The Theological Origins of Political Power
To understand where you are going, you must first understand where you have come from. In light of current disagreements over the purpose and direction of political power (def. the right of a rational agent to govern the subjects under his jurisdiction toward the common good) in relation to religion, both in the broader culture and within the Church, it is essential to revisit the origins of politics. Only by doing so can we gain clarity about its proper function and relation to religion within God’s created order. Some of the popular proposed theories of the relationship of the government to religion within our modern context include state established secularism, religious pluralism, and Christian nationalism. These different proposals rest upon different first principles with regard to what the political power is and how it ought to relate to religion. My goal is not to provide a taxonomy of those differing principles nor interrogate them. I am aiming rather to positively illuminate the theological origins of political power through an examination of both natural and revealed principles and then show the implications that the origin of political power has for its relationship to religion.
The Origins of Political Power in Scripture
The origins of political power in Scripture begin as soon as you open up the text. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” (Gen. 1:1) God, who created all things from nothing, is also and immediately the rightful King over all of creation. (Ps. 95:3-5) God exercised his kingship by a divine order to bring into existence his creational kingdom. By this divine right, he determined the nature of all things and what they were to be used for. God, through the hovering work of His Spirit, descended from his throne to accomplish His creative work over the span of six days. After finishing His work, He rested upon His throne on the seventh day and made that day holy. (Gen. 2:1-3) Through sanctifying the seventh day, God oriented all of creation to find their ultimate rest in Him as its rightful King who would give them rest.
God, who has absolute divine Kingship over all things, on the sixth day of creation, created man in the image of God. (Gen. 1:27) Man was to be a mirror of God’s divine rule upon the earth. This is further elucidated when God dictates to man that he ought to be fruitful and multiply, to fill the earth, and to have dominion over the work of God’s hands. (Gen. 1:28) Man was to be fruitful and populate the created kingdom of God with image bearers who would rule over the creation and order the creation to its intended purpose. Man, mirroring the divine creative pattern in the original creation, was to do the work of subjecting things to the created order, ordering them to their intended end of glorifying God.
God created man and fitted him for this task. Man could not, however, complete this task on his own. The first thing that God declared to be ‘not good’ is the fact that man was alone and that he had no helper fit for him. (Gen. 2:18) God created woman out of the side of man and God presented the woman to him and they entered into a marriage relationship. (Gen. 2:23-24) In this marriage, the man was to rule over his wife as the head of the relationship. (1 Tim. 2:11-15) The man that God has created to rule in his stead over the world was given a wife that he also would rule over and seek the common good of the newly formed household. Within this household, man was to fulfill the divine commission and so image and glorify God in the world as he ordered all things to the worship and glory of God.
In the Scriptural account, political power is not something that is foreign to the created design of God. We see that it is actually a central element by which God would rule and govern his created kingdom through image bearing vice-regents. Not only do we see that man had rule over the creation in general but that carved into the created order of relationships between man and wife within a household was a hierarchical structure. Given the fact that God had commanded man to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and that man ought to leave his mother and father and become one flesh with his wife (Eph. 5:31), more households would have come from this original household and thus more rulers of households.
As these households began to live together, they would have formed villages and thus would arise rulers of villages, and those villages a city and thus would arise rulers of cities. Thus we can see that according to the Scriptural narrative, it would have been something completely natural that ‘politics’ would arise given proper development. These cities and rulers would all be collaborators in the original mandate that God gave to man, subjecting all things to the rule of God through seeking the chief common good of glorifying God and finding their rest in God, the king who would give them rest.
The Origins of Political Power in Nature
Nature and Scripture come together to form one account of God’s revelation to man. These two principles of knowledge, because they come from the same God, will always accord with one another (Herman Witsius, An Essay on the Use and Abuse of Reason in Matters of Religion ). Scripture has its own supernatural principles, and the proper means of its reception is through the way of faith. Nature also has its own principles and the proper way of attaining them is through the way of reason. In examining the supernatural principles of Scripture, the tools of nature can be used to further elucidate the truths contained therein. This is so because, while the supernatural principles of Scripture are above reason, they are not contradictory to reason (Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Sentences). Reason, then, plays an important instrumental role in helping us form a holistic account of how God has created the world and intends for it to function. This is the way of faith seeking understanding (Anselm, Proslogion).
With this in mind, the natural principles of reason should correspond to the Scriptural conclusion that political power is something natural to the world that God made. This is first seen in the nature of man himself as a rational animal. Man as man belongs under the genus of animal as he possesses the sensitive and biological faculties that other animals share in as well. What sets man apart as unique is that he does not just have sensitive faculties, but he also has rational faculties. The faculties of man’s rational nature are his capacity to grasp universal truth through his intellect and his capacity to freely choose the good as he desires it through his will. The sensitive and rational powers of man are not independent from one another; they constitute man’s holistic experience as a psychosomatic unity.
Within this unity, there exists an order or a rule. The rational powers of the intellect and will are to rule over the sensitive faculties of sense perception and sense appetite (This is what Matthew LaPine in The Logic of the Body terms a “tiered psychology”). This is not because there exists an innate vice within the sensitive faculties of man but rather because the sensitive faculties are only able to know a certain ‘perceived good’ through an individual species. The rational faculties are able to abstract the individual species, grasping the universal good, and then deducing the universal good to be chosen. Upon man’s very nature, then, there is stamped political power, as the higher rational faculties rule over the lower sensitive and biological ones for the common good of the entire man. I call this the self-rule of man.
The fact that man is a rational animal also assumes that man is a political or social animal. There are two primary factors that tend to this assumption. The first is that man as a rational animal is able to rationally communicate (Franco Burgersdik,Concept of Economic and Political Doctrine). Secondly, it arises out of necessity, in that man could not attain his good without others. In order for man to adequately self-rule and attain his own good, he could not rely upon himself and himself alone. He would need others to help him attain the goods of the body; such as reproduction for the continuance of life. He would also need others to help him attain the goods of the soul; such as the expression of love, the highest object of this pursuit being God. The need of man’s socio-political nature then would have naturally first expressed itself in the building of a household through the bond of marriage in order to attain the bodily good of reproduction and the spiritual good of expressing love.
As the newly formed household is considered as a unit, it would need an ordering principle to seek its own good and the common good of those within the household. (Franciscus Junius, The Mosaic Polity) Man, as the more fitting governor of the household due to his strength of body and mind, would procure the goods of the household and in a similar way that the individual rules himself, he would politically rule those within his household. Yet, because the wife of the husband is also a rational creature, he should consider her his partner. In this way, the household government mirrors political governance as the man is like the supreme governor of the household and the wife like a lower governor (Franco Burgersdik,Concept of Economic and Political Doctrine).
Naturally, through the union of the husband and wife within the household, children would be born and would grow up to leave their father and mother and start their own household. As soon as this household comes into existence, a neighborhood now comes into existence. As the households seek to collaborate with one another to further seek the goods that their own household cannot supply, you have an order and rule that springs forth in order to govern the neighborhood to that common good. So, a need for a government would arise so that the entire entity of the neighborhood would be led to the common good. This pattern would continue until neighborhoods turned into villages and then the need would arise for governance over the unit of the village, and many villages collaborating together would turn into cities and the new entity of the city would require an agent to govern the city. The necessity of attaining both the goods of body and soul, then, would naturally drive man to pursue his happiness and good within the context of households, neighborhoods, villages, and cities and as these entities collaboratively sought the common good of their own unit, rulers and wielders of political power would arise to govern and guide the units in their pursuit of the goods of body and soul.
The origin of political power, in both nature and Scripture, then, is a natural and inevitable good. This good springs forth from man’s rational nature to know and to seek the good, which is the chief mark of the image of God, the King. Political power is meant to serve the purpose of governing and ordering the unit or entity towards the common goods of both body and soul. These common goods are determined by the type of creature that man was created to be. In other words, they are prescribed by man’s nature as he is a psychosomatic unity.
Implications of Origins in Relation to Religion
Political power is a natural and created good that God instituted amongst mankind, in order that there would be order and governance in man’s collective pursuit of the goods of both body and soul. Again, this is seen through the fact that man is a rational animal who acts towards the good of his being and that by consequence man is also a political animal who seeks this good amongst a community of others who also seek to attain this good. Hence, political communities are meant to promote the common goods of both body and soul amongst the people that belong to that community.
With this in view, what are the implications of the origin of political power upon its relationship to religion? In order to answer this, I need to first define religion. Religion is a moral virtue that obliges or binds man to God and is contained under the genus of justice, or giving to another his due right. (Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica) Religion, then, is the moral obligation that every man owes to God as his Creator, on behalf of His infinite excellency, to bind himself to God in obedience and worship. Religion as a virtue, is something that perfects a power of the soul. In other words, religion is properly deemed a good of the soul by which every man is bound to worship God and perform to God all due duties that belong to God’s divine right.
Is it within the designed purpose of political power to order and govern its inferiors to the practice of true religion? Given that political power is a natural good that has to do with ordering an entity toward the common goods of both body and soul and that true religion is a good of every rational soul, then political power, indeed, ought to concern itself with the ordering of its inferiors towards true religion. The excellency of God requires that worship and obedience to God be man’s chief good (WSC Q1). No man could be blessed or virtuous without this virtue of religion because no man could be blessed or virtuous without his chief good. If a political body, which as a collective, is concerned with pursuing the common goods of both body and soul, and the ones governing and ordering the political body toward those common goods of both body and soul, neglect the pursuit of or ordering to the chief good of every man, it will be to the detriment of the soul of the community and not to its advantage, for which it is supposed to exist. (Burgersdik,Concept of Economic and Political Doctrine)
This fact has been universally recognized and confirmed by the consent of the nations. All nations have attested to the fact that God exists, to the fact that we are religious beings, and to the fact that worship of God is amongst our highest goods. They have also attested to the fact that, in light of our religious nature, no political entity could function properly without the foundation of religion (Aristotle, Politics; Plato, Republic; Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods). For political power to neglect the ordering of its inferiors to the good of religion is to neglect why God instituted political power and communities in the world, namely to order all things to their good and His glory.
The principle that political power ought to order inferiors toward true religion has been shown to be a true principle by the nature of the things themselves. It is out of the purview of this article to outline and map out the continuity and discontinuity of modern views of this relationship with this original principle. Yet, it must be said all vice is contained in either excess or lack. Political power can be used in an excess of its right to order others to false religion, to take liberty away from the conscience, and to unduly take to itself the keys of the kingdom of heaven. These are examples of political tyranny. Political power can also neglect its right in defect by not ordering its inferiors toward true religion, by remaining indifferent in the religious practice of its people, by allowing gross sins to be promoted amongst its people, and neglecting their own piety as an example to their inferiors. These are examples of political abdication.
The use of political power can and should be used to order and govern inferiors to the chief common good of true religion. Those wielding political power ought to be ‘nursing fathers’ (Is. 49:23, WCF 23.3) to the religion of their people. They ought not abdicate their responsibility to order their people to the common goods of both body and soul. They ought not usurp their given responsibilities and order the body in a tyrannical manner. Political power as a natural and created good ought to be used to order the body toward the common good so that man may attain to his highest end within the context of a community. For the final end of political power is the “the conservation of a human society that aims at a life in which you can worship God quietly and without error.” (Johannes Althusius, Politica)
Image: A view of Amsterdam, Jacob van Ruisdael (1629-1682). Wikimedia Commons.