Abstract
Nicholas Wolterstorff’s The Mighty and the Almighty is an intervention in the field of Christian political theology. He argues that traditional political theology in both its premodern and contemporary forms has tended to fall into perfectionist and providentialist traps, allowing the state to claim divinely-bestowed authority where it has none. In response, his constructive project advances particular views of the relationship between divine and political authority as well as the relationship between the state, conceived as a divinely-authorized rights-limited institution, and the church, conceived as a non-natural institution that is ontologically autonomous of the state. Wolterstorff suggests that Christian political theology can, and ought to, endorse a certain form of modern liberal polity. While granting many of his points, I argue that Wolterstorff’s dismissal of traditional thinkers, such as John Calvin, reveals two problematic features of his own theory: first, the way he relates the state’s moral authority to natural rights and the common good; and second, his proposal of the ontological distinction between church and state. Drawing on the conceptual resources of some of Wolterstorff’s own theological forebears—John Calvin and Johannes Althusius—I suggest that traditional Christian political theology offers a more adequate framework for recognizing the common good and responding appropriately to conditions of justice and injustice.
According to a popular narrative, the demise of what we now call “political theology” was tied to the early modern rise of the liberal nation-state. The premodern world of political theology, so the story goes, had been a “hierarchically organized, religiously constituted” world 1 that viewed its governmental structures as representatives of divine rule, authorized to cultivate virtue and piety among its citizens. However, by the mid-seventeenth century, following decades of religiously-motivated wars that had devastated most of northern Europe, Christian political theology had reached a point of crisis. Even while the old order of Christendom was crumbling under the weight of its metaphysical commitments, a new empirical science of politics was emerging with a novel conception of civil authority. Rejecting the metaphysical and authoritarian allurements of theology, the new political science invented the idea of an autonomous nation-state. This sovereign power would be vested with the authority needed to enact law and bring about temporal peace. 2 It would recuse itself from the rancorous debates over theology and the metaphysics of divine rule that had proved so divisive in Western Christendom. Instead, the sovereign state would concern itself only with protecting a narrow set of subjective natural rights—that is, individual rights that no human institution (even one claiming a divine imprimatur) is authorized to violate. With this crucial turn, politics was freed from theology. And thus, according to this “separation narrative,” 3 the long tradition of political theology was cast aside, “and with it memory of the age-old human quest to bring the whole of life under God’s authority.” 4
Still, the hypothetical demise of political theology left something of a vacuum for the new political science. If one cannot appeal to a preexisting theological or metaphysical order to justify the existence of a particular political administration, what then? What is it that generates the kind of authority that grants civil government the right to issue morally-obliging commands to its citizens? It was this question that animated a series of early modern political theorists who speculated about the origins of social contracts and sovereign power—concepts that underlie the establishment of authoritative political administrations. 5 Yet, as Martin Loughlin points out, many contemporary theorists have set aside this ambitious early modern project, preferring a principled agnosticism when it comes to the grounds of authoritative legal and political administration. After all, the question of how authority is generated appears to lie “beyond the boundaries of juristic knowledge.” 6 As such, it is a matter “rarely regarded as being of primary importance.” 7
In recent years, however, a number of religious and secular scholars have begun to return to the question of the nature of political authority. Some of these scholars have even reintroduced the concept of political theology 8 in an attempt to shake late modern liberalism out of its dogmatic slumbers. Perhaps, they suggest, the separation narrative that we have told ourselves does not express the whole truth about the modern political condition. We ought to ask, once again, on what grounds the state believes it can legitimately demand our allegiance and our obedience. Is it possible that, contrary to the separation narrative, late modern liberalism has retained certain theological or authoritarian elements? Christian theologians like John Milbank, William Cavanaugh, and John Howard Yoder suspect that this is indeed the case. In fact, some theologians argue, the liberal nation-state has generated its own myths, misappropriating sovereign titles and prerogatives, treading close to idolatry. Alongside the theologians, secular forms of political theology, drawing on the work of Carl Schmitt and others, have arrived at a similar conclusion. If, as Schmitt argued, “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts,” 9 then it would seem that liberal theory has obscured the real (pseudo-theological) character of the liberal state. What is necessary, then, is to construct a sort of theopolitical phenomenology of the liberal nation-state, attempting to understand the analogies of “political faith” that continue to sustain liberalism’s culture of belief and practice. These secular theorists question whether political theology was really defeated at some point in the seventeenth century. Is it possible that a great deal of what the theological tradition had to say about the sacred nature of political rule and obedience remains implicit in the structures and practices of late modern liberalism?
In this revitalized field of political theology, Nicholas Wolterstorff’s The Mighty and the Almighty: An Essay in Political Theology is an exceptional and innovative contribution to the discussion. Political theology is a topic of interest that has produced sweeping claims about the nation-state, the legitimate use of coercive power, sacrifice, love, and other evocative themes. Wolterstorff addresses issues of equal scope, but does so with an analytic precision that is quite refreshing. At the core of any political theology are certain fundamental concepts—authority, governance, and the nature of moral obligation. Properly defined, he argues, these concepts allow Christians to make better sense of the purpose of civil government, the grounds for political obedience, the relationship of church and state, and the theological status of liberal democracy.
Wolterstorff brings his particular Reformed Christian theological commitments to bear on his project of political theology in many insightful ways. His theological arguments in defense of liberal polity are compelling and clear, and demand careful attention. But because it would be a dreary exercise to catalog all the points on which we agree, I will instead offer a few normative and historical rejoinders to Wolterstorff’s essay. I will argue that even in this meticulous construction of a Christian political theology, there remains an intriguing and important tension. On one hand, Wolterstorff rejects the part of the separation narrative (told above) that preaches that the death of political theology was a necessary sacrifice to obtain the promise of abstract, secularized reason in the public sphere (p. 9). 10 On the other hand, he makes common cause with the proponents of the separation narrative in rejecting two aspects of traditional political theology: first, the presumed sacrality of political hierarchy in God’s providential order; and second, the idea that the political community ought to pursue the common good by means of perfecting its citizens’ virtue and piety, potentially through coercive means.
For evident reasons, these providentialist and perfectionist elements of the premodern tradition are difficult for us to swallow. Few moderns wish for a return to the political institutions and practices of Christendom. With Wolterstorff, we should acknowledge with gratitude all that was gained alongside the emergence of modern liberalism. At the same time, I will argue that Wolterstorff’s critique of premodern political theology reveals two problematic features of his own theory: first, the way he relates the state’s moral authority to natural rights and the common good; and second, his proposal of the ontological distinction between church and state. Drawing on the conceptual resources of some of Wolterstorff’s own theological forebears—John Calvin and Johannes Althusius—I will suggest that traditional Christian political theology offers us a more adequate framework for recognizing the common good and responding appropriately to conditions of justice and injustice.
The Twos
Christian theologians have employed a wide range of concepts to explain how God’s authority relates to civil authority. Many of these explanations have turned on a metaphorical duality: two cities, two swords, two kingdoms, and two rules, among others. Implicit in these metaphors is the idea that Christians somehow live simultaneously under divine and human governance. But after this point, differences quickly emerge. For instance, should we talk of the duality of God and Caesar, the church and the state, or the temporal “city of man” and the eternal “city of God”? Despite the familial resemblance, these frameworks have led to quite different theologies and social practices.
Wolterstorff notes that many contemporary Christian theologians have chosen to set up the duality in terms that present the modern state as a rival to the church. In this picture, the state is essentially an aggressor—an institution whose false claims to sovereign power make it difficult to imagine legitimate ways in which faithful Christians could ever participate in civil rule (pp. 5–6). By contrast, Wolterstorff points out, many medieval and some early modern pictures of the duality were quite the reverse. In these accounts, the civil magistracy and the ecclesial hierarchy were each viewed as distinct sacred institutions authorized by God to rule over all Christians—the state over temporal affairs, and the church over spiritual. In the former case, the authorization to command was bestowed by God on the political office itself, regardless of whether the object of the ruler’s commands was just or unjust (p. 7). To disobey the civil magistrate was to disobey God—full stop.
Neither of these pictures of dual authority persuades Wolterstorff. Instead, he directs us back to a primitive strand of Christian thought—one that he traces from the writings of St. Paul through the narrative of the martyrdom of Polycarp, the bishop of Smyrna (d. 155–6 or 166–7 CE). It is this latter account that frames Wolterstorff’s main argument about the nature and extent of political authority.
As the story is told, the Roman proconsul of Asia had Polycarp arrested on charges of atheism—a capital crime for which Christians were held liable on account of their denial of the gods of the imperial cult. After Polycarp’s arrest, the proconsul pled with him to reject Christ publically and to swear by the tyche (the genius) of Caesar. Polycarp responded, “For eighty and six years have I been his servant, and he has done me no wrong; how can I blaspheme my King, who has saved me?”
For Wolterstorff, the significance of Polycarp for political theology lies not just in the bishop’s courage in facing martyrdom, but in how he went on to describe his own status as a both a Christian and a Roman subject. Polycarp refused to obey the political authorities, certainly, but he also reminded the proconsul that Christians “have been taught to render honor, as is meet, if it hurts us not, to princes and authorities appointed by God.” The point that Wolterstorff wants to press, which becomes foundational for the rest of his argument, is that Polycarp did not maintain that the proconsul had no authority over him, or that Christ was his sovereign instead of the Roman political authorities. Rather, Polycarp invoked a jurisdictional distinction between sovereign authorities. As a Christian, he believed he was obligated to render obedience to whomever obedience was due. In this particular moment, with the prospect of martyrdom looming, there was a collision of authorities that each claimed the right to command Polycarp’s obedience. In his response to the situation, Polycarp argued that, although the Roman political order had the right to demand his obedience on certain matters, the command to reject Christ and to swear by Caesar was not one of them.
But why? On what grounds did Polycarp affirm his status as political subject and yet refuse to obey his political authorities?
Two forms of duality emerge in the story of Polycarp. First, there is the duality that Wolterstorff believes affects all human persons: in what way does political authority “mediate” divine authority while still “being limited and placed under judgment by divine authority”? Second, how should Christians in particular understand their moral duties as members of both the state and the church?
By framing the questions in this way, Wolterstorff has already implicitly rejected those political theologies which shirk at the notion that Christians ought to recognize the mediation of divine authority through political institutions. On this account, he argues, the political theology of both Augustinians and Yoderians is fundamentally flawed. Both schools of thought rely on what Wolterstorff takes to be a mistaken interpretation of the biblical notion that Christians are “resident aliens” in this world. Neither school of thought has the requisite resources or principles to make competent judgments about whether the state has overstepped its divinely-mandated jurisdictional boundaries. Augustinians and Yoderians share a misconception about the nature of the dual authorities of God and the state. Better to return to the example of Polycarp, Wolterstorff suggests, in which we see that it is possible for Christians to conceive of political authority as entirely legitimate—within a limited jurisdiction. So long as the state remains within these (as of yet unspecified) boundaries, the church may stand as a polis without being a counter-polis. The civil magistrate may bear the sword justly and in a way that the church can, and must, affirm.
Authority to Command
For Wolterstorff, the fundamental mistake of the Yoderians and Augustinians is to ignore the possibility that divine authority could be mediated through various political structures. But there is the opposite danger as well, which he locates in premodern Christian political thought. If we grant that divine authority is in fact mediated through political institutions, what will prevent the state from using its status as divine “deputy” to command its citizens arbitrarily and with impunity? The appeal of the more wary Yoderian and Augustinian traditions lies in their ability to distinguish sharply between sacrality and divine rule on one side and the state’s temporal rule on the other. If we give up their suspicion of political mediation, what do we have left to save us from Leviathan?
At this point, Wolterstorff redirects us to a three-tiered conception of authority: authority in general, authority to govern, and the uniquely political authority to govern. Before turning to Wolterstorff’s own constructive project, it is necessary to attend to these distinctions and definitions.
Wolterstorff first distinguishes between social authority (of the sort that we would say: she speaks with authority about X) and performance authority. The difference between the two, respectively, is the difference between being an authority and having the authority to do something. In a critical move, to which I will return later, Wolterstorff signals that his political theology is concerned with the latter form. Having the authority to perform some action implies having the right to do it—with right being characterized in terms of permission (p. 48).
Authority in all its general forms is an inescapable part of human existence, but most relevant to the topic at hand is the authority to govern. This too must be parsed out. There are a number of reasons for which someone might treat the command of another as authoritative. Wolterstorff gives the example of a business owner issuing a directive to his employees. Some employees may treat the directive as authoritative because they think it best to defer to their owner’s superior judgment. Others might obey because they fear repercussions if they disregard him. Neither of these quite captures what Wolterstorff is after, though. What is it “for the owner to have authority to govern his employees?” (p. 61, emphasis original). It is one thing to say that the owner is in a position to issue a directive that his employees treat as authoritative. This is authority as potentia, in which someone may have the ability, or be in a position, to do something without being morally authorized by anything or anyone to do it. To have moral authority of this latter type is to have potestas—the right to issue a directive that generates moral obligation (pp. 61–62).
The distinction between potentia and potestas allows Wolterstorff to set his own view of political authority apart from both contemporary theory and traditional political theology. On one hand, contemporary theory has largely focused on potentia, leading to the view that authority to govern is a “species of influence,” rather than something that generates moral obligation (pp. 64–66). The right of appeal, or the attempt to justify a commanding action, can only go so far back as a Grundnorm—some hypothetical standard or rule that is not deduced from any other principle but is simply assumed in order to maintain the efficacy and authority of the legal order. 11 As a result, the question of moral right or authority is irrelevant. On the other hand, Wolterstorff believes that traditional political theology has tended to conflate the two concepts, assuming that the political ruler, simply by virtue of her office (potentia), necessarily has the potestas to issue commands.
Thus the question becomes: what are the sorts of commands that the political ruler has the moral authorization (potestas) to make?
It is on this point that Wolterstorff believes he has earlier Christian political theologians—notably, the Genevan reformer John Calvin—dead to rights. In sum, he believes that Calvin makes two critical mistakes—one is what I have called the providentialist error and the other the perfectionist error.
Calvin’s first mistake, which Wolterstorff ascribes to the premodern Christian tradition in general, is to assume that political authority is a species of “positional authority.” That is, God “deputizes” the magisterial office to defend the regnant social order. Thus, any command issued by God’s deputy is one that morally obliges the citizen to obey, because it is, in effect, God’s own command. Wolterstorff quotes Calvin to this effect: “the magistrate cannot be resisted without God being resisted at the same time” (Institutes 4.20.23). Worse still, Calvin appears to believe that even the cruelest tyrant—again, simply by virtue of holding office—ought to be obeyed. The actual content of the command is irrelevant to the matter of moral obligation. The only exception that Wolterstorff finds in Calvin comes when the magistrate commands impiety, which Wolterstorff interprets as matters pertaining to divine worship and the church (pp. 150–51). The Christian, Calvin writes, must “suffer anything” except to “turn aside from piety.” But this narrow provision still leaves the vast majority of immoral magisterial actions untouched. Calvin’s statements on political authority appear to be based on a disastrous confusion of the two concepts of potentia and potestas. Consequently, the Genevan theologian is unable to put any rigorous limits on governmental authority.
Calvin’s second mistake appears to build on the first. Not only is the magistrate God’s deputy on earth, he is also charged with the task of perfecting his citizens’ virtue and piety. This is done rightly when the government recognizes its duty “to cherish and protect the outward worship of God, to defend sound doctrine of piety and the position of the church” and to “form our social behavior to civil righteousness,” thus promoting social peace (Institutes 4.20.2). By combining this perfectionist element with his providentialist view of the state’s moral authority, Calvin invites the state to overstep its proper God-given jurisdiction in dangerously intrusive ways.
On these two points, Wolterstorff argues, Calvin lies on the far side of a great divide separating premodern political theologians from moderns. “When you and I think about the authority of the state,” he writes, “we think immediately about limits on its authority” (p. 142). We now believe that the state oversteps its jurisdiction if it censors public speech or prohibits the free exercise of religion. Perhaps the easiest way to explain the difference between Calvin and modern liberals, says Wolterstorff, is the concept of natural rights. These rights determine the boundaries of the state’s potestas. That is, citizens have natural rights that “impose limits on state authority.” This notion of subjective natural right plays no role in Calvin’s own thought, even if it appears in later generations of Reformed political theory.
For Wolterstorff this notion of rights is crucial because it allows us to overcome both of Calvin’s fundamental mistakes. First, the concept solves Calvin’s providentialist error by limiting the state’s jurisdiction to that of “curbing wrongdoing,” that is, protecting its citizens’ natural rights. In addition, natural rights have the effect of restraining Calvin’s perfectionism, because if the “God-given task of the state is to protect citizens from being wronged,” its license for divinely-authorized action is quite limited. The state would only be indirectly concerned with matters of virtue and piety, insofar as it punishes those who violate the rights of others (p. 101).
Still, two nagging questions remain about the way that Wolterstorff has used Calvin’s premodern political theology as a foil for his own rights-based theory. First, does Wolterstorff actually get Calvin and the premodern tradition of political theology right, or are there neglected factors which raise doubts about his own project? Second, does Wolterstorff’s own account of political authority, and his corresponding emphasis on natural rights, provide him with a substantive answer to our earlier question? That is, does he give us a way to specify the types of commands which the political ruler has the moral authorization (potestas) to make?
Calvin’s Deficit of Rights
On Wolterstorff’s account, the closest that Calvin gets to a proper understanding of political authority is when the reformer acknowledges that the magistrate cannot morally obligate his citizens to commit impiety. By making this exception, Calvin appears to endorse, at least implicitly and incompletely, the existence of some subjective rights which constrain political power.
But this is not exactly right. The first problem with this reading of Calvin is Wolterstorff’s use of the term “piety.” Although Wolterstorff does not define the term himself, he interprets Calvin’s use of piety as observance of the first table of the Decalogue, and therefore matters of religious worship (pp. 73–74). If Wolterstorff is correct in this interpretation, it seems that Calvin would have Christians obey any magisterial command that pertains to the second table of the law, even if it entails the mistreatment of one’s neighbor (p. 74). Apart from first table matters of piety, Calvin puts “no limits on the authority of government” (p. 150). But this narrow definition of piety is anachronistic. For Calvin, piety is not simply a religious expression or sentiment that is isolated from the (second table) demands of justice or neighborly care. 12 Rather, there is a broader theological, even hierarchical, framework he has in mind.
Interestingly for Wolterstorff’s own project, Calvin’s understanding of piety is quite closely associated with his concept of authority. As Calvin defines the concept in the Institutes, piety is a moral disposition in which the individual, conscious of her own reliance on others, comes to understand the source of her material blessings and of life itself; this consciousness then prompts her to offer due reverence to the source of her existence (Institutes 1.2.1). For Calvin, of course, the ultimate source of existence is God. The divine–human relationship therefore provides the archetype for pious authority: God, after forming the world, “governs it by his wisdom, preserves it by his goodness … rules the human race with justice … bears with them in mercy.” Consequently, any “particle of light, or wisdom, or justice, or power, or rectitude, or genuine truth” finds its source in God. The essence of piety is therefore the “union of reverence and love to God which the knowledge of his benefits inspires.” It is the grateful response to an antecedent relationship—the habitual recognition of the innumerable goods offered via friendship with, and reliance upon, God.
Significantly, Calvin applies this definition of piety not only to God’s governance of humanity, but to human authorities as well. Although divine rule is paradigmatic, Calvin believes that Christians owe reverence, and even piety (reverentiae atque adeo pietatis affectum), to human governors (Institutes 4.20.29). After all, these rulers are God’s provision for creation, the providential protection from the chaos that would necessarily ensue in a world corrupted by sin. Therefore, an individual with a truly pious disposition ought to recognize the political authorities as divine gifts, and so respond with due obedience.
This is all well and good, Wolterstorff might object, but Calvin still makes the mistake of identifying these civil rulers as deputies of divine authority. Must pious Christians obey even the impious commands of the magistrate (p. 75)?
There is a valid point to be made here. But we first need to be careful to read Calvin in light of his own context. Wolterstorff finds it troubling that the reformer could have countenanced Christians obeying unjust and injurious magisterial commands. And, as he points out, if later generations of Reformed thinkers would seize on this problem of political tyranny to construct a theory of resistance, why couldn’t Calvin do the same?
In premodern Christian thought, to which Calvin was of course deeply indebted, there was a concept of natural—or fundamental—law to which all political authorities were subject. The crucial problem, however, was in determining how the magistrate could be held accountable to this higher moral order. Many late medieval theologians and canon lawyers had argued that the civil ruler did, in fact, have a temporal superior who could hold him in check: the bishop of Rome. Protestant communities, however, had to look elsewhere for this sort of authority. Martin Luther famously called on the German nobles to act as Notbischöfe (emergency bishops) to reform the church and stand against what he considered papal tyranny. Likewise, Calvin implored the royal family and nobility of France to serve as protectors of “true religion.” 13 The early reformers’ view of political agency was centered, as Wolterstorff rightly notes, on those who already occupied positions in the civil hierarchy.
So what about the moral obligations of the ruler’s political subjects? Let’s say the ruler is duty bound to obey God’s law but there is no other temporal authority, like the pope, that can compel him to do so. In such a situation, would Calvin argue that the Christian ought to obey the magistrate’s command to commit theft, murder, or any other act prohibited by the second table of the law?
The simple answer is no. There is a difference between the command of a magistrate who murders and a magisterial command to murder. The discomfiting passages that Wolterstorff cites in his discussion of Calvin have to do with obedience under the former circumstance. 14 Regarding the latter circumstance, Calvin in fact forcefully states that Christians are bound to obey the commands of the prince only “as far as lawful” (Institutes 4.20.24). Or, as Wolterstorff himself quotes Calvin, if magistrates “command anything against [God], let us not pay the least regard to it.” 15 Whereas Wolterstorff interprets this “piety exception” as limited to matters of divine worship, Calvin views the obligations of piety as part of God’s beneficent moral ordering of the world. Calvin’s logic is this: rendering due honor to God, who is the source of all human order and happiness, takes precedence over the obedience due to political officials. If a prince were to command his subject to harm her neighbor, it would be a violation of piety: he has acted against the providential order. No moral obligation attends such a command (Institutes 4.20.32).
What Wolterstorff overlooks here, because he is still picturing the solution in terms of subjective rights, is that Calvin’s view of political rule (mistaken though it may be) is conceived in terms of providential order. At the same time, Wolterstorff correctly seizes on the fact that Calvin, like many in the Christian political tradition before him, found it difficult to specify the circumstances in which an aggrieved subject would be able to, or have the right to, rebel against her “superior.” Even though Calvin famously mentions the possibility of “lesser magistrates” recognizing their duty to “restrain the willfulness of kings” on behalf of an aggrieved people, it is not exactly clear what would happen if the lesser magistrates were equally corrupt or unwilling to intervene.
But notice that we are talking about two distinct matters. Calvin believes that the exercise of political authority must accord with justice; a command to act against God’s providential rule cannot generate moral obligation. This does not mean that when a magistrate issues an unjust command, the aggrieved subject has acquired the right to overthrow the magisterial office itself. To put this in terms that Calvin does not use (so far as I am aware), the subject may passively resist an unjust command. This passive resistance may take the form of calling on the (divinely-authorized) lesser magistrates to intervene, or fleeing the country, or simply choosing not to obey a magisterial command that is immoral and awaiting the punitive consequences. 16 Still, Calvin thinks the subject may not actively resist the office of civil rule itself. To resist actively, by force of arms, would be to upset the whole order of divine–human governance. This sort of action would be, Calvin believes, an impiety that welcomes chaos. 17
Here, later generations of Reformed theorists identified a tension in Calvin’s thought. Are there unjust actions that a political ruler could commit that would not only negate any moral obligations to obey his command, but also (if sufficiently impious) divest him of his office? If there are such acts, how would we recognize them?
Calvin was reticent to specify such acts, even later in his life when some of his colleagues and former students began to advocate the overthrow of Catholic regimes. 18 There are a number of reasons for this reluctance, although one of the more compelling explanations is the notable Stoic undercurrent in Calvin’s doctrines of providence, necessity, and temporal authority. 19 Although he believed that magistrates ought to be exhorted to justice, clemency, and piety, he was hardly utopian about the prospects for such princely virtue. For Calvin, in fact, tyrannical rule is a perennial condition, more the norm than the exception in political governance. In response to tyranny, Calvin exhorted the faithful to recognize that their true freedom lay beyond the ruler’s power. 20 The signal virtue of political subjects under tyranny was patience. Faithful Christians could expect God’s ultimate judgment on the tyrant, but as political subjects they must not actively try to loose the bonds of oppression. 21 The powerless must await their vindication from some other divinely-authorized agency.
Later Reformed political thought diverges from Calvin, not by denying divine providence, but by extending its scope to include the political agency of subjects as well as the existing civil magisterium. Wolterstorff signals this early modern shift, quoting at various moments the resistance theorist Philippe de Mornay and the arch-republican John Milton. Yet Wolterstorff characterizes this shift in terms of a recovery of the “biblical” (that is, Pauline) notion of natural rights and justice. This causal explanation, however, is unsatisfying for both normative and historical reasons. To explore why, we must return to Wolterstorff’s initial distinction between social authority and performance authority.
Rights and Recognition
In his discussion of the ways in which authority may be generated, Wolterstorff underscores the means of conferral and delegation. In each case, for someone or some institution to have authority it must be acquired in some specific way from a preceding, or higher, authority—that is, authority authorizes authority. Conferral and delegation complement Wolterstorff’s description of a rights-limited state mechanism. As he describes it, the state is an institution that must not violate the rights already possessed by its citizens. A procedural explanation would go something like this: after the state issues a directive to the individual, she may perform a sort of self-inventory of both her own rights as well as the state’s constitutive permissions. The state is permitted to do X, prima facie, so long as: (i) X falls within its jurisdiction as an institution for curbing wrongdoing; and (ii) X does not violate the subjective rights of the citizen. Further prudential considerations enter the picture in terms of context and appropriate expenditure of state resources, but these are secondary to the fundamental question of right and authorization. In sum, the state’s performance authority is bounded by its citizens’ rights (pp. 63, 117, 157–58).
But this picture becomes more complicated when we consider another way in which we commonly use the term authority. If I refer to Nicholas Wolterstorff as an authority on the philosophy of Thomas Reid, I am not saying that some other authority has previously bestowed on Wolterstorff the potestas to speak bindingly about the Scottish philosopher. Nor am I necessarily implying that Wolterstorff holds some office which gives him the power to speak thus about Reid. Rather, by calling Wolterstorff an authority in this context I am stating implicitly that I recognize him as a person of a certain standing. I take him to be someone whose speech and writings about Reid ought to be trusted or at least given due consideration. There are many possible explanations for this implicit trust. Perhaps the scholarly community, whose expertise I also trust, has favorably received Wolterstorff’s writings on Reid. Or perhaps I know Wolterstorff to be, not only a person of considerable acuity, but also someone who has spent many decades in study of the relevant primary and secondary texts. I therefore take him to be an intellectual authority on the topics at issue.
This is not Wolterstorff’s characterization of performance authority, but rather something like his definition of social authority. Historically, this sense of social, or recognitive, authority underlies some of the most significant concepts advanced by early modern Christian, particularly Reformed, political theorists. This is especially evident in their attempt to expand the political agency of subjects by articulating ways in which citizens (qua citizens) could hold magisterial authorities accountable. In order to achieve this, these theorists advanced a wide array of arguments, many of which used language of rights and fundamental laws. 22 Yet their use of this language differs from Wolterstorff in a key respect. Whereas Wolterstorff talks of natural rights under the auspices of performance authority, with its promise of a set of pre-social principles for determining the limits of state jurisdiction, the early modern Calvinists and resistance theorists commonly talked in terms of compact, consociation, or covenant—terms which summon up the category of social authority that Wolterstorff bracketed at the outset of his project.
Wolterstorff states, although he does not explain why in this particular volume, that social authority is not relevant to the discussion of political governance (p. 48). So what was it that led many of his theological ancestors to disagree?
An Althusian Excursus
One of the more influential—and controversial—works in early seventeenth-century political theory was Johannes Althusius’ 1603 treatise Politica Methodice Digesta. 23 Althusius, whose main arguments were immediately interpreted as a defense of the Dutch Calvinist revolt against Spain, advocates several principles that are relevant to Wolterstorff’s own political theology. These include a fledging theory of popular sovereignty, a defense of lawful resistance to tyrants, 24 and—as Wolterstorff himself mentions (p. 159)—a discussion of the role that mediating institutions have in protecting the populace from sovereign power. At the same time, Althusius’ project diverges from Wolterstorff’s at crucial points. Most importantly, Althusius construes the grounds of political authority in terms of social communicatio rather than in modern terms of pre-social rights. 25
Relevant to the present discussion, Althusius argues that relationships of authority arise within what he calls consociatio. He uses this term of art to describe the entity through which “those who have their life together oblige themselves to each other, in an express or tacit covenant, to the mutual communication of those things that are useful and necessary to the use and interchange of social life” (Politica 1.2). The consociation is thus, as Annabel Brett describes it, a “juridical phenomenon” that encompasses all forms of association, both “natural” (for example, marriage and kinship) and “voluntary” (for example, university and guild). These communities comprise a wide network of social relations that give rise to jus symbioticum—a “norm of life-sharing” that allows individuals to pursue the common good in ways they could not in isolation. 26 The terms of the relations are made explicit as social bodies are able to identify goods and natural ends that are shared in common. 27 Althusius refers to this process as a type of “communication” in which members of society exchange and allocate material goods, services, and rights. 28 For Althusius this phenomenon is possible because these communicative acts are implicitly authoritative. That is, consociations exist insofar as their members recognize each other’s communicative acts as authoritative (Politica 9.16).
The crucial thing to note here is that the concept of rights enters Althusius’ discussion at the stage in which social and political bodies wish to recognize, in some formal sense, the implicit values and ends that make the community something good—that is, something worth preserving (Politica I.7–10). When appropriate, an explicit covenant is made for a dual purpose. First, the covenant makes the terms of agreement known so that those to whom authority has been communicated may be held responsible to the fundamental laws that are mediated through normative relationships. Second, the covenant is an expression of the goods recognized by the community, with the implication that specific terms can be modified later, if necessary, to better pursue those goods. In short, rightly-ordered relationships set rights, not the other way around.
Here, Althusius and Wolterstorff are at cross-purposes. Both are Christian thinkers concerned to identify the means by which political rule is morally authorized. That is, both are concerned with potestas, not just potentia. Yet Althusius articulates his concept of authority in terms of social recognition and communication. Wolterstorff, on the other side, turns to inherent subjective rights that the state must respect if it is to exercise any authority as God’s “enforcement mechanism” in society. Both theorists want to maintain, on one hand, that divine rule (that is, providence) is mediated through political governance, and, on the other hand, that political authority is constituted from below so as to hold sovereign power to account. Yet, for all these common causes, the two theorists proceed along opposite lines: Althusius from relations to rights, and Wolterstorff from rights to relations.
Rights and Shalom
What should we make of this systematic difference between Althusius and Wolterstorff? On one level, I am proposing that Wolterstorff is mistaken to think that a theory of non-socially conferred individual rights is the best or only way to achieve a political theology from below. Althusius is just one counterexample; others might be explored as well. Contrary to Wolterstorff’s claims, earlier forms of Christian political thought had the means to identify morally-binding political commands, as well as the difference between just and tyrannical rule, without holding to a modern theory of rights or performance authority. 29 In short, I want to note that there are stronger and more nuanced accounts of traditional political theology and the common good that Wolterstorff has yet to engage.
On a more normative level, I want to question whether it is Wolterstorff’s theory, or something closer to Althusius’ political thought, that captures the way in which we actually make substantive judgments about specific political commands and actions. The initial attraction of Wolterstorff’s theory of the rights-limited state is that it promises a rather definitive, and enforceable, limit on the state’s ability to issue morally-obliging commands. Legal rights and social norms are insufficient to determine moral obligation, according to Wolterstorff. It is only through the notion of natural rights, which obtain prior to any social recognition, that we can decide whether the state is acting with or without (divine) authorization.
But even if this were true, it is not very clear how the concept of pre-social rights would play a determinate procedural role in actual political judgments. Let us assume for the moment that every human person has “divinely-bestowed” rights which obtain prior to an act of social recognition. 30 But how are we to recognize the specific instances in which a right has been violated by some political command? And in cases where no right has been obviously violated, does Wolterstorff’s theory allow us to make judgments about the proper extent of state jurisdiction?
With regard to the first question, many natural law theorists of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were confident that human reason was, in fact, able to discover a set of evident, free-standing principles that could be used to judge whether applications of political power were justified. 31 Wolterstorff is not so epistemically cavalier, and his comments about the human capacity for moral action and discernment acknowledge the need for experiential reasoning and even some kind of traditional casuistry (pp. 107–10). So what precisely is the discursive role of rights vis-à-vis political authority?
Wolterstorff might say that judgments about rights violations come relatively easy in at least the most extreme cases, and these are the ones that matter most, after all. As he argues elsewhere, the worth that God bestows in equal measure on creatures forbids us to violate human life or dignity. Thus, murder and torture are unmistakable violations of divinely bestowed natural rights. 32 There are, of course, moral vocabularies other than that of natural rights that are able to arrive at the same conclusion, but Wolterstorff’s theory appears to work well enough on this formal level. Yet the role of rights talk is less clear when it comes to situations that are not so stark, and the prospects for widespread moral agreement less certain. For instance, Wolterstorff poses a question along these lines: “what if the state goes beyond seeking to curb injustice and aims to enhance the common good—builds infrastructure that is of benefit to everybody, coordinates the activities of citizens, develops public parks, and builds public museums?” To these examples we might add other, more contentious, proposals, such as state-run health care, public funding of contraception and abortion, and so on. In cases like these, “does the state have the authority to do such things or is it exceeding its authority?” (pp. 113–14).
Wolterstorff recognizes that, at least in comparison to the perfectionist picture of the state, his Pauline view is at something of a disadvantage here (p. 114). How can we make judgments about broader or concrete infrastructural matters based on the state’s limited divine mandate to curb wrongdoing? This is complicated, he admits. Yet Wolterstorff still wants to argue that his view of the rights-limited state does not necessarily imply “that the state lacks authority to enhance the common good in ways that go beyond what justice requires” (emphasis added).
It is not entirely clear what Wolterstorff has in mind with this last provocative phrase. 33 A comprehensive analysis of this claim may need to link the present work with Wolterstorff’s recent volumes on justice. What is suggested from the immediate context, however, is that Wolterstorff envisions the existence of a certain sphere of political governance or activity that cannot be justified by appeal to intrinsic rights or wrongs. Rather, he suggests, Christian political theologians might want to construct an argument from the idea that “God desires shalom, the flourishing of the people.” This idea of shalom “goes beyond the absence of injustice,” and may be associated with much of the modern state’s work of “building infrastructure, securing coordination, of activities, founding and maintaining institutions and landscapes that are of public benefit” (p. 114).
Strikingly, Wolterstorff’s brief exploration of the concept of shalom brings him much closer to the theological framework of figures like Calvin and Althusius. Here we have the potential for a broader conception of some common good that motivates citizens to give and exchange reasons for how it should be protected, perhaps leading to some formal authorization of a governing political body. If we were feeling adventurous, we might even say that shalom implies a theology of right-order, because we proceed from recognition of the good to specific authorizations and rights.
Yet it is not entirely clear how Wolterstorff wants to fit this notion of shalom into his theology of the state. The state is, after all, an enforcement mechanism. It simply “is a governance-authority structure” (p. 47, emphasis original). God has delegated a very specific authority to it. So, even though Wolterstorff speculates about whether God may have commissioned “it to do something else than what Paul mentions in Romans,” we are not clear about when this shalomic addendum was made or what its provisions are. In fact, following the terms of Wolterstorff’s critique of providentialism and perfectionism, the state would have to obtain specific divine authorization before having license to go “beyond” justice (the sphere of rights) to shalom. This introduces an abstraction that is never filled out in Wolterstorff’s conception of rights and the practical ways that various communities organize to pursue common goods. And it is this abstraction that becomes especially problematic in his subsequent articulation of the relationship between church and state.
Where in the World is the Church?
For Wolterstorff, the state is just one vehicle for God’s governance of creation, and a very limited one at that. This has great significance for the character and role of the church. Unlike all other modes of governance, especially the state, the church “does not belong to the social identity of any natural people.” It is born of the Spirit. It is universal and has no natural features (gender, sexual orientation, social class, ethnicity, etc.) that are required for membership. On these terms, Wolterstorff argues, the institutions of church and state are “entities of two fundamentally different ontological types” (p. 136). Consequently, wherever the church goes it introduces “religious fissure in every society” (p. 122). The existence of the church is a constant reminder that the state’s role as rights-protector is profoundly narrow. The state, which is now looking quite liberal indeed, may no longer vaunt itself as the highest institutional expression of some “religio-ethical unity.” It ought to recognize the “autonomy” of the church because the body of Christ is non-natural, and certainly not a creature of the state. In sum, “if the church has the authority to do certain things, then the state does not have the right to prevent it from doing those things. Should the state try to prevent the church from doing those things, it exceeds its authority” (p. 157). Correspondingly, the church must not grasp for political power as the earlier Christian tradition did, but respect the state’s proper mediation of divine authority.
Although aspects of this account are appealing, there is a disconcerting vagueness to Wolterstorff’s concluding formula. How do we determine those “certain things” which the state cannot do once the church exists? And, conversely, how can we identify the specific practices and beliefs that fall within the church’s autonomous jurisdiction?
The latter question may be particularly difficult for Wolterstorff to answer in any detail, given the way he has described the nature of the church. Insofar as the church is non-natural, born from above, ontologically distinct from all other forms of governance, it is hard to pinpoint exactly where this church is in the world. Wolterstorff briefly mentions the church’s liturgy and particular practices (p. 119), but these—he argues—do not constitute the body of Christ. The church was not established after individuals “discovered some natural affinity for each other,” “learned of some shared occupation, plight, or project,” or “discovered that they shared certain religious interests.” Other forms of human association may arise from these practices and moments of recognition, but not the church. Similarly, Wolterstorff believes it is important to distinguish the roles of the church and state as much as possible. The state, as a rights-limited enforcement mechanism, should not try to provide any substantive and unified moral vision of the ultimate human good. By contrast, the church, as a spiritual organism, is very much concerned with ultimate human good.
By the conclusion of Wolterstorff’s argument, we appear to have a strangely abstract, and very modern, description of both “state” and “church.” It is difficult to see how this description adequately accounts for the multiplicity of social practices and identities that constitute political and ecclesial communities. A look back at the theological tradition may again be useful.
Theologians have often described the church in metaphysical or eschatological terms. Following in the tradition of Augustine, Wolterstorff’s own Reformed forebears talked of the church invisible, the church eschatological, and the church triumphant. This is the church “as it really is before God” (Institutes 4.1.7). All the language Wolterstorff employs (non-natural, transnational, born from above, etc.) fits this ecclesiological category. What Wolterstorff does not do, however, is distinguish between this transhistorical church and the specific Christian communities that constitute what theologians have called the visible church. It is the church in this latter sense—the body of Christ between-the-times, fallible, suffering, praying, confessing—that concerns us in the world. In other words, Christians believe the apostolic testimony about the church’s eschatological hope, but we still have to go about the business of addressing how this hope continues to animate and form our particular social practices, our liturgies, and our beliefs. Through grace, we believe that this broken ecclesial body, sustained by faith, hope, and love, will one day be transfigured. But this broken body is still our body—natural, historical, all-too-human, tempted by power, blinded by greed, groaning like creation for the manifestation of the children of God.
If this traditional picture is at all accurate, it is a misdirection to say that the church (as we see it now) and the state (as we see it now) “are entities of two fundamentally different types.” In fact, speaking of the “church” and the “state” in abstract opposition to each other can be quite problematic. It is easy—misleadingly so—to use these categories as a kind of shorthand to divide up realms of human activity. Of course, one of the primary attractions of the separation narrative I retold above is the belief that liberal polity achieved a clear-cut bifurcation of theology from politics, and thus affairs of church from affairs of state. But I suspect this is a story too neat to be true. In its place, I again want to sketch a brief Althusian alternative.
Rather than reifying the church and state, we can look at ecclesial and political communities as paradigmatic human consociations drawn together by the pursuit of various goods. On this account, the church is a community drawn together (through the work of the Holy Spirit, the theologian would add) by the mutual recognition and pursuit of certain goods: divine worship, works of mercy and justice, the edification of the ecclesial family that Christ instituted, and so on. For the Christian, these goods may be identified as temporal and/or eschatological. Likewise, the political community exists to promote certain goods and punish certain evils. In the modern era, this political community has become increasingly identified with a centralized bureaucracy, or the sort of punitive mechanism that receives most of Wolterstorff’s attention. But even if we wish to focus solely on this bureaucratic manifestation of political community (which I think is less than helpful), it still does not seem that the church and the state are ontologically different in any experiential sense. Rather, they simply recognize certain goods and ends that may or may not overlap. Or in some cases, as in the martyrdom of Polycarp, they may conflict quite fundamentally. Here, through the mediation of various competing or complementary goods and ends, moral duties may obtain between the respective communities of ekklesia and polis. One historical instance of this phenomenon might even be the Westphalian political settlement—ironically, a triumphal moment in the separation narrative—in which much of Western Europe recognized that the attempt to impose confessional unity across too wide a boundary was simply too costly. Better to arrive at some settlement which allowed various ecclesial and political communities to preserve other common goods (social peace, freedom to worship, etc.).
Notice that in the end the implications of this alternate view are not very far off from Wolterstorff’s own recommendations. He believes that a humbled liberal polity is quite suitable for free ecclesial practice, as do I. He believes that the bureaucratic state is hardly the best candidate to instill virtue in its citizens, and I agree. 34 If anything, I would go one step further than Wolterstorff, because I worry about providing the institutional church with “ontological” autonomy. It was this sort of privilege that allowed earlier generations of Christians to claim that ecclesial practices (de jure divino) trump all responsibilities to preserve the social peace. 35 Perhaps I am overly Protestant in this regard. In any case, when it comes to contesting the extent of ecclesial privilege, I suspect these situations will be better handled through judicious, historically-informed casuistry than by reverting to a principled defense of the church’s inviolable autonomy. 36
An additional benefit of talking about the ecclesial and political communities in this way involves the problem of origins. Wolterstorff emphasizes the church’s spiritual founding—that it is born from above. Yet, despite his attention to the grounds of the state’s performance authority, he spends very little time talking about how particular regimes acquire or sustain their positional authority. So although Wolterstorff’s theory of the rights-limited state addresses the exercise of political authority, it does not try to explain the complex factors that underlie the power of particular regimes—the national identity and sacrificial spirit that constitute liberal structures today. 37 Ironically, this aligns Wolterstorff with much of late modern theory, with its principled agnosticism about the origins of institutional authority. It is precisely here that the latter-day political theologians, religious and secular alike, have argued that liberal polity has tried to keep its theological and authoritarian skeletons hidden in the closet. Left unnoticed, then, are the shared practices and sacraments, as well as the violent or exclusionary acts, that sustain the institutions of liberal communities. In this way, it is the value that many ascribe to socio-political symbols that motivates individuals to make sacrifices for their preservation (for example, the willingness to die for one’s country). Through these valuations and performances, citizens implicitly invest the offices and symbols of power (potentia) with their authority (potestas), for good or ill.
If any of this is true, political theologians will need to become phenomenologists as well as theorists. This will require us to examine the implicit goods, desires, and commitments of the political body of which we find ourselves a part. We may need to come to terms with the fact that the nation-state relies on something like civic trust or political faith. This political faith, in turn, rests on the mutual recognition of natural ends, values, shared symbols and identities. Of course, this recognition is often radically flawed—skewed by sin and the lust for domination. As such, the Christian political theologian will need to learn how to discriminate among the ways that the goods of the ecclesial and political communities coincide, complement, or contradict each other. Perhaps she may even need to pick up the prophetic mantle, using her citizenship in the context of either community to protest its idolatry and domination. There is a time for everything—cooperation, cooption, even contestation.
On these terms, in both his scholarship and Christian practice, Wolterstorff has embodied the political theologian’s calling to an extraordinary degree. Disagreements over how best to frame a Christian political theology will continue, of course, so we ought to be profoundly grateful that a work of this caliber, and practitioner of this integrity, exists. It would be a mark of impiety if I did not acknowledge the ways in which Wolterstorff’s early work in this field demonstrated that matters of justice were not merely extrinsic or peripheral, but at the very core, of Christian witness. 38 Over the years his work has employed a patient and meticulous mode of persuasion, punctuated by moments of preacherly earnestness. These rhetorical and intellectual virtues provided me with a very formative exemplar of Christian scholarship. I can only hope that his new article will have a similar effect on others, provoking thoughtful debate among religious and secular citizens alike as they strive to protect the justice and peace of the city they share in common.
Footnotes
1.
Martin Loughlin, Foundations of Public Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 7. Cf. Mark Lilla, The Stillborn God (New York: Knopf, 2007); Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).
2.
The legal theorist Paul Kahn describes this development as a new social imaginary in which the state was viewed “as the expression of a social contract that was the product of reasonable agreement among a group of individuals trying to escape danger and privation,” Political Theology: Four New Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), p. 19.
3.
I am adapting this term from Mark Lilla, who argues in The Stillborn God that the “Great Separation” of politics and theology was a historical contingency, a settlement reached only by successfully resisting the natural tendency to feel “compelled to travel up and out: up toward those things that transcend human existence, and outward to encompass the whole of that existence. Only with effort and a great deal of argument can people be trained to separate the basic questions of politics from questions of theology and cosmology,” p. 307.
4.
Lilla, The Stillborn God, p. 5.
5.
For instance, Rousseau wrote of the apparent circularity in the relation between political authority and political administration: “For a nascent people to be capable of appreciating sound maxims of politics and of following the fundamental rules of reason of State, the effect would have to become the cause, the social spirit which is to be the work of the institution would have to preside over the institution itself, and men would have to be prior to the laws what they ought to become by means of them.” Rousseau’s solution is to create the fiction of the Lawgiver, which, as Martin Loughlin explains, is “required to enable him to explain the moment of foundation without relying on force and violence. It intercedes to resolve the paradox that the sovereign people must apparently be both parties to the [political] contract and the entity created by it,” Loughlin, Foundations, p. 116.
6.
Loughlin, Foundations, p. 4.
7.
Leslie Green, The Authority of the State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 2.
8.
As I indicate below, this concept is employed in different ways by various parties. Whereas the term “political theology” is often identified with Carl Schmitt’s reference to secularized theological analogues in political theory, in this article I follow the model of Wolterstorff in referring to “political theology” as a theology of the state, or (better) a theology of political life.
9.
Carl Schmitt, Political Theology (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005 [1922]), p. 36.
10.
Unless otherwise noted, all parenthetical references are to Nicholas Wolterstorff, The Mighty and the Almighty: An Essay in Political Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
11.
See Hans Kelsen, ‘What is the pure theory of law?’, Tulane Law Review 34 (1960), pp. 269–76; ‘On the Basic Norm’, California Law Review 47 (1959), pp. 107–10.
12.
Consider Calvin’s belief that religio was “the best teacher for instructing us mutually to maintain equity and uprightness toward each other; and where a concern for religion is extinguished all regard for justice then perishes along with it,” Calvin, Commentary on the Psalms, 14:4.
13.
See Calvin’s dedicatory preface to King Francis in his Institutes. Similar themes are present in Calvin’s 1548 letter to Edward Somerset, Lord Protector of England during the reign of Edward VI.
14.
On this point, Calvin is not an anomaly in traditional political theology. Compare, for instance, Thomas Aquinas’s account of circumstances in which “superiors are not to be obeyed,” Summa Theologiae II-II, q104a5.
15.
Calvin continues: when rulers command something against God, Christians ought not to “be moved by all the dignity which they possess as magistrates—a dignity to which no injury is done when it is subordinated to the special and truly supreme power of God,” Institutes, 4.20.32.
16.
Nicely summarized in the abridgement of Calvin, One Hundred Aphorisms, 100.
17.
For Calvin, we should remember, this fear was instilled by events such as the Münster Rebellion of 1534, in which radical Anabaptists (with whom Calvin had, shall we say, a fraught relationship) overthrew the civil magistrates and attempted to institute a new millenarian community.
18.
See Calvin’s attempt to distance himself from John Knox’s inflammatory political writings (Letter XV, 29 January 1559, Zurich Letters. Second Series, 35).
19.
Phillip Melanchthon once referred to his friend Calvin as Geneva’s Zeno. See Barbara Pitkin, ‘The Protestant Zeno: Calvin and the Development of Melanchthon’s Anthropology’, Journal of Religion 84.3 (2004), pp. 345–78.
20.
This is a common trope in Calvin’s commentary on the book of Psalms. When confronted by the corruptions and wickedness of temporal powers (both political and ecclesial), Calvin often exhorts Christians to “rise higher, and to contemplate the invaluable treasures of the kingdom of heaven,” patiently waiting with a “good conscience” for God’s judgment, Commentary on the Psalms, 8:7–9.
21.
See Calvin’s evocative account of the Christian’s duty under oppression in his commentary on Daniel 6:21–22.
22.
Although more recent scholarship has complicated the history, two classic analyses of the development of Protestant resistance theory are Robert Kingdon, ‘Calvinism and Resistance Theory: 1550–1580’, in J. H. Burns and Mark Goldie (eds.), The Cambridge History of Political Thought 1450–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 193–218; and Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought: Volume 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006 [1978]), pp. 189–348. On the early modern themes of Protestant natural law and covenant, see Harro Höpfl and Martyn Thompson, ‘The History of Contract as a Motif in Political Thought’, in The American Historical Review 84:4 (October 1979), pp. 919–44; Knud Haakonssen, ‘Protestant Natural Law: A General Interpretation’, in N. Brender and L. Krasnoff (eds.), New Essays on the History of Autonomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 92–109; Horst Dreitzel, Protestantischer Aristotelismus und absoluter Staat (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1970); Martin van Gelderen, ‘Aristotelians, Monarchomachs and Republicans: Sovereignty and respublica mixta in Dutch and German Political Thought’, in van Gelderen and Skinner (eds.), Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Tim Hochstrasser, ‘The Claims of Conscience: Natural Law Theory, Obligation and Resistance in the Huguenot Diaspora’, in J. C. Laursen (ed.), New Essays on the Political Thought of the Huguenots of the Refuge (Leiden, 1995), pp. 15–51; and Annabel Brett, Changes of State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).
23.
Later revised in 1610 and 1614. I will be quoting from the third edition.
24.
Although one could read Althusius as merely extrapolating on Calvin’s own attenuated comments about the right of lesser magistrates to hold tyrants in check. See Matt McCullock, ‘Johannes Althusius’ Politica: The Culmination of Calvin’s Right of Resistance’, European Legacy 11:5 (2006), pp. 485–99.
25.
John Witte offers a rather different account of Althusius in The Reformation of Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 169–81, indicating that Althusius employs a concept of “natural rights.” But Witte invites an anachronistic reading of Althusius, because he assumes the modern concept of pre-social subjective rights. Althusius does not talk of natural rights in this sense, but of symbiotic rights (jus symbioticum)—that is, rights that are communicated between members (symbiotes) of a community, and which vary “according to the nature of the consociation,” Politica, 2.5. Cf. Höpfl and Thompson, ‘The History of Contract’, p. 936; Robert von Friedeburg, ‘Persona and office: Althusius on the formation of magistrates and councilors’, in The Philosopher in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 162; E. H. Kossmann, Political Thought in the Dutch Republic (Koninklijke Nederlandse. Akademie van Wetenschappen; Amsterdam, 2000), p. 29.
26.
Brett, Changes of State, p. 129.
27.
Althusius states that the efficient cause of political consociation is the “consent and agreement among communicating citizens,” the formal cause is the relations brought about by the members “contributing and communicating” with each other, and the final cause is enjoyment of a good life and the common welfare, Politica, I.29.
28.
Compare this to Wolterstorff’s earlier meditation on Calvin’s concept of “mutual communication” of goods according to the moral order of nature in Until Justice and Peace Embrace (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1983), pp. 78–79.
29.
Because Wolterstorff focused on Calvin, I have followed suit. He also briefly mentions Aquinas. I will leave it to others to address this matter in full, although I believe Wolterstorff will need to address: first, Aquinas’s comments in the Summa on how a citizen’s contestation (perturbatio) of a tyrant does not fall under the (prohibitive) category of “sedition” (II-II, q42a2); and second, Aquinas’s commentary on Romans 13. The latter is particularly relevant to Wolterstorff on account of Aquinas’s threefold distinction of political power: first, the power itself, which can only originate in God; second, the way in which power is obtained, which may or may not be from God; and third, the use of power, which may sometimes be from God, “as when a person observes the precepts of divine justice in using the power granted him,” and sometimes not, “as when a person uses power given to him to act against divine justice.”
30.
Compare Wolterstorff, Justice: Rights and Wrongs, pp. 311–22; and Justice in Love, pp. 142–57.
31.
Haakonssen describes this strain of Protestant thought as a distinctly modern, anti-scholastic, and anti-skeptical theory of natural law and rights, Natural Law and Moral Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 24–62.
32.
Wolterstorff, Justice, p. 37.
33.
It is interesting to compare this comment with Wolterstorff’s discussion of justice and shalom in Until Justice and Peace Embrace, pp. 69–72. In this early work, Wolterstorff’s conception of shalom is clearly “intertwined” with justice. “Shalom is the human being dwelling at peace in all his or her relationships: with God, with self, with fellows, with nature” (p. 69). Shalom is present when individuals take delight in these relationships. When these relationships are broken, when the common good of human fellowship is perverted by wrong-doing and domination, “shalom is absent.” In this sense, we might say that the good and the right are fundamentally interrelated. We participate in shalom through fellowship with God and our neighbor. We take delight in this fellowship insofar as it is constituted by just relationships and right actions. On this note, it is also interesting to point out that the early Wolterstorff allies himself with what he calls the medieval Christian “happiness tradition of reflection on the good life,” albeit with greater emphasis on how liberation from injustice is a necessary component of human flourishing (p. 125). Cf. Justice in Love, pp. 85–90.
34.
Here we also ought to note that the premoderns conceived of the political polis in different terms, and on a different scale, than we do. Wolterstorff does not remark on the linguistic shift between Aristotle, Aquinas, and Calvin’s political vocabulary and his own talk of the “state.” If we want to pursue a comparative evaluation of premodern and modern theologies of the political, we need to account for which particular social imaginary is at play: Aristotle’s polis, Augustine’s civitas, Calvin’s regimen, or a more bureaucratic state of the sort described by Max Weber.
35.
I have in mind something like the sixteenth-century debate between Richard Hooker and more radical Puritans like Thomas Cartwright. According to Hooker, the foremost Protestant Thomist of his day, the de jure divino ecclesiology of the Puritans was implicitly a rejection of social unity, and of Christian forbearance, in an English polis that was in danger of polarization along religious lines. See W. J. Torrance Kirby, Richard Hooker’s Doctrine of the Royal Supremacy (Leiden: Brill, 1990); W. Bradford Littlejohn, ‘The Freedom of a Christian Commonwealth: Richard Hooker and the Problem of Christian Liberty’, PhD dissertation, University of Edinburgh (2013).
36.
On these terms, we may want to reject Richard Rorty’s view of religion as a “conversation stopper” while still acknowledging the ways in which religion can be an unwelcome “party crasher.” It is unlikely that secular liberals will know what to make of the Christian church’s claim to ontological autonomy. See John Perry, Pretenses of Loyalty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 209–15.
37.
See Kahn, Political Theology, pp. 1–30; cf. Loughlin, The Idea of Public Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 32–52.
38.
In a similar vein, I owe a debt of gratitude to Eric Gregory for his comments on the initial draft of this article. I have also benefited from the generous feedback and criticism of a number of other readers, including Nicholas Wolterstorff, Sam Goldman, Jeffrey Stout, Kate Henreckson, the anonymous reviewers of Studies in Christian Ethics, and my colleagues in the Religion and Critical Thought Workshop at Princeton University.