Politica is, “Politics is the art of associating (consociandi) men for the purpose of establishing, cultivating, and conserving social life among them.”3 Henreckson traces this rarely used term and concludes that Althusius took this term from the prior theological concept of the fellowship of all believers. He writes, “Consociation…is best described as the Latin correlate for the theologically freighted Greek term koinonia.”4 Hence, “consociation is the means by which Althusius is able to offer a sophisticated account of the covenant-as-fellowship conception that was already widely used by Reformed theologians to describe the relationship between God and God’s people, as well as the ruler and the ruled.”
Althusius’ use of consociation shows one cannot easily excise the Reformer’s theological thought from their social and political thought. Even as they set their eyes on the socially involved things, the Reformers grounded their policies in principles on a theological edifice. Consequently, one should not discount the authority of the Reformers on social and political authorities as opposed to theological ones. Instead, in the spirit of honoring one’s fathers, we should first understand their social views and the relation to their largest system before critical evaluation. As with theological matters, the burden should be on us to justify deviation from their social and ethical principles. Moreover, this deviation should be taken when only absolutely necessary – as when the weight of Scripture or reason dictates it. This posture of prejudice for the tradition and its authorities just is the nature of belonging to a tradition. To engage in obedience to the Reformers on doctrinal matters and then place them in the position of having to justify their social views before us betrays the very idea of retrieval and especially threatens the Reformation project insofar as the Reformation was not just theological renewal but a social and political one centered on all of life coram deo.
The thrust of Ehrett’s concerns is not on social and ethical principles as such but on their possible application today. His exhortation against proof-texting and quote-mining warns against simply repristinating past views. In response, it’s first incumbent to admit a diversity of views within the Reformed tradition. The nature of a tradition is that it has a shared ethical, political, and metaphysical vocabulary that can nonetheless mediate across differences. The Reformation in the Netherlands differed from the outworking in England and America. Richard Hooker’s ethical and political views differed from the Puritans – and their views differed from the American settlers. Yet all of them loosely belong to the Reformation, have the same sources of authority, and can agree on foundational principles of theology and the social order. Indeed, one of the most diverse arguments the Reformed have is on the right to resist authority and, the circumstances for doing so and how that coheres with the divinely instituted social order. These arguments, in particular, resonate within a larger theological system and have practical importance, especially on the other side of COVID.
The beauty of a tradition is precisely the possibility of arguments on these matters within a shared web of concepts and principles. Tradition is not dead; it is living and has the power to bring new wine to old wineskins. The transformative power of ressourcement lies in the ability to frame a set of shared principles to live out and apply. Further, the diversity of authorities allows us to develop the insights of the tradition, just as medieval theologians developed the insights of the Church Fathers and their diversity of views. To that end, Ehrett should be heeded in that we should not seek to replicate the political views of any one Reformer but to enter discussion with the full diversity of authorities in order to generate fruitful pathways for our social vision today. As for specific policy views, our implements should reflect the spirit of our authorities and be a faithful response to them as we seek to address social ills. Like Ehrett, we should consider our political context and the chasm between their world and ours, but that does not allow us to abandon their general social views on human life without warrant. Indeed, this is not the first time the Reformed Orthodox have been applied to modern life. Neo-Calvinism, which itself is seeing a resurgence of interest in the Church, came from putting Orthodox and Modern (particularly Romantic) sources in dialogue. Sutanto and Brock write, “neo-Calvinism conveyed that the heritage of classical Reformed orthodoxy can engage fruitfully with the insights of modern theology and philosophy.”5 One may indeed take issue with how some in the neo-Calvinism used their reformed authorities and their appropriation of modern sources, but the movement itself and its current appeal to a swath of pastors and academics to facilitate Christianity’s engagement with modernity demonstrate that the Reformed Orthodox social and political views, even some of their policy views, can be applied to encounter and transform modern life. The Reformed tradition is rich enough to be applied to modern life. It’s even rich enough to challenge modern life and show a new path forward for an exhausted society. Indeed, without the possibility of transformation, the retrieval project remains contained within our pre-set limitation.
Indeed, the transformative power of the Reformed Orthodox raises the stakes of retrieval. Retrieving and applying protestant social and political doctrine can fundamentally renew American culture, a once Protestant culture. The sheer number of American Christians, coupled with sufficient investment in intellectual training and activism, opens up the possibility for tangible influence. This simultaneously opens up the possibility of unrest, chaos, and schism. Thus, implicit in this discussion is also a concern about how resourcement should be undertaken and by whom.
Micah Meadowcraft insightfully compared the sides here to divisions between two camps of students of Leo Strauss, who also sought to imagine a frontier beyond liberalism through an encounter with classic political texts – “you have a camp worried the miseducated masses are so dangerous that they should only be selectively introduced to early modern texts via the mediation of an authoritative teacher and oral tradition” and another camp “concerned that such gatekeeping prevents lovers of divine wisdom by disposition from discovering the educative power of direct encounter with these texts.” The former side, representing East Coast Straussianism, results in a political project that merely makes society safe for theological studies. This also correlates with the reigning principled pluralist paradigm that has percolated in recent decades. The latter side, representing West Coast Straussianism, however, invites direct encounter with Reformed Authorities and the political theology they contain. This correlates to the present group of reformed scholars, institutions, and lay people doing retrieval without the backing of mainstream evangelical institutions. The former camp is an ideology built on preserving a permanent but durable minority class, while the latter camp is willing to risk radical change for the promise of renewal. The fact that such a debate was had after World War II and continues to this day alerts us that the crisis of modern life cannot be avoided. In a perfect world, we would have teachers in respected academic institutions facilitating an encounter with Reformed Political Thought, grants from the National Endowment of the Humanities to fund translations of Althusius, and a class of pastors equipped to disciple their congregation in protestant social thought. Alas, we have a fraction of that, and the need has not been greater. While both camps represent strategies to negotiate with the crisis, the reformational principle of ad fontes presses the resourcement project to allow access to all and limit obstacles to understanding. At the same time, any movement requires good leaders, even in crisis, so we should raise up fruitful guides who can be midwives in transformative reading. Honoring our heritage demands we set our sights beyond short-term crisis and build durable stewards of tradition.
Calvin began his Institutes by noting the interrelated nature of our knowledge of God and ourselves- “no one can look upon himself without immediately turning his thoughts to the contemplation of God” and “man never achieves a clear knowledge of himself unless he has first looked upon God’s face.”6 Protestant retrieval has hitherto set upon looking at God and now has come to look toward man, seeking a whole new set of eyes to see the world. The end goal of the retrieval project is a horizon beyond modernity that can be actuated today. It must assume work at an accelerated pace, but nonetheless, it needs to place the Reformed Orthodox as social and political authorities in evangelical thought life. The treasure of our heritage places a burden on us to be serious about leadership. The end of retrieval must be a transformation of our theological and social life. This transformation begins first with the renewal of our minds and hearts. I pray it spills over so the church may be salt and light in a decaying world.
Image Credit: Unsplash
