Earthly Power and the Christian

MODERN REFORMATION VOL.30 | NO.6 | NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2021 | $6.95

Earthly Power and the Christian

This IsWhere We Go Deeper...

2 TIMOTHY 2

Retrieve

Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth.

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FEATURES 18

Christian Culture Is Over: Why We Need St. Augustine, Not St. Abraham

BY JOHN HALSEY WOOD JR.

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Power, Politics, and Public Life: Reframing How Christians Engage in Culture

BY KRISTEN DEEDE JOHNSON

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From Orange to Pink: A History of Politics and Religion in South Africa’s Cape Town

BY SIMON JOOSTE

COVER ILLUSTRATION BY METALEAP CREATIVE

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This IsWhere We Grow...

1 PETER 3

Converse

but in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect.

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DEPARTMENTS

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53 BOOK REVIEWS

Theologians and Contract Law The Moral Transformation of the Ius Commune (ca. 1500–1650)

B I B L E S T U DY

The Debt

BY ALLEN C. GUELZO

Lutheran Theology and Contract Law in Early Modern Germany (ca. 1520–1720) REVIEWED BY

R E F O R M AT I O N RESOURCES

“Head and Heart”

By Herman Bavinck T R A N S L AT E D B Y G R E G O R Y PA R K E R J R .

By Adonis Vidu REVIEWED BY K . J. D R A K E

By Wim Decock

By Paulo Astorri

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The Same God Who Works All Things: Inseparable Operations in Trinitarian Theology

SAMUEL BOSTOCK

Duplex Regnum Christi: Christ’s Twofold Kingdom in Reformed Theology

By Jonathon D. Beeke REVIEWED BY DREW MARTIN

Liberty for All: Defending Everyone’s Religious Freedom in a Pluralistic Age Andrew T. Walker REVIEWED BY TIMON CLINE

72 B A C K PA G E

First the Temple, Then the City

BY MICHAEL HORTON

MODERN REFORMATION Editor-in-Chief Michael S. Horton Editorial Director Eric Landry Executive Editor Joshua Schendel Managing Editor Patricia Anders

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Production Assistant Anna Heitmann Copy Editor Kate Walker Proofreader Ann Smith Creative Direction and Design Metaleap Creative

Modern Reformation © 2021. All rights reserved.

ISSN-1076-7169

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LETTER from the EDITOR

“

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ot contentedness but more power; not peace but war; not virtue but fitness.”

So wrote Friedrich Nietzsche in his Der Antichrist. For most Christians, such a bold assertion will sit ill at ease for them, to understate the matter. This push for power by means of might and combat is not easy to marry with Jesus’ instruction to turn the other cheek or Paul’s instruction to live peaceably with all inasmuch as we are able. Nietzsche knew that—hence its title. Yet, were we to describe American Christians’ beliefs about power solely by their actions in the public sphere, we might end up describing something alarmingly close to Nietzsche!

The question of Christian engagement in culture and politics is a vexing one and always has been. At the theoretical and practical levels, agreement among Christians is hard to achieve. But, of course, this is no reason to give up the task. It is rather a reason to double the effort. So, in this issue of Modern Reformation, we look at Christians and earthly power at both levels.

In a provocatively titled piece, Dr. John Halsey Wood Jr. makes a case for why we need Saint Augustine more than Saint Kuyper now.

Evangelicals have wrestled long and hard with how best to approach cultural engagement in America, and Abraham Kuyper’s Calvinistic approach to the question has had great purchase on evangelical ideas. Yet, Dr. Wood argues,

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despite Kuyper’s near unprecedented genius, his approach to the question falls short of the prudence offered by Augustine for our twentyfirst-century American context.

Today, any discourse on the notion of power is fraught with difficulty, particularly in relation to public and civil life. Notwithstanding the problems, Dr. Kristen Deede Johnson tackles the question of power, politics, and Christian public engagement head on. What if we reframed the discussion theologically? What if power weren’t assumed to be essentially bad? What if political power weren’t assumed to be the only kind of public engagement? Can Christians inhabit a different kind of posture for public engagement?

It’s not only Christians in America, however, who wrestle with these issues. In his article, Dr. Simon Jooste tells the story of South Africa’s Cape Town, beginning with the Dutch colonization in the mid-seventeenth century. He details the complex and often sad history of the role that a mix of Pietism, Revivalism, and a kind of Calvinism played in the rise of apartheid. He then looks at the current role of critical Marxist theories and liberation theologies in the postmodern vision of social justice for oppressed identity groups (LGTBQ+). In his compelling history of Cape Town, Dr. Jooste provides lessons for us in the United States, and helps us by bringing some of that instruction to bear.

We pray that as you read and think about these complex matters, you would do so not with resentfulness but charity, not with reaction but faith, not with grief but hope. Such, we might say, is der Christ.

JOSHUA SCHENDEL exec utive editor

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B ible S tudy

The Debt

by Allen C. Guelzo

enjamin Franklin is famous for saying, among many other things, that the only two certainties in life are death and taxes. If he were writing today, I suspect he might want to alter one of those terms—not so much death and taxes, but debt and taxes. Debt has become as much a part of our way of living, as death has always been the means of not living.

We hear about this most often when people talk about public debt, and that’s pretty unnerving on its own terms. National borrowing now sits at over $28 trillion, a sum so gargantuan that most of us can’t even conceptualize it. Just the 1 debt run-up over 2020 amounted to $3.3 billion.

And in case that’s too abstract to be easily

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grasped, it works out to an indebtedness of $81,390 for each living American.2 But that’s only public debt. The American way of living floats on bubbles of personal debt as well. On average, every credit card owner 3 in America is toting over $8,000 in debt.

Two-thirds of the graduates who marched to commencement in May have loans to pay off 4 that, on average, come in at over $37,500.

If you’ve been sagging deeper into your chair as I’ve recited this unhappy little litany, maybe the only useful consolation I can offer is that it could be worse. In Roman times, a borrower who couldn’t pay up was sold into slavery; that way, the lender could be sure of getting his money’s worth out of you. (Actually, a Roman who was

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being pursued for debt could sell one of his children into slavery as a way of dealing with the problem, which offers up a whole new vista of modern opportunities.) As slavery was abo­ lished, we became kinder: we merely threw you into prison if you missed payments. In England, imprisonment for debt continued as late as the 5 twentieth century.

A MORE FORBIDDING DEBT But now, let us suppose for a moment that without any warning, someone stepped in and offered to pay off all your credit-card debt at once and on the spot. How would that brighten your face? And suppose this same person added that all of your student loans (or your children’s loans) are now fully paid. My guess is that there would be a mix of even more delight, with a slight entering touch of incredulity. And when your benefactor announced that the entire national debt would be considered dissolved, I think it’s pretty likely that you would shift into disbelief and begin dialing 911 to report

What Paul is saying here, and with all the precision of a mortgage lender, is that we are in debt.

To God.

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something. And yet, as the apostle Paul tells us in Colossians 2:13–14, this is the equivalent of what has happened: And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross.

Paul here is talking about debt. Not debt with dollar signs, but something even more forbidding in its consequences, and even more hopeless of ever being paid off: a moral debt.

Not just an obligation, not just a responsibility, but a debt of moral failure calculated down to the last moral penny: there is a “record that stood against us with its legal demands which has made us dead in trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh” (v. 14).

The actual word debt doesn’t look like it’s there, but it is. It’s hidden inside that opaque English word record. Taken back to Paul’s Greek, it simply means handwriting (χειρόγραφον). But those Greeks also knew that handwriting was a colloquial way of speaking about any legal docu6 ment, especially a bond or a debt. So what Paul is saying here, and with all the precision of a mortgage lender, is that we are in debt. To God. And what’s more, that debt is so deep it might as well be our grave, because we’re so far down in it that we’re as good as dead in trespasses. So, you see, debt doesn’t get any more cheerful in the Bible than it does at the bank.

In fact, the Bible as a whole has a pretty dim view about debt, which can be summed up fairly simply by saying don’t borrow and don’t lend.

“Do not be one who shakes hands in pledge,” says Proverbs 22:26, “or puts up security for debts.” By the same token, borrowing is just as questionable as lending. At best, “the borrower is slave to the lender” (Prov. 22:7). At worst, it becomes larceny. “The wicked borrow and do not repay,” says King David in Psalm 37. And

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Do we live and breathe? We do so because God gives us the means to do so. “In him we live and move and have our being,” says Paul in Acts 17.

Paul sums it up sharply in Romans 13:8 when he writes, “Owe no man anything, but to love one another.” That may not make for a very dynamic economic outlook, but it’s bound to make sense to those 4.2 million Americans whose mortgages were in delinquency in the second quarter of 2020, or the 20 percent of 7 student-loan borrowers who are in default.

It also made sense to the ancient rabbis when they talked about their relationship with God. The great Rabbi Akiba spoke of God as being like a storekeeper who lent out money and goods, recording each borrowing in a ledger; but just as that ledger would furnish the proof whenever the shopkeeper came to collect, so God demands of men and women some compensation for what he has lent them, in terms of life or health or blessing. Hence, the great liturgy at Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the Avinu Malkenu (‫ּו ֵּנ ְכלַמ ּוניִבָא‬‎ ), includes the prayer “Our Father, our king, in your 8 great mercy cancel all our debts.”

This same understanding is at the center of Jesus’ direction to us to pray “forgive us our trespasses” or our debts because the debts we owe to God are formidable. Do we live and breathe? We do so because God gives us the means to do so. “In him we live and move and have our being,” says Paul in Acts 17. Do we enjoy health and prosperity? We do so because God gives these things to us. “Except the Lord build the house,” warns King David, “they labor in vain who build it” (Ps. 127:1). Number up every aspect of your life from your first day until this

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one, and what do you have that has not been borrowed from the bank of God? Knowing this, it would be nice to say that we should behave as God’s good borrowers and repay our debts promptly and fully. That would make for a very tidy world, in which God provides the start-up capital for our lives and we faithfully make payments until we can finally say that we own that life, and that God should be remarkably satisfied with us as a good investment.

But that would be telling one of the biggest, fattest lies that has ever been told. The truth is that we haven’t done anything even close to paying off our debts to God. • Because we were overconfident and thought we were masters of the universe and could do anything we wanted.

• Because we thought we were entitled to things and took them, or put the entire focus of our lives on acquiring them.

• Because we thought other people were less intelligent or less deserving or more vulnerable and could therefore be used, manipulated, and taken advantage of to suit our pleasure.

Each of these attitudes brings us into moral as well as fiscal debt. In fact, the ways in which we routinely mismanage our finances so closely parallel the ways we mismanage our relationship to God that it should be no surprise when Paul tells us that “all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.”

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And it’s not just that we have sinned—that ominous, overhanging word. Yes, we’ll admit to having sinned; in fact, I doubt whether there’s anyone, even at their most self-confident, who would claim never to have sinned. What we fail to reckon with is the God we have sinned against, a very particular God, an infinite God. So that sinning—even only once—is a sin against an infinite being, and with infinite consequences that stretch away, beyond the rim of the universe, to infinite dimensions. The old medieval theologians had a savagely neat way of putting this: Every sin is like an attempt to murder God (omne peccatum contra conscien9 tiam est quasi deicidium).

No wonder James writes in the second chapter of his epistle, “Whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it” (v. 10). So, when we cast our eye down the length of God’s ledger, we find that we’re not only in debt, but we’re also like so many mortgages: underwater. Worse, we’re not only underwater; we have drowned. That’s what Paul means in Colossians 2: “You were dead in trespasses.”

A MOST FORGIVING GOD But Paul’s purpose is not to have us reaching for the deject button. Read on: “When you were dead in trespasses . . . God made you alive together with him.” In fact, he “forgave us all our trespasses, erasing the record that stood against us with its legal demands.” After we traced our fingers down the long, fearful columns of God’s moral ledger, God did something that never happened with Bernie Madoff, Enron, Bear Stearns, and the other failures from the Great Recession: he stamped it Paid in Full.

This is not because God suddenly experienced a fit of generosity. It was because someone else stepped in and paid the moral account in full, and that was our Savior, Jesus Christ. All the debts that appeared in our moral ledger of indebtedness disappeared and were transferred to the moral ledger of Christ, where he paid the penalty

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All the debts that appeared in our moral ledger of indebtedness disappeared and were transferred to the moral ledger of Christ, where he paid the penalty for them on the cross.

for them on the cross. (This is what we like to call the passive obedience of Christ—his submission to the penalty demanded by God for sin.)

But that was not all. As the superb theologian J. Gresham Machen once wrote, “The passive sufferings of Christ discharged the enormous debt we owe,” but that only brought us “back to a zero balance.” That alone “does not get us into heaven; 10 it simply returns us to the starting point.” We needed more if we expected to appear before God at the day of judgment—and we got it, in the form of the active obedience of Christ. All the moral credits of Jesus’ perfect life and truth and resurrection are now transferred to us, allowing us to stand before God, not only debt free but with the full value of Jesus Christ’s active obedience in the place of those debts. This gives the Christian, as another great theologian, Charles Hodge, declared, “a right to the full pardon of all his sins 11 and a claim in justice to eternal life.” And just to show how very satisfying this entire arrangement is to God, he took the old “record” and “set 12 this aside, nailing it to the cross.”

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Remember, if you can, how it felt that day on the expressway when a car careened through the lane barrier and came within an inch of smashing you into a twist of metal. You pulled over, got out of your car; the shock and adrenaline almost made you dizzy, and it suddenly seemed inexpressibly good to be alive. We experience something very close to that when we finally understand just what kind of a spiritual debt has been cancelled out by Jesus Christ and what merits have been put in its place.

On whatever day you looked into yourself, looked hard and looked real, and saw yourself for the first time for what you were—when you saw the moral deficits and behavioral debts, and wondered how on earth or in heaven you were ever going to get around them—on whatever day you were “raised with him through faith in the power of God,” that’s when you knew what it was to be really free, to be inexpressibly alive.

That’s what Paul means when he says that “God

13 made you alive together with him.” Alive, in every vibrant, vigorous sense of the word. Alive, because the debts that were smothering you have dissipated and you can now go free into God’s presence.

Let the markets fizzle. Let the bankers and brokers droop. There is no debt so towering, or so deadly, as the debt Paul describes here. But that debt has been paid in Jesus Christ, paid in full, and the ledger nailed with a spike to the cross. Now, go and live:

Continue to live your lives in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving. (Col. 2:6–7) ALLEN C. GUELZO is senior research scholar in the Coun-

cil of the Humanities and director of the Initiative on Politics and Statesmanship in the James Madison Program at Prince­ton University.

1. “Public Debt of the United States,” https://www.statista.com/statistics/273294/public-debt-of-the-united-states-by-month/; and “An Update to the Budget Outlook,” September 2020, Congressional Budget Office, https://www.cbo.gov/publication/56542.

2. “US Public Debt Per Capita,” March 21, 2021, https://ycharts.com/indicators/us_per_capita_public_debt.

3. “Credit Card Debt Study,” March 8, 2021, https://wallethub.com/edu/cc/credit-card-debt-study/24400.

4. “Overall Average Student Debt,” 2020, https://www.investopedia.com/student-loan-debt-2019-statistics-and-outlook-4772007#overall-average-student-debt.

5. Richard Ford, “Imprisonment for Debt,” Michigan Law Review 25 (November 1926): 24–31.

6. John Eadie, Commentary on the Epistle of Paul to the Colossians (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1884), 163.

7. “Mortgage delinquencies Spike in the 2nd Quarter of 2020,” August 17, 2020, Mortgage Bankers Association, https://www.mba.org/2020-press-releases/ august/mortgage-delinquencies-spike-in-the-second-quarter-of-2020#:~:text=WASHINGTON%2C%20D.C.%20(August%2017%2C,Bankers%20 Association’s%20(MBA)%20National%20Delinquency; and “Is Rising Student Debt Harming the U.S. Economy?” April 13, 2021, Council on Foreign Relations, https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/rising-student-debt-harming-us-economy?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIj-Lzh9qo8AIVSWxvBB2__wNcEAAYBCAAEgI9HPD_BwE. 8. Eduard Lohse, Colossians and Philemon (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971), 108.

9. Thomas Watson, The Lord’s Prayer (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1972), 211.

10. J. Gresham Machen, “The Active Obedience of Christ,” in God Transcendent (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1982), 187.

11. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology (New York: Thomas Nelson, 1872), 3:145.

12. C. F. D. Moule, The Epistles of Paul the Apostle to the Colossians and to Philemon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), 98.

13. J. B. Lightfoot, Saint Paul’s Epistles to the Colossians and to Philemon (London: 1876), 186.

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R eformation resources

“Head and Heart”

by Herman Bavinck translated by Gregory Parker Jr.

his essay was originally published in 1892 by Herman Bavinck in the yearbook of the Dutch Youth Association (Nederlandsch Jongelings-Verbond) as “Hoofd en Hart” (“Head 1 2 and Heart”). Formed in Amsterdam in 1853 as a result of the Réviel, this association of young males between eighteen and thirty-five later merged with the Young Men’s Christian Association (Y.M.C.A). Since the original readers of this essay most likely struggled with the intersection of theology and life, Bavinck’s intention was to clarify for them the relationship between the head and the heart. The piece also demonstrates Bavinck’s ongoing work in 3 4 biblical psychology. (The numbers found in brackets are the page numbers in the Dutch edition.)

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[71] Everyone knows that Holy Scriptures grants the heart a central place in the spiritual life of man, and on the other hand it seldom makes mention of the head. According to [Scripture], the heart, not the head is the principle, the root, the fire—and midpoint of all of life, and of all

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the activities of the soul. It is not only, as for us, an organ of all feeling and emotion, so that love and hate, friendship and enmity, sadness and joy, courage and fear, compassion and revenge, and all sorts of other feelings are added to it.

See, for example, to name just a few places of

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many: Isa. 65:14; Hos. 11:8; Ps. 84:3; John 16:6; Acts 2:46; 7:54. But it is also the origin and driving force of the will, which cannot be turned to and fro, but is bound to and moved by the nature of the heart. See, among others: Exod.

35:21, 29; Eccl.1:13; Dan. 1:8; Acts 11:23; 2 Cor. 9:7. Nonetheless, the most remarkable thing is that all of the works that we summarize under the name of the faculty of knowing [kenvermogen] are attributed in Scripture to the heart.

Thinking, contemplating, deliberating, remembering, imagining, knowing, etc., are according to Scripture functions of the heart; from there they derive their origin and therein they have their seat and organ. Deut. 8:5; 29:4; Neh. 5:7; Isa. 32:4; 65:17; Luke 2:19; Acts 16:14; 1 Cor. 2:9, and many other places, clearly teach this. That is why there is always talk of poems, imaginations, counsels, objections, consultations, and thoughts of the heart (Gen. 6:5; Ps. 73:7; Matt.

15:19; 1 Cor. 4:5; Heb. 4:12). Even words come from the heart: “The fool says in his heart, there is no God” (Ps. 14:1). And thinking is speaking in the heart (Gen. 8:21; 17:17; Ps. 27:8; Prov. 23:33; Matt. 24:48).

This psychology of Holy Scripture therefore deserves our attention all the more, since it diverges so completely from ours. Not only does scientific psychology teach us that the head, and not the heart, must be regarded as the seat and organ of thinking, but the same applies to the testimony of daily experience.

Everyone knows from experience that thinking takes place with the head and that the conscious life is bound to the brain. It even startles [72] us and seems strange to us that the Israelites could have attributed those activities of the soul to the heart, which we believe to be so clearly taking place in the head. For us, the heart is only the seat and organ of the affections and moods [stemmingen] of the soul. But consciousness with all its expressions and activities has its center in the head. It is as if our thinking has increasingly sought to escape from the influences of the heart and has now taken on an autonomous and independent position.

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And that Eastern character is also found in Israel. Israel is not a nation of thinkers; it lacks the sharp dialectic of reason, the philosophical disposition that characterizes the Indo-Germanic peoples. It is rather a people of 5 gemoed and of heart [gemoed en van hart] ; not a people of tepid western beaches and on and on.

[The] Eastern [character] is lively, cheerful, passionate, susceptible to all kinds of impressions; it is never indifferent or neutral, but loving or hating with their entire soul, blessing or cursing, cheering or lamenting. In all of this, their character was formed by the Lord himself. Israel was not to produce, but to receive and preserve what God had given it; it was not to reason philosophically about God, but rather to listen to him and sing of his deeds. That is why, even in Scripture, reasoning and argumentation are seldom seen; it was not born of reflection but of inspiration.

But Western people are nourished completely differently. They are characterized by a strong feeling of freedom [gevoel van vrijheid], through a strong pursuit of independence [onafhankelijkeheid]. They excel through clarity of [73] thought, severity of argument, and sharpness of reasoning. From the outset, the head has a different, greater significance than the heart.

There has always been an effort among the Indo-Germanic people to emancipate the head from the heart and to make reason rule over the changing moods [stemmingen] and disorders of the soul. The dark side of this excellent construction is indubitable; intellectualism was at all times and even now is more than an imminent danger. Intellectualism is the tendency [richting] that sees in thinking not a lofty activity but the essence of the human soul. It sees intellectual knowledge as the highest good and determines the value of man according to the extent of his knowledge. All education then serves the purpose of developing the mind and expanding knowledge. Schools save people from prison. As long as the head is full, the heart will automatically reach the right place. Knowledge is a source of virtue and cure for all the ailments of suffering humanity.

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R eformation resources

Against this one-sided intellectual tendency, Scripture offers an excellent corrective to us.

However, much one appreciates the aptitude and the peculiar calling of Western peoples; the head is not the only thing, and the intellect is not the essence of man. We too often experience that thinking and willing are controlled by our heart, and thus the heart is the origin of our whole spiritual life. Outside of our knowledge and against our will, sundry thoughts and deliberations often arise in our consciousness. There is therefore no so-called unbiased research and independent science. Even in the most impartial and fairest investigations, every person brings with him his own heart, and he cannot get rid of himself. Consciously or unconsciously, his heart gives the direction in which his thinking and willing will move. A famous philosopher has therefore rightly said: “The kind of philosophy one chooses therefore depends on the 6 kind of person one is.” The system of our head is often nothing but the history of our heart.

That is why the demand and also the impossible practice to impose silence on our hearts as a man of science only give the floor to the socalled neutral intellect. This cannot and must not be the requirement of science: to cut a man in half and to shorten the deepest and noblest in him; but our calling ought rather to be this, that we always and everywhere, including the

Intellectual development and progress are themselves insufficient to renew mankind spiritually and morally.

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scientific domain, are whole and true people [74], equipped for every good work. That is a demand of our nature and a need of our spirit, which thirsts for unity and strives for harmony.

Conversely, we all know that the most astute line of reasoning and the strongest arguments are often pointless at convincing us of the wrong and persuading us to a different view. The heart has its own logic and it yields no syllogism to the understanding. Whoever does not realize and acknowledge this must explain the tenacity of their opponents’ stubbornness and their unwillingness to seek shelter. Intellectualism leads to intolerance and looks down on the foolish and reluctant crowd with contempt. But even without unwillingness or misunderstanding, it often happens that a man cannot surrender himself under an argument, because he cannot convince himself and his heart; because he is his heart, he keeps opposing, even though his intellect is at the end of all contradiction. And in such a case, he would prefer to comfort himself with his intellect than displease the gemoed.

Peace with one’s own heart is elevated by the peace of the head. The logical power of truth has always proved impotent by itself to convert the heart without any other help. Even philosophy has occasionally acknowledged this; Kant and Schopenhauer both hold “a sort of rebirth” as 7 necessary for the true renewal of man. To think and to will as one ought, one must first be what one is supposed to be. Intellect and will are not suspended in the air, nor can they move to their heart’s content; they are bound to and rooted in the inner nature, in the heart of man. Therefore, first of all, plant the tree well; then the good fruits will follow. For this reason, intellectual development and progress are themselves insufficient to renew mankind spiritually and morally. Underneath all this [intellectual development], the heart and character can remain unchanged. And intellectual knowledge, beautiful and in itself an invaluable good, becomes even in the service of the unregenerate man a dangerous tool for the satisfaction of evil passions and sinful inclinations.

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Nevertheless, the conscious retains the highest and most honorable place in our spiritual life. It corresponds to the assertion that our head belongs in the human organism. Thinking is and remains one of the most important activities of the human mind [geest]. Consciousness is the passage, the gateway, [75] the royal road to the human personality. There is no other path cleared for us, or at least permissible, than that which leads through the head of mankind. There man, as it were, grants an audience and hears us and speaks to us. The head is the waiting room of man. Attempts to penetrate the human personality through another path—through a back door, as it were, as is done nowadays— generally deserves our disapproval; they lead to the deprivation of man’s right to his personality, to himself, and bring him into the possession of another; that is, make him “possessed” by another. God himself walks that royal road, as he lets the Word work on our souls and brings faith to hearing.

Although, not the head but the heart is the center of man. There he dwells himself; this is his inner chamber; in the heart, man is first honest with himself. The head is the entrance and the waiting room; the heart is the temple, the sanctuary of man. Only he who has won the heart has the man. Wherefore the Lord

demands first our heart, and then also intellect and all strength. Armed with the key of knowledge alone, we cannot penetrate into the inner sanctuary of the human personality. We may be able to silence someone, but in this case staying silent is not permitted. Anyone who wants to win the heart of a man must bring with him something other than reasoning and argument. He needs love in order to ignite another heart in love. Mighty at all times were those people who in one way or another satisfied the needs of the heart, knew how to stir the faculty of people’s gemoed, and were able to become masters of the deepest passions of the soul.

Only love, taken in the broadest sense, is the key that unlocks the inner sanctuary of man’s personality. According to the Reformed confession, the Holy Spirit’s operation of grace is irresistible, but it is so because it is both gentle 8 and sweet. It does not compel but inclines. It does not make slaves but volunteers. And God is the Master of the human heart, because he is almighty love.

GREG PARKER JR. is a PhD candidate in systematic the­ology at the University of Edinburgh. He is the co-editor and cotranslator with Cameron Clausing of Herman Bavinck’s The Sacrifice of Praise (Hendrickson, 2019) and Guidebook for Instruction in the Christian Religion (Hendrickson, 2022).

1. Herman Bavinck, “Hoofd en Hart,” in Christophilus: Jaarboekje Nederlandsch Jongelings-Verbond (1892): 71–75. There are two handwritten manuscripts of “Hoofd en Hart” in the Archive of Herman Bavinck at the Free University of Amsterdam (see “Hoofd en Hart” [1900–1902], Box 346, Folder 114). Although the table of contents attributes the work to a “W. Bavinck,” the handwritten manuscripts confirm that the work belongs to Herman.

2. The Réviel was an international revival of Reformed thinking in the nineteenth century. Within the Netherlands, it was cultivated and promoted by Willem Bilderdijk. In 1906, Bavinck wrote a positive biography on Bilderdijk (see Bavinck, Bilderdijk als Denker en Dichter [Kampen: J. H. Kok, 1906]).

3. Bavinck, “Foundations of Psychology,” The Bavinck Review 9 (2018): 1–252. In this book, Bavinck also compares Eastern and Western psychology (see pp. 216–18).

4. I would like to express gratitude to Jacolien van Eekeren for her feedback on this translation.

5. Gemoed is a synonym for heart but goes deeper. Gemoed indicates the fountain spring from which emotions—especially the higher, noble emotions—arise. The heart is the seat; the gemoed is the source of emotions. Therefore, we speak about a soft, warm, deep, pious, friendly, or noble gemoed. Gemoed confers a quiet, friendly, pleasant, gentle warmth on all impressions and deeds it touches. It is something genuinely human. Bavinck, “Foundations of Psychology,” 217.

6. Johann G. Fichte, “[First] Introduction to the Wissenschaftlehre,” Fichte, Introductions to the Wissenschaftslehre and Other Writings, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale (Cambridge: Hackett, 1994), 20. Bavinck draws on Fichte’s statement to argue in favor of the heart and the head working together in science (see also Bavinck, “Foundations of Psychology,” 124).

7. Immanuel Kant, Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft (Leipzig: Voss, 1838), 41, 50; Arthur Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1887), 1:448. Bavinck makes reference to this elsewhere in his corpus. See, for example: Bavinck, Christian Worldview, trans. and ed. Nathaniel Gray Sutanto, James Eglinton, and Cory Brock (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2019), 112; Bavinck, trans. and ed. Cory Brock and Nathaniel Gray Sutanto, Philosophy of Revelation: A New Annotated Edition (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2018), 187.

8. Canons of Dort, III–IV, 3, 6, 11, 16. The Spirit “spiritually quickens, heals, corrects, and at the same time sweetly and powerfully bends it.”

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RECOVERING OUR SANITY

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BEING IN VERY NATURE GOD, HAVING ALL POWER AVAILABLE TO HIM, JESUS USES THIS POWER TO EMPTY HIMSELF FOR THE LIFE OF THE WORLD.”

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CHRISTIAN CULTURE IS OVER: WHY WE NEED ST. AUGUSTINE, NOT ST. ABRAHAM

POWER, POLITICS, AND PUBLIC LIFE: REFRAMING HOW CHRISTIANS ENGAGE IN CULTURE

FROM ORANGE TO PINK: A HISTORY OF POLITICS AND RELIGION IN SOUTH AFRICA’S CAPE TOWN

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Christian Culture Is Over WHY WE NEED ST. AUGUSTINE, NOT ST. ABRAHAM

BY JOHN HAL SEY WO OD JR.

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here’s this town I know that’s got great public spirit. Boy Scouts is a big deal. The country clubs are nice. The Rotary Club owns the town, they say, and the Kiwanis runs it. The United Methodist Church, the Episcopal Cathedral, and the big Presbyterian Church are full on Christmas and Easter. The Republicans and the Democrats get along well enough, especially compared to other places. There seems to be an underlying cultural unity about the town, as if it were frozen in the heyday of mainline Protestantism. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote about a town like this. One day a madman showed up. “God is dead, and we have killed him!” he cried. The people laughed. The madman is in semi-retirement now. His job is mostly done.

He hasn’t made it to this town yet. But he will.

Abraham Kuyper grew up in a town like this around 1860. He wrote to counter the likes of Nietzsche, and he was successful for a while.

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Among orthodox Protestants, Kuyper is still the authoritative theologian for Christian culture building. After World War II, American evangelicals, enjoying the prosperity created by “the Greatest Generation,” looked to Kuyper for how to spend it. Their fundamentalist parents hadn’t much advice on what to do with so much worldly wealth. Like Kuyper, the Kuyperians were successful. Writing about the intellectual renaissance among late twentieth-century evangelicals, Catholic historian James Turner said, “From my viewpoint, the decisive influence on the revival remains [Abraham Kuyper’s] 1 neo-Calvinism.”

Kuyper was pliable, protean. He could be enlisted for any cause. Conservatives liked Kuyper because he supported local action.

Progressives liked Kuyper because he also supported centralized government solutions.

Kuyper wasn’t inconsistent. Rather, in a country the size of the Netherlands, local and central aren’t all that different. In any case, Kuyper’s heirs fought over his legacy in Europe and America. On December 19, after the 2020 presidential election, Wall Street Journal profiled a Christian Reformed congregation in Michigan (Kuyper’s near kin) engaged in these kinds of disputes. The congregation was split, fiercely, over Biden and Trump, each group claiming Christian warrant. Although they differed on the way, they agreed on the goal: a godly society. What if they were both wrong? What if Kuyper was wrong? Christian culture is over.

Saint Augustine found himself in a rather different situation than Kuyper. Things weren’t looking good for Rome. The barbarians had sacked the city (AD 410). It was not a setback; it was a catastrophe. It was one episode in a long, slow demise. The Romans looked for answers.

Augustine chided, “You have missed the profit of your calamity.” The lesson should have been obvious: true happiness, justice, and virtue, are not found in the City of the Earth, however impressive it may be.

This is precisely the message that makes ancient Augustine so timely once again.

Christian culture is over. Except for a few odd

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spots, the madman has come and gone. There’s more barbarism around than Christendom.

Augustine offers a way of living in such a world, one that does not depend on a Christian cultural consensus. If Kuyper shows us how to build a Christian culture, then Augustine teaches us how to live in a decadent and declining one.

ABRAHAM KUYPER, SUBCULTURE WARRIOR United States Senator Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) is a natural Kuyper enthusiast, as the New York Times recently discovered. Hawley shares Kuyper’s populist appeal as well as the reflexive outrage of the elites; and like Kuyper, Hawley is an outspoken Christian in a contested public square. It’s not surprising that Hawley or the New York Times know who Kuyper was, because Kuyper was the greatest Calvinist ever to live, after Calvin himself. Calvinism is two things: doctrine and moral reform. John Knox called Calvin’s Geneva “the most perfect school of Christ that ever was on earth since the days of the apostles. In other places I confess Christ to be truly preached; but manners and religion so sincerely reformed, I have not yet seen in any other place.” Calvin’s heirs have made some impressive achievements in these areas, but no one succeeded in both imaginative doctrinal vision and rigorous social and moral reform like Abraham Kuyper. Like Calvin, Kuyper did so without regard for traditional structures. Where he needed them, he invented new ones. He was a thinker like Calvin, but not too much. He was a doer too. He moved fast and broke things. The various political, media, religious, and academic establishments all resented it.

Born in the Netherlands in 1837, Kuyper lived in the twilight of Christendom. He was nurtured in the national church, which had largely decided like all establishment churches do that the best way to get along in the world was simply to accommodate it. That suited Kuyper fine, until he met Pietje Baltus. Kuyper was a young pastor and a newly minted, award-winning PhD. Well-educated, successful, and credentialed, he

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quickly began setting the town straight. He had the off-putting pretense of every social reformer.

His self-assurance was tested, however, by the parishioners in the little village of Beesd.

They had read Calvin too. One, Pietje Baltus, refused even to attend Kuyper’s sermons. Why on earth?! Because he was a damn liberal—her words, not mine.

This hit Kuyper like a lightning bolt. It forced him to read Calvin again, only this time with sympathy rather than suspicion. The result was a conversion to doctrinal, biblical Calvinism.

He realized that modernism, with its roots in the French Revolution, was something entirely different from Christianity. Modernism was a competing life system, a comprehensive way of thinking and living in the world, one grounded in human sovereignty and opposed to the divine.

Modernism couldn’t be accommodated.

If not, then how should Christians live? After all, wasn’t the Netherlands a Christian nation?

The question has a familiar ring. Kuyper was always combative, but he wasn’t a culture warrior. He didn’t aim for a unified Christian culture the way Calvin did in Geneva. Kuyper wanted a Calvinist subculture. He rallied the kleine luyden (or “little people”), like Pietje Baltus, who were a potent, if neglected, group where orthodox Protestantism was still venerated. They built schools, newspapers, churches, and other institutions by which they could wield Christian influence in a waning Christian society.

SCRATCH A MORALIST, EVEN A THERAPEUTIC MORALIST, AND HE BLEEDS THEOLOGY. MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

SPHERE SOCIOLOGY Although Protestants, especially Reformed ones, like to skip immediately to ethics and action (it’s our work ethic, not our contemplative practices or aesthetic sensibilities, that we Calvinists are known for), a comparison of Kuyper and Augustine should start with sociology. The word sociology has two obvious parts: “social” and “logic.” Logic regards the order of things; social refers to life together. Thus sociology is the order of our life together. Ethics is about what is good, the good life. Social ethics is about living well together; and deep down, social ethics always assumes sociology. (Ethics always assumes and depends on logic and metaphysics.

Scratch a moralist, even a therapeutic moralist, and he bleeds theology.) The deepest difference between Saint Abraham and Saint Augustine is the way they imagine society to be. Once we’ve plowed that socio-logical soil, then we can see why different ethics might grow out of it.

Kuyper’s sociology of subculture is called “Sphere Sovereignty,” taken from the title of his 1880 inaugural address at the Free University of 2 Amsterdam (hereafter referenced as SS). The idea is distilled in Kuyper’s most famous saying: “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine!’” (SS, 488). These sentiments have had a powerful, imaginative purchase for many Christians.

The sociology of spheres has two parts. First, a sphere refers to a sociological subgroup or subculture defined by its religious or ideological commitments. Kuyper understood that all people are essentially religious. Everyone has a metaphysical bearing. Writing for the Atlantic Monthly, Shadi Hamid compares Kuyper’s principle to political theorist Samuel Goldman’s notion of “‘the law of the conservation of religion’: In any given society, there is a relatively constant and finite supply of religious conviction. What varies is how and 3 where it is expressed.” Kuyper argued that the expression ought to occur in relatively discreet social spheres, one for the Calvinists, one for the Catholics, one for the liberals, and so on.

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A comprehensive Christian social sphere was needed within which Christians might live in a larger plural society. The Free University, the Netherlands’ first private university, was a major step forward in building a Christian cultural sphere.

“Sphere” also referred to the various areas of cultural activity. Each of these cultural “spheres” had its own laws or principles of order such as science, politics, art, and religion. By virtue of Christ’s sovereignty over all creation, not just the church, the Christian cultural mandate likewise extended to all areas of cultural endeavor: science, politics, art, and religion, and so on. In his Lectures on Calvinism (hereafter referenced as LOC), Kuyper insists: “Instead of monastic flight from the world the duty is now emphasized of serving God in the world, in every 4 position in life.” This was a reassertion of the traditional Protestant work ethic, with a twist.

Sphere sovereignty preserved the comprehensiveness of the Protestant work ethic and the division of modern social arrangements, for the sake of orthodox Protestantism. The separation of church, state, and academy was critical to Kuyper’s plan because the traditional institutions were no longer hospitable to confessional Protestantism. In order to found a Christian university, for example, the academy would have to become disentangled from the church and the state. Kuyper’s separation of the spheres accomplished that.

Kuyper was remarkably successful at bringing this plan to bear on Dutch society at large.

Protestants, Catholics, and liberals were allowed their own segregated communities, with their own educational, religious, and political organizations. The ideological or religious spheres of society were called “pillars” (zuil) and the social arrangement was called “pillarization” (verzuiling). There was even a Catholic goat breeders association. It wasn’t perfect, but it was practical and prudent for its time.

In the Netherlands, Kuyper was accused of being an Anabaptist due to his withdrawal from the establishment institutions. In America, a nation disestablished in its very charter, he was a champion of Christian cultural renewal.

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KUYPER OPENED UP THE SPHERES OF CULTURAL ACTIVITY AND PROVIDED A SACRED OBLIGATION TO ENGAGE THEM.

Richard Mouw, former president of Fuller Seminary and Kuyperian Calvinist, describes the appeal of Kuyper for one coming of age in the 1960s. Social activism was in the air. This was the era of Walter Reuther’s labor unions, Sharon Jeffries’ Students for a Democratic Society, the civil rights movement, and Sargent Shriver’s unprecedented billion-dollar spending on poverty (partly inspired by Shriver’s Catholic upbringing). Mouw was eager to be involved. But unlike Shriver’s he had grown up evangelical, singing “This world is not my home. . . . My trea5 sures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue.”

This parochial Protestantism had no answer to contemporary social problems.

In Kuyper’s robust Calvinism I discovered what I had been looking for: a vision of active in public life that would allow me to steer my way between a privatized evangelicalism on the one hand and the liberal Protestant or Catholic approaches to public 6 discipleship on the other.

Kuyper opened up the spheres of cultural activity and provided a sacred obligation to engage them.

ONE CITY OR TWO? Kuyper’s sociology of the spheres is a blueprint for human civilization, an ordering of the cultural house. According to this blueprint there are numerous rooms, or spheres, that must

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be built out. That is the task of Christians on earth. The big difference between Kuyper and Augustine does not have to do with the details of this blueprint. It is not a difference in the trim work of this or that room. The big difference is that Augustine is working from two blueprints, two sets of plans. According to Augustine, there is not one civilizational house being built; there are two. There are two cities in the world, not one. Working from two sets of plans makes a radical difference in how the house or, rather, houses are built and what role Christians play in these respective houses.

Augustine calls these two houses “cities,” by which he means civilizations. Nowadays, we commonly use the word city to mean an urban center. That is not what Augustine meant. This is not a matter of urban versus rural or suburban. It is more comprehensive than that. It is a matter of order and chaos, city versus wilderness. Augustine’s masterpiece, The City of God (De civitate Dei; hereafter referenced as Civ Dei), is the history of these two competing cities: the City of the Earth and the City of 7 God. “Because some live according to the flesh and others according to the spirit, there have arisen two diverse and conflicting cities” (Civ Dei, XIV.4). These cities are distinguished by their loves and their destinies. One city is motivated by the love of man, the other by the love of God. One city is destined for eternal misery, the other for peace with God. These differences do not merely make for different individuals or even different subcultural spheres; they make different civilizations.

The City of God is not about a personal relationship with Jesus, if by “personal” we mean individual. Kuyper argued that all religion is fundamentally between the individual, and God. Of course, both Augustine and Kuyper taught that religion is personal, between persons not things. For Augustine, however, persons are part of cities, ordered social realities. Kuyper’s Calvinist sociology is democratic. It starts with the individual, not the polis. The City of God does not. There is no social contract, no ruleby-consent-of-the-governed, no separation of powers or spheres. All glory, honor, dominion,

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and power in the City of God belong to God. Quite undemocratic in fact.

These contrasting sociologies are guided by different founding myths. The Kuyperian story begins with creation. In this way, Kuyper shared more with modern revolutionaries than he admitted. He thought in revolutionary, Rousseau-like terms of a pristine state of nature, and his cultural project was guided by a vision of unspoiled creation. One popular Kuyperian 8 manual is titled Creation Regained. Augustine thought differently. Sin permanently altered the world. There is no return to creation. Sin is the reason why there are two cities in the world, not one.

On an Augustinian reading, the great risk of Kuyperian social thought is the melding of the two cities into one. According to Kuyper, the state would adjudicate claims between the subcultural spheres and the operational ones, even the religious sphere, the church. It does so, not as Hegel’s immanent god, but as a minister of the Trinitarian God (SS, 466–68). This is dubious. All political regimes claim religious legitimacy. They all vie for metaphysical rights, even late-Protestant, nineteenth-century liberalism. In Europe and America, this quickly led to culture-Protestantism. Augustine would caution us. The City of the Earth may minister on behalf of Baal, Beelzebub, or the sovereign, expressive self, but it does not minister on behalf of God (cf.

Westminster Confession of Faith 23.3).

PILGRIM ETHICS Kuyper and Augustine have very different Christian sociologies, which issue in different social ethics. Kuyper’s creational ideal calls for a certain way of being in the world, guided by the so-called cultural mandate. Christians are supposed to be culture builders, world builders, kingdom builders, reformers, renewers, and so on. They are supposed to build Christian schools, Christian newspapers, and Christian goat-breeding associations. “Instead of monastic flight from the world the duty is now emphasized of serving God in the world, in every

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position in life” (LOC, 30). This is what Max Weber called “worldly asceticism.” The ascetic call to Christian world building is a call for all Christians, everywhere, all the time, not just monks and monasteries. Every job takes on religious weight. Culture-Protestantism is just around the corner.

In Augustine’s two-city scheme, Christians are not chiefly builders; they are viators, pilgrims. “Accordingly, it is recorded of Cain that he built a city, but Abel, being a sojourner, built none. For the city of the saints is above” (Civ Dei, XV.1). The Christian way-of-being is to be on-the-way.

The pilgrim ethic is not nearly as straightforward as the Kuyperian one. Kuyper pursued a simple compatibility between Calvinism and the world. Calvinism, he claimed, was the true source of liberal democratic values, as he titled one of his most famous lectures, “Calvinism: Source and Stronghold of Our Constitutional 9 Liberties.” The pilgrim life, on the other hand, is not necessarily compatible with life in the world. A pilgrim lives in one place but belongs to another. The pilgrim’s position in the world depends. He may be a builder in one place and an insurgent in the next. It depends.

According to “Sphere Sovereignty,” the cultural spheres operate according to a law-like regularity. “There is a domain of nature in which the Sovereign exerts power over matter according to fixed laws” (SS, 467). Likewise natural science, the personal, the family, and the church, says Kuyper. It is easy to see how this mindset abets the cultural imperialism that still characterizes the institutions of the West in academia, media, and politics, and that has only become more vicious. Once these laws have been discovered, the technocrat proceeds with scientific, laboratory-like confidence. The pilgrim operates quite differently.

This heavenly city, then, while it sojourns on earth, calls citizens out of all nations, and gathers together a society of pilgrims of all languages, not scrupling about diversities in the manners, laws, and institutions whereby earthly peace is secured and

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maintained, but recognizing that, however various these are, they all tend to one and the same end of earthly peace. (Civ Dei, 413) The pilgrim city lives by God’s laws and knows that the earthly city does not. The earthly city operates differently in different times and places. The City of God works for peace and does not scruple much over cultural differences as long as they don’t inhibit the worship of God. As a matter of fact, the pilgrim’s evaluation of the world is weirdly akin to Nietzsche’s: “Let us articulate this new demand: we need a critique of moral values, the value of these values them10 selves must be called into question.” The death of God requires the reevaluation of all values, said Nietzsche. Not only his death but his resurrection also, says the pilgrim. Worldly values must be inverted, called into question, transvalued. (Yes, I am taking Nietzsche out of context, but that is the best way to take him.) The City of God is a masterpiece of transvaluation. It is a critique (not reconciliation or accommodation) of all moral values. It is what Christians used to call “heavenlymindedness.”

This reevaluation of values is the theme of book nineteen of the City of God, wherein Augustine asks, what is true happiness? Epicureans like the Roman poet Lucretius emphasized material existence and therefore pleasure as the source of true happiness (we live in an epicurean moment today, albeit a prosaic one, for Lucretius thought intellectual pleasure the highest pleasure). Stoics like Cicero, who elevated humanity’s reasonable nature, believed that virtue was the way to happiness (the American founding was our stoic moment). Augustine critiqued both. The miseries of life, the constant war against vice within us and suffering without, the inequitable distribution of goods among the just and the unjust, prove that ultimate happiness is not to be found in this life. Rather, “If, then, we be asked what the City of God has to say upon these points, and, in the first place, what its opinion regarding the supreme good and evil is, it will reply that life eternal is the supreme good, death eternal the supreme evil.” As for those who pursue either pleasure or virtue as the supreme good, “all these

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HOPE, NOT PLEASURE OR VIRTUE, IS THE SOURCE OF CHRISTIAN HAPPINESS. THIS IS DIFFERENT FROM THE CLOYING SUBSTITUTE CALLED “HOPE” IN THE CITY OF THE EARTH.

have with a marvelous shallowness, sought to find their blessedness in this life and in themselves” (Civ Dei, XIX.4).

A marvelous shallowness indeed.

Augustine demonstrates how a number of worldly values are transcended in the heavenly city. Freedom is a good example. We modern people above all prize freedom from external constraints, be it God, rulers, family, community, or nowadays, even our own bodies.

Modernity has provided a dose of freedom, but it has come at the cost of great despair. Why? Because, says Augustine, all the means of the City of the Earth cannot save us from the master and enslaver that follows most closely: our own sin, addiction, and concupiscence. The dominion of one person over another is a great evil, but not the worst one. Not only our bodies but also our eternal souls are enslaved, and no earthly utopia can save us from ourselves.

This is not pessimism. As a matter of fact, hope is the virtue of the heavenly city. As therefore we are saved, so we are made happy by hope. And as we do not as yet possess a present but look for a future salvation, so is it with our happiness, and this “with

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patience”; for we are encompassed with evils, which we ought patiently to endure, until we come to the ineffable enjoyment of unmixed good; for there shall be no longer anything to endure. And this happiness these philosophers refuse to believe in, because they do not see it, and attempt to fabricate for themselves a happiness in this life, based upon a virtue which is as deceitful as it is proud. (Civ Dei, XIX.4) Hope is the way-of-doing that follows from the viator’s way-of-being (Civ Dei, XIX.20). Hope, not pleasure or virtue, is the source of Christian happiness. This is different from the cloying substitute called “hope” in the City of the Earth.

Heavenly hope responds to the desire for happiness, but it is a virtue of the “not yet.” It is neither certainty nor despair. It is not undermined but proved in suffering, and suffering cannot be avoided in this life. It is both given by grace and cultivated on the way. Hope is cautious about all promises of happiness by the City of the Earth, whether from its therapists, influencers, or online algorithms.

THEOLOGIAN OF DECADENCE Finally, although more distant in time, Augustine is much nearer our own predicament.

Kuyper assumed a dominant Christian ethical framework that still characterized Europe in his own day. Even as Europe waned, he remained optimistic.

Here, on American ground [the lawns of Princeton] for the first time, he [the European] realizes how so many divine potencies, which were hidden away in the bosom of man from our very creation, but which our old world was incapable of developing, are now beginning to disclose their inward splendor, thus promising a still richer store of surprises for the future. (LOC, 9) No one could foresee the catastrophe that fell on the West in the twenty-first century, least of all a romantic like Kuyper. Living on

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the other side of history, the “right side of history” as it was doubtless once called, the decline of the West seems obvious. “Make America great again!” “Build Back Better!”

Even opposing politicians agree that something good has been lost.

Cultural decline is not unique. It does not negate the real achievements of a civilization, and it does not mean that apocalypse is immanent. All people live and die; all cultures rise and fall. What we share with Augustine is not decline but a specific sort of cultural decline, the decline of decadence. Decadence is not decline from without; it’s not invasion, natural disaster, or plague. It is decline from within. Decadence is decline brought by success, not failure. Augustine wrote for Christians living through the decline of decadence. The barbarians had sacked Rome, and some people blamed the Christians. The problem, as Augustine saw it, was not the barbarians or the Christians. Augustine appealed to the great Roman general Scipio. He “sought to preserve you from [this ‘plague’] when he prohibited the construction of theaters . . . seeing how easily prosperity would corrupt and destroy you. He did not consider that republic flourishing whose walls stand, but whose morals are evil” (Civ Dei, I.33). The “plague” Scipio predicted was not a virus. It was a pandemic of the soul. A malignant entertainment culture, internal divisions, sexual dysphoria, the loss of traditional virtues, scapegoating Christians—the cultural symptoms of this psycho-spiritual epidemic were familiar to Augustine.

CONCLUDING AUGUSTINIAN THOUGHTS Abraham Kuyper constantly guarded against accusations that his Calvinist subculture was really an Anabaptist retreat. Similarly, Richard Mouw worried over the cultural disengagement of American fundamentalists. Is this where Augustine leads us? Augustine’s counsel is neither withdrawal from nor accommodation to the City of the Earth. He counsels peace.

Even in an unjust city like Rome, Christians

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AUGUSTINE’S COUNSEL IS NEITHER WITHDRAWAL FROM NOR ACCOMMODATION TO THE CITY OF THE EARTH. HE COUNSELS PEACE.

should seek its peace (Civ Dei, XIX.26); but the way to peace—engagement, accommodation, antagonism, or otherwise—he leaves to Christians in their varying contexts to decide.

As for Christian artists, teachers, and immunologists? Suffice it to say that beauty, truth, and life-saving vaccines are conducive to peace, and Augustine is down with that.

Our engagement in the City of the Earth, however, is qualified. The City of the Earth traffics in a number of metaphysical fictions. In 1 Corinthians 10, Paul discussed these kinds of fictions when he dealt with the matter of food offered to idols. Should Christians eat? Well, yes and no. On the one hand, idols are nothing and of no consequence. On the other, if eating misleads other pilgrims, then why not buy your food somewhere else? Although there aren’t many wooden idols in the West nowadays, a number of our social forms imply suspicious metaphysical falsehoods: the “methodological atheism” of the sciences, the putative neutrality of the marketplace, the “right side of history,” and the so-called separation of church and state. These fictions lead to ambiguities, conflicts, and cross pressures for Christian ethics. As with food sacrificed to idols, the food is good, the idols are bad, and the way is often difficult.

A false metaphysic produces a false church.

Kuyper recognized that humans are irreducibly religious, the “law of the conservation of religion.” Humans make and live by certain

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ultimate, religious, metaphysical claims. It is part of the image of God. Augustine made the further claim that religion is irreducibly civilizational, even ecclesial. Our ultimate commitments inevitably issue in social forms. Call it the law of the conservation of church.

Cities, civilizations, are built on love. Love is about our beliefs, hopes, and dreams of what is real. We love the real, and we believe that we will be happy if we live at peace with what is real and true. If, for example, we believe that the sovereign, expressive self is most real, then we will build our cities around the love of self. We will celebrate its holidays and ordain its mediators.

Moreover, love inspires a dream or imagination about what the world should be like. Thus our ethics, what we believe should be, follow from what we believe is, our metaphysics; and then, our politics embody this ethical-metaphysical dream. It is a dream about a metaphysical, moral order based on these shared loves. If this sounds like a fusing of religion and politics, it should.

That is the conclusion to which Augustine leads us. The City of the Earth is not just about politics; it is about what we really love. In theological terms, that makes the City of the Earth a church, or very nearly one.

The terrestrial church looks different at different times and places. For Augustine, it looked like empire. For Kuyper it was the nation-state, but it could be otherwise. Imagine a corporation with revenues larger than many small nations that dictated terms to the largest ones. What if a corporation did not provide what we want but aimed to tell us what we should want, what we should love? Besides goods and services, what if it enforced a moral code, boosting the saints and de-platforming sinners? What if its brand signed, sealed, and united a global stakeholder community? Such a company would be a comprehensive, moral community. One holy catholic . . . corporation?

That is not to deny that the City of the Earth has made important accomplishments. God has not removed all reason, order, and pity from it. Nevertheless when Christ was offered all the kingdoms of the world and their glory, the grandest achievements in every sphere, he

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turned them down. Perhaps prosperity deceives us. The “deceitfulness of riches,” Christ called it.

John Steinbeck was blunter: “Feed a man, clothe him, put him in a good house, and he will die of 11 despair.” Sound familiar?

What practical steps follow from Augustine’s pilgrim sociology? The most important answer is deceptively simple: Let the church be the church. The power and prosperity of the City of the Earth is attractive. Yet, it cannot save even itself. If you want to save the world, then pilgrims must do these things: preach the gospel, minister the sacraments, and pray. Thereby the earthly city is exposed and the world is invited, even allured to another.

It is natural that we want our great cities to last forever. We are eternal beings, and we are social beings. But there will always be plagues, wars, and rumors of wars. Don’t miss the lesson of these calamities: The Romans thought Rome was the eternal city; the barbarians proved it was not. The City of the Earth never is.

JOHN HALSEY WOOD JR. is an advisory board member for

Beeson Divinity School and the director of purchasing for Wood Fruitticher Grocery Co. Dr. Wood studied theology at Westminster Seminary and Saint Louis University, and was a Fulbright scholar to the Netherlands in 2006. He is the author of Going Dutch in the Modern Age: Abraham Kuyper’s Struggle for a Free Church in the Netherlands, Oxford Studies in Historical Theology (Oxford University Press, 2013).

1. James Turner, “Something to be Reckoned with,” Commonweal (2004), https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/something-be-reckoned.

2. Abraham Kuyper, “Sphere Sovereignty (1880),” Abraham Kuyper: A Centennial Reader, ed. James D. Bratt (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998).

3. Shadi Hamid, “America without God,” The Atlantic (April 2021), 10.

4. Abraham Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1931), 30.

5. Richard Mouw, Abraham Kuyper: A Short and Personal Introduction (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011), viii.

6. Mouw, Abraham Kuyper, viii–ix.

7. Augustine, City of God, trans. Marcus Dods (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1994).

8. Albert Wolters, Creation Regained: Biblical Basics for a Reformation Worldview, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005).

9. Kuyper, “Calvinism: Source and Stronghold of Our Constitutional Liberties,” Abraham Kuyper: A Centennial Reader.

10. Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1967), 20.

11. John Steinbeck, East of Eden (New York: Penguin, 1952).

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Power, Politics, and Public Life REFRAMING HOW CHRISTIANS ENGAGE IN CULTURE

BY KRISTEN DEEDE JOHNSON

ON POWER

H

e was a man who had stumbled into a little bit of power and seized it with both hands.

She’d known that within the first few hours of his arrival, when he’d chosen the best room and gathered up the warmest blankets for his bed, when he’d taken all the pillows in the house and all of the candles, leaving 1 Vivian a single oil lamp for her use.

This reflection from the historical novel The Nightingale captures a common—perhaps the most common—way for us to think about power.

As fictional character Vivian Maurice reflects upon the SS officer with whom she was forced to share her home during Nazi Germany’s occupancy of France, we see the temptations that accompany power. Power is used for selfish gain. This SS officer uses his power to dominate, deprive, and exploit other people.

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History is replete with such stories of power.

This is what happens, to draw on concepts used

by Augustine, when the power game is prioritized over the justice game. For Augustine, this was the problem of the devil, who distorted God’s good intentions by seeking power over justice: The essential flaw of the devil’s perversion made him a lover of power and a deserter and assailant of justice, which means that men imitate him all the more thoroughly the more they neglect or even detest justice and studiously devote themselves to power, rejoicing at the possession of it or inflamed with the desire for it.

When power is an end in and of itself, we are merely imitating the original lover of power, the devil himself.

Augustine’s profound sense of the ways power has been and continues to be distorted does not lead him to classify power as “bad.”

He does not counsel Christians to reject the use and pursuit of power altogether. For Augustine, it’s a question of the end toward which power is used. If we use power to seek justice, with justice understood as the proper telos, then we’re in keeping with God’s intentions for power.

The challenge is that because of the disorder that results from sin, according to Augustine, we cannot keep power in its proper place. We follow the devil in prioritizing power over justice. But thanks be to God, Jesus Christ opens up a different way. As Augustine puts it, It pleased God to deliver man from the devil’s authority by beating him at the justice game, not the power game, so that men too might imitate Christ by seeking to beat the devil at the justice game, not the power game. Not that power is to be shunned as something bad, but that the right order 2 might be preserved which puts justice first.

God sent Jesus Christ to free us from our disordered relationship with power. In Jesus, we see one who used power to seek justice; and in

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Christ, our disordered loves are reordered so that we too can seek justice with our power. This vision of power being rightly used harkens back to the creation narrative, when God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.” (Gen. 1:26 NRSV) Dominion is a power word. God used his power to create this world, including humankind, and then he shared his very power with us. God could have chosen, like the SS officer, to use his power for his own gain. He could have both hoarded his power and used it to hoard things for himself.

But that is not God’s way.

God, with all the power in the world, used that power to create a world of beauty, harmony, justice, and delight—a world intended to delight not only himself but all who inhabit it. And then he shared his power with humans. As we read in Genesis 1, after creating humankind, God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” (Gen. 1:28) The root of “have dominion” is radah in the Hebrew. This term has been much discussed, not least because of concerns that the Christian tradition has problematically drawn on this concept to dominate rather than carefully steward the created world. Elsewhere in the Bible when this word is used, it can have quite negative connotations—such as enslavement, harsh rule, and the subjugation of the weak by the powerful. But here, prior to the fall, the man and the woman are given the authority to use their power like God does. They are called to rule over God’s good world in the manner that God himself would rule over the world. God is giving them his power to

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use according to his will and his ways. To return to Augustine’s language, they were given power in order to maintain the justice that marked God’s good creation, a creation in which all things were rightly ordered and all of creation was designed to flourish.

God’s original commissioning of his people includes the use of power. This is significant.

It suggests that part of what it means to be God’s people, even today, is to use our power to seek God’s will and ways in the world. From a Christian perspective, power is a gift to be received from God and offered back to God as a part of our daily discipleship. When we think about what it means to present our bodies as living sacrifices to God today (Rom. 12:1), or how to live out the Great Commission (Matt.

28:18–20), we have to acknowledge that using our God-given power to seek first God’s kingdom, justice, and righteousness (Matt. 6:33) is a part of our daily callings.

It’s worth pausing to underscore the significance of God sharing his power with us. Let’s consider, by way of contrast, the example of King Herod. Herod was king when Jesus was born.

When he heard rumors that a young king—the “king of the Jews” as the Magi called him—had been born in the land, he was deeply disturbed.

He did not want to share his power in any way.

So definitively did he not want to share his power that he ordered every boy two years old and younger who was born in and near Bethlehem to be killed, just in case one of them should grow up and claim to have rival authority. This is power as exemplified by the SS officer, and truthfully this is power as we tend to think of it. Power is hoarded rather than shared. Power is used to serve one’s own selfish gains and to preserve one’s own position rather than to serve others.

This is not our God’s way. God, King of kings and Lord of lords, from the very beginning shared his power, giving us dominion over this world. He commissioned us to use this power to serve. To offer a visual image, the posture that humankind was to have before God was one of open hands. With those open hands we would receive life, love, and power from God, and with those same open hands we would offer all of that

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back to God as we lived out his calling on us to steward his creation. This was God’s intention for this world, in which we would have lived in dependent trust on God, receiving from God all that we needed and offering it all back to him.

And then we get to the fall of humankind.

Here at the infamous tree, for the first time we see humans taking rather than receiving. Our open hands became clenched fists, first clenched around that piece of fruit. Rather than receiving and offering back, we take and we begin to hoard.

The power that had been given to us to use for God’s glory and the flourishing of the world, we used instead to seek our own gain. This ushers in a whole different posture. This is another way to describe incurvatus in se, a concept attributed to Augustine and further explored by Martin 3 Luther: we become curved in on ourselves. Our fists become tight, we hoard power, and we look out for ourselves and our kind rather than serve the wider world. Our use of power is like Herod, leading to death and destruction, rather than like God, in which power leads to life, beauty, justice, and love.

And yet our calling to use power like God is not erased by the fall. While Augustine is right that our loves become so deeply disordered that we cannot use power as God intended, that gift of dominion persists. As David writes in Psalm 8:6–8, You have given them dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under their feet, all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the seas.

Using power to seek God’s vision for the world continues to be a shared calling of God’s people.

Within the context of the covenant, God gave his law to guide his people in the way of life he intended for them. Here we find all sorts of windows into God’s vision for how his people would use their power, even in very small ways.

In an economic system that involved weights and measures, for example, God forbade his people from using their power to create dishonest measures and weights that would give them

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unfair advantage (Lev. 19:35–37). In the law, God directly prohibits hoarding, by commanding his people not to reap to the edges of their fields or gather the gleanings. Instead, they are to leave some of their harvest to share with the poor and the immigrant (Lev. 19:9–10). They were even prevented from hoarding Sabbath rest, which would have been rather tempting to do after their own long season as slaves. But God commanded that they share Sabbath rest with servants and immigrants (Exod. 20:10). Those who were placed in positions of power, such as judges and eventually kings, were explicitly told to use their power for justice: “Justice, and only justice, you shall pursue,” such officials are told in Deuteronomy 16:20.

Of course, in Jesus Christ we see the law fully embodied and perfectly fulfilled. We learn how God in human flesh uses his power. We see Jesus Christ, who being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing, by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death—even death on a cross!

(Phil. 2:6–8 NIV) Being in very nature God, having all power available to him, Jesus uses this power to empty himself for the life of the world. He uses his power toward its true and proper end, to return to Augustine’s language: beating the devil at the justice game. In so doing, God in Christ delivered us from the devil’s authority and opened the way for us, too, to use our power to seek justice.

We have been called from the beginning to use our God-given power in this world in keeping with ways God would use his power in this world. In Christ, we see as concretely as we ever will how God uses power—not for his own advantage but for our sake, by becoming humble to the point of death on a cross that we might have life.

Through the cross, our own disordered loves are reordered so that we can at long last, by God’s

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WE SEE THAT HUMANS WERE GIVEN THE GIFT OF POWER AND THAT THE USE OF THIS POWER TO SEEK GOD’S VISION FOR THE WORLD WAS, AND REMAINS, CENTRAL TO OUR CALLING FROM GOD.

grace, fully and freely offer our power back to God. Having been justified and made right with God through the salvific work of Jesus Christ, we can now seek what is just and right in this world with the ongoing help of the Holy Spirit.

To put this differently: by God’s grace, at long last, we can return to the posture of having open hands before God. In creation, we received life, love, and power; in our new creation in Christ, we receive new life, reordered loves, and the power of the Holy Spirit that enables us to freely offer our lives, our callings, and our power back to God. God can replace our clenched fists and our hoarding ways with open hands and dependent trust.

I have (perhaps) belabored this opening theological reflection on power, but I have done so for a couple of reasons. First, power is so often distorted and misused that many people, Christians included, have tended to view it as

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negative. This is a point Andy Crouch makes in his constructive account of power, in which he notes that Christians often avoid talking about it. In so doing, they can miss the gift that comes with the divine calling to use our power to seek 4 flourishing in the world. In our account here, we have seen that both in creation and in redemption, power is used for good, to create life and offer new life, to create a world of justice, and to deliver justice to a disordered world. We see that humans were given the gift of power and that the use of this power to seek God’s vision for the world was, and remains, central to our calling from God. Second, throughout the biblical narrative, we see a consistent emphasis on power, but political power is not given a particular priority. Power, in all of its forms, is to be used for God’s glory as we seek God’s will and ways in the world.

Within American society, we have witnessed the increasing politicization of our collective life. This means that we have placed more and more emphasis on politics, public policy, and legislation when it comes to addressing the public issues of our day. Politics is seen as the way, rather than a way, to engage the matters and concerns that arise within our life together.

Within this context, political power becomes emphasized over every other kind of power.

POLITICIZATION AND THE PATTERN OF THIS WORLD To make this more concrete, let us consider some of the institutions that make up contemporary society in the United States: the family, education, and news media. These institutions are a part of our collective life and have public components to them, but they do not need to be political. As sociologist James Davison Hunter shows in To Change the World, however, each one has become political within recent decades.

He writes, “There is hardly an issue relating to the family that has not been politicized in our days and divided by ideology.” Similarly with education, “whether the question is standards of excellence, curriculum, funding policy, or

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extracurricular life, all are divided politically and contested legally.” With news media, the issue is both that media outlets are positioned and judged by their political orientation and that “news reporting on almost any issue is framed in terms of who is winning and who is 5 losing in the contest for political advantage.”

Other examples would bear out as well how areas of our civic life that are not inherently political have become politicized.

Because this is the air we breathe within our contemporary political culture, it can be hard to step back and realize there are other ways to inhabit the public sphere. As inhabitants of the same political society, we share a public life together that has components to it that do not need to be political. As I have written elsewhere, in our contemporary imagination, “public” has come to mean “political,” but it does not need 6 to. To use Hunter’s language, “Politics subsumes the public so much so that they become conflated. And so instead of the political realm being seen as one part of public life, all of public 7 life tends to be reduced to the political.”

“Public” simply means united by a common interest or good. We have many areas in our public life, and many accompanying common interests or goods that can be attended to using other forms of power than political power. In this cultural moment, this is hard to see but not impossible. We will explore shortly what this might look like.

Before we do so, let us pause to note that the politicization of this cultural moment includes a certain kind of political engagement: one characterized by anger, resentment, a sense of embattlement, and a drive to dominate the other side. The “culture war” mentality is predominant, with each side driven by narratives of injury that fuel their desire for political victory over their perceived enemies. Compromise is no longer a viable political goal; domination, resulting in the legislation of one side’s convictions, has become the objective. We can think about the larger politicization and this particular mode of political engagement as part of the pattern of this world, to use Paul’s language in Romans. From a Pauline perspective, the

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questions are: What have Christians done to resist being conformed to this pattern? Have we offered an alternative witness that does not mirror these marks of our world in this cultural moment? Have we embodied a different mode of political engagement?

For many scholars and commentators who study and reflect on such things, the answer to these questions—at least when considering white, evangelical Christians—is “no.” We see this in insider Kaitlyn Scheiss’s reflections on the ways politics has shaped and formed evangelical and fundamentalist Christians in the U.S. 8 context. It’s evident in historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s searing and best-selling account of how in recent decades white American evangelicals have been shaped more by notions of Christian nationalism and rugged masculinity than by 9 their own faith commitments. Even before the political tumult of the last couple election cycles, Hunter argued that the Christian Right and the Christian Left, by allowing politics to become their dominant witness to the world, had largely succumbed to the spirit of the age.

We all know exceptions to these generalizations, but Scheiss, Du Mez, and Hunter point to a troubling reality: by and large, the public witness of evangelical Christianity in the U.S. context has become a politicized one that conforms more to the pattern of this age than it resists it. In so doing, Christians have focused on only one type of power, that of politics.

Further, their mode of pursuing and/or using that political power has been marked more by domination than a biblical notion of dominion.

The question we turn to explore now is: Could Christians in America, by resisting the politicization of this moment and using our power for more than political ends, inhabit a more biblically faithful posture in the public square?

PUBLIC WITNESS: BEYOND THE POLITICAL SPHERE Christians are actually well equipped to consider this question, as part of our heritage lies in using our power, even when we had no

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political power, to address issues of public concern. Indeed, Christians pioneered the creation of institutions to address the needs of the poor, the sick, and the orphaned. Kavin Rowe reminds us that attending to such needs, and the people with these needs, was nowhere in the social imagination of the Roman Empire. Christians, according to Rowe, were the first who had the eyes to see “the poor,” using ecclesial structures to attend to the distribution of goods in their local communities, developing shelters as places to serve and house the poor, and eventually becoming known within the empire as “lovers of the poor.” All of this is linked to the history of the church’s tax-exempt status: by attending to the needs of the poor in their communities, churches became exempt from imperial taxes.

Rowe notes that “this combination of caring for the indigent and receiving tax benefits elevated the church’s ministry to the poor into a 10 work of civic goodness.” The church’s public witness as “lovers of the poor” was not about political power, but about using the power they had received from God to create structures that enabled them to share what they could with those in their community who had need.

Even more sacrificially, Christians used what power they had to address the needs of the sick in their communities. As Rowe paints the picture, at a time when community-wide health care did not yet exist, people typically sought remedies from pagan temples dedicated to gods of health, from magicians, and from private physicians in their homes (if they could afford them). Regardless of one’s wealth, plagues were devastating experiences with no remedies available, and people were terrified of visiting one another or being near the sick or the dead.

Some historic accounts show that some threw sick people, even from their own families, out of their homes and into the roads to avoid catching the illness. In this context, Christians, rooted in their new life in Christ, offered their lives back to God to visit and tend the sick in their homes.

This practice enabled many to recover from the plague who otherwise would not have—though in the process, it cost many Christians their lives. Over time, Christians used monasteries

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to create infirmaries for the sick, and then they created the first hospital to provide a designated place for the sick to receive care at no cost by those who were trained. Here we see another institution created and offered by Christians to the wider community to serve a public good.

While this first hospital was funded by both the church and the government, it was not political in the sense we think of today. Eventually, Christians created hospitals throughout the eastern part of the Mediterranean and in the 11 West as well.

Equally important as we consider Christians’ use of power in public ways, Rowe notes that more of them became physicians in the early centuries of Christianity than went into any other profession or trade. As they used their vocations to care for the ill, they did not simply copy the cultural practices of the day, which involved the wealthy receiving private treatment in their homes. They instead reimagined the practice of health care, using their vocational power to provide a greater public good. As Reformed Christians today who prioritize a robust theological understanding of vocation, we can build on the longer history of the creative public service embodied by these earliest Christians, learning from the ways they used their callings to seek what is just and right in this world.

One of Hunter’s concerns about Christian acquiescence to the politicization of our time is the way it has limited our imaginations: Politicization has delimited the imaginative horizon through which the church and Christian believers think about engaging the world and the range of possibilities within which they actually act. Politics is just one way to engage the world and, arguably, not the highest, best, most effective, 12 nor most humane way to do so.

We have become so used to thinking about politics as the way to engage the world and the issues of our day that we struggle even to imagine other ways of addressing public concerns and seeking public goods. The reality is that the turn to politics, which has marked our culture and

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American Christianity in recent decades, is not based on the fact that politics is the best way to address most issues or to enact lasting change.

Political and legislative action can certainly have their place; but when you consider what shapes people, at the kardia-gut level that Jamie Smith often talks about—what forms our desires and our imaginations—it’s not usually laws in 13 and of themselves.

Consider, for example, the “Billy Elliott effect.” When a movie about a working-class British boy (Billy Elliott) who pursues the ballet exploded onto the scene, the number of boys interested in pursuing ballet markedly increased (for the first time in its history, the Royal Ballet School had as many boys audition as girls after the film released).The movie is also associated with a cultural shift in attitudes toward male dancers; and twenty years later, people continue to attribute the rise of male 14 ballet dancers to this film.

More recently, we can look at the impact of the Netflix series The Queen’s Gambit about a fictional chess player. Amazon sold out of chess sets after the show came out. One director of marketing for a game company attributed a 1,048 percent increase in the sale of chess sets in October 2020 (compared to the previous 15 October) to the release of the show. The show created a desire for chess playing in very different ways than a law requiring the purchase of chess sets would have done.

Laws certainly have an important role to play and can well be used to enact much-needed societal change. Consider the Americans with Disabilities Act, for example, which helped to open employment, transportation, education, and buildings (such as churches, theaters, and restaurants) to people with disabilities. The Civil Rights Act of 1964—which prohibited discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin—is another significant piece of legislation that had a real impact on society. Yet, it is important to recognize that photography played a powerful role in the civil rights movement, both bringing awareness of the realities of segregated life and exposing the brutality of the violence experienced by protestors and children.

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BY GOD’S GRACE, WE CAN RESIST THE CLENCHED FISTS THAT LEAD US TO USE OUR POWER TO LOOK OUT FOR OURSELVES AND OUR KIND, TO HOARD THE GIFTS WE’VE BEEN GIVEN.

Such photographs helped persuade many in the nation that change was needed and paved the 16 way for the legislation that was enacted.

These examples underscore that while legislation has its place, we do not need to rely on political power to engage public issues or shape our culture’s imagination. Likewise, in Scripture we see God calling humans to use the power he has given them to seek justice in the world, not only politically but in every area of life. The illustrations we have explored from the early church, as well as from recent contemporary culture, illuminate the possibilities that exist for using our power to address public issues beyond the political sphere. Hunter encourages Christians today to recognize this: To decouple the public from the political will open up other options for engaging the world and addressing its problems in ways that do not require the state, the law, or a political party. There are innumerable

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opportunities not only in art, education, the care for the environment, and the provision of relief for the widow, orphaned, and sick, but in the market itself to engage the world 17 for the better.

Even from within the very vocations we already occupy in areas such as education, the arts, and business, we as Christians can think creatively and imaginatively about how to use our power to seek God’s will and ways in the world.

This is what Amy Sherman calls stewarding our vocational power for the common good.

Sherman calls Christians to consider how they can use the power they have been given in Christ to seek God’s kingdom of justice and shalom from within our everyday vocations.

Stewardship is about more than stewarding the money God has give us: [It is] about devoting all that I am and all that I have to God, recognizing him as the ultimate owner of everything (ourselves, our lives, our time, our money).

As members of one body, as humans created for community, God calls us to fight the ingrained selfishness with which we all struggle and to recognize that his gifts are 18 given to all for the common good.

To put this differently, we are called to have open hands, recognizing that everything we have received is a gift from God and offering it all back to God to be used to seek his vision for what is just and right in the world. By God’s grace, we can resist the clenched fists that lead us to use our power to look out for ourselves and our kind, to hoard the gifts we’ve been given. By the power of the Spirit, we can offer our vocational power to engage and address issues of public concern, like the earliest Christians who became physicians and creatively reimagined how to provide health care in a world that did not yet have any institutions dedicated toward that end.

To embrace a vision like this one is to believe that Christians ought to be engaged in “culture care” rather than culture war, to use the language of artist Makoto Fujimura:

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After many years of culture wars, no one can claim victory. We have all been further dehumanized, fragmented, and exiled from genuine conversation. Culture at large is a polluted, overcommoditized system that has failed all of us.

We need to recognize that “culture is not a territory to be won or lost, but a resource we are 19 called to steward with care.” “Culture care,” as Fujimura describes it, attends to our culture’s soul, restores beauty, and is generative, meaning it is life-giving and helps create environments in which people can thrive.

Drawing on his knowledge of artists, Fujimura suggests that they often become aware of dehumanizing trends in a society more quickly than others. Even in the face of tragedy, artists can point toward hope and reveal new aspects of human flourishing. Fujimura further notes that artists tend to be on the margins of contemporary society, not fitting easily into homogeneous groups, which equips them in this divided cultural moment to help people learn to appreciate the margins and to bridge the spaces between groups. Fujimura encourages us to learn from these aspects of the artist’s calling as we consider our own cultural engagement. In this vision of culture care, we can find nonpolitical ways to use our vocational power to attend to some of today’s most pressing public issues. We do not need to be in the center of political power to contribute to society.

This is a truth that God taught his people when they entered into exile in Babylon. When the neoBabylonian Empire conquered Judah, leading to the loss of land, temple, and kingship, the nation 20 of Israel ceased to exist as a political entity. God’s people had to ask some difficult questions about their posture and role within an empire in which they had no political power. This is the context of Jeremiah 29:5–7, in which the prophet speaks these words to God’s people on God’s behalf: Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons

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and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.

God instructs his people to make their homes in this foreign place, because their exile is not ending anytime soon. He does not tell them to isolate themselves, withdrawing from the public good to seek only their own good. Nor does he tell them to try to take over Babylon and turn it into Israel. They do not and they will not have political power in this context, but they are still commanded to seek the welfare, or shalom, of the city where they reside. They are to use their power to seek the common flourishing of the cities they inhabit together with their enemies.

Many centuries later, Augustine drew on this passage in Jeremiah to help the Christians of his day navigate a different set of political realities after Rome, “the Eternal City,” was sacked for the first time in seven hundred years. Facing a season of political uncertainty, Augustine reminded Christians that they are pilgrims in this earthly city and not fully at home in any

political society. And yet, they are called to seek the peace and prosperity of the earthly city in which they live. This is a peace Christians share with their neighbors and are to pursue on their behalf with whatever power God has given them.

As we consider how to engage our culture within our day, with its own set of political realities, may we remember the wisdom of Augustine and the counsel of Jeremiah as we offer our power to seek the peace and prosperity of the cities in which we live. By God’s grace, may we use our power to seek God’s vision of justice in this world, creatively caring for culture and addressing public needs as we offer our vocations to God with open hands.

KRISTEN DEEDE JOHNSON (PhD, University of St. Andrews)

is dean and vice president of academic affairs and professor of theology and Christian formation at Western Theological Seminary. She is coauthor of the award-winning The Justice Calling: Where Passion Meets Perseverance (Brazos Press, 2017) and author of Theology, Political Theory, and Pluralism: Beyond Tolerance and Difference (Cambridge University Press, 2007). She also has a range of articles and book chapters in the areas of formation, discipleship, culture, politics, and theology.

1. Kristin Hannah, The Nightingale (New York: St Martin’s Griffin, 2015), 406.

2. Saint Augustine, The Trinity, trans. Edmund Hill, ed. John E. Rotelle (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2012), XIII, 17.

3. For more on this topic, see Matt Jenson, The Graving of Sin: Augustine, Luther and Barth on ‘homo incurvatus in se’ (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2007).

4. See Andy Crouch, Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Books, 2013).

5. James Davison Hunter, To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World (Oxford University Press, 2010), 104.

6. Kristen Deede Johnson, Theology, Political Theory, and Pluralism: Beyond Tolerance and Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

7. Hunter, To Change the World, 105.

8. Kaitlyn Scheiss, The Liturgy of Politics: Spiritual Formation for the Sake of Our Neighbor (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2020).

9. Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (New York: Liveright, 2021).

10. C. Kavin Rowe, Christianity’s Surprise: A Sure and Certain Hope (Nashville: Abingdon, 2020), 72; see also 68–72.

11. Rowe, Christianity’s Surprise, 72–76.

12. Hunter, To Change the World, 185.

13. James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2009).

14. See, for example, “Billy Elliott 20 Years on: A Lasting Legacy,” The Financial Times, https://www.ft.com/content/736164d6-7e6c-11ea-b0fb13524ae1056b, accessed 30 July, 2021.

15. “The Queen’s Gambit Caused Chess Sets to Sell Out, but You Can Still Buy Some Here,” Indiewire.com, https://www.indiewire.com/shop/ queens-gambit-chess-sets-sold-out-1234607190/.

16. See, for example, “Race, Civil Rights and Photography,” The New York Times, https://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/01/18/ race-civil-rights-and-photography/.

17. Hunter, To Change the World, 186.

18. Amy Sherman, Kingdom Calling: Vocational Stewardship for the Common Good (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Books, 2011), 240.

19. Makoto Fujimura, Culture Care: Reconnecting with Beauty for Our Common Life (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Books, 2017), 40.

20. See Elizabeth Achtemeier, Jeremiah (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1987).

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From Orange to Pink A HISTORY OF POLITICS AND RELIGION IN SOUTH AFRICA’S CAPE TOWN

BY SIMON JO OSTE

A

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s South Africa’s second-largest metropolis (after to Johannesburg), Cape Town not only has a rich history but is also a melting pot of scenic views, cuisines, and skin colors. She boasts incredible beauty but also thrombotic veins of prejudice and inequality, which are still fed by the painful legacy of the failed social experiment of racial segregation known as apartheid. Remarkably, the Reformed family of churches in South Africa more or less assumed a political role in both the rise and the demise of institutional apartheid, which officially ended in 1994. This political role has continued into the establishment of a new liberal democracy on the southern tip of Africa into the new millennium. Complicating this role has been the social justice ideology of cultural Marxism and postmodern identity politics. This essay sets forth key events in South African Reformed history, where combinations of Calvinist and Pietist legacies have made the church a questionable political force. In turn, I argue for the corrective value of a cruciform rendering of the church, which is its spiritual polity (Belgic Confession 30).

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CALVINIST COLONIALISM: THE THREE FORMS AND PIETISM Like the United States, South Africa has a history of pioneering emigrants from the Old World who had a powerful influence on the global expansion of Reformed Protestantism 1 comingled with a “benevolent empire.” Most notable for the purposes of this essay is the genesis of the Protestant witness on the southern tip of Africa through Dutch settlers, starting in 1652. The first permanent Dutch Reformed minister arrived in the cape in 1665. One hundred and fifty years after the small beginnings of Roman Catholicism (via Portuguese sailors who landed in Mossel Bay in 1501), the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) slowly monopolized the Christian presence at the Cape of Good Hope. She did so with a constant flow of ministers from and under the supervision of the Classis of Amsterdam (the church governing body), and in the process absorbed the French Huguenots, who immigrated in large numbers to the cape from 1688 to 1691.

Like the Puritans landing in New England in 1620, the Dutch Reformed who first settled at the cape brought with them a Christian piety mixed with social, religious, and philosophical ideas arising out of post-Reformation Europe.

While the cape settlers lacked an initial sense 2 of “manifest destiny” and permanence (still being under the control of state-controlled mother church and supposedly on their way east), they nevertheless shared with their North American counterparts two features that would profoundly shape the future of Protestantism in their respective contexts.

First, both the Puritans in America and the Dutch Reformed in South Africa had origins in Protestant and Reformation Europe, a creedal tradition marked by church-centered piety built on the likes of John Calvin’s Ecclesiastical Ordinances and The Three Forms of Unity. Like the early Puritans in New England, the Dutch Reformed brought to South Africa substantive elements of Reformed orthodoxy. In short, and thanks to direct oversight by the Classis of Amsterdam, the early piety of the Dutch settlers

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at the cape would have mirrored to a significant degree the faith and practice of the Reformed churches in the Netherlands, dictated in substance by the Three Forms of Unity and the 1619 Church Order of Dort. Beyond ministers being ordained and sent from the Dutch Reformed Church in the Netherlands, worship services included, for example, the reading of the Decalogue and the Apostles’ Creed, the singing of metrical Psalms only, and the preaching 3 of sermons from the Heidelberg Catechism.

Yet, neither of these seventeenth-century New World Reformed ventures would completely rid themselves of European-based social, political, and religious ideas that have challenged confessional allegiances to this day. One important religious force was a form of personal and practical devotion otherwise known as Pietism.

A complex movement that emerged in English Puritanism was a kind of self-authenticating spiritual fervor that helped define an emerging religious movement, which would become known as Pietism. While not necessarily eclipsing laudable tenets of Calvinist orthodoxy, there developed alongside it a strand of what may best be described as a “moral precisionism” that emanated from the heart into all spheres of life as an attempt to prove the authenticity of faith and God’s kingdom for all to see. In this grand practical vision for renewing Christianity, the subjective, moral, and political tended to challenge the cross-centered objective of gracious and churchly. This strand of Pietism in the early English Puritans extended to the continent as well, perhaps most conspicuously in the spiritual renewal movement known as the Nadere Reformatie (Second Reformation) in the Netherlands between roughly 1600 and 1750. What was common to both English Puritans and disciples of the Nadere Reformatie alike was life in a waning Christendom context where the boundaries of church and state still remained diffuse and the policing of morals went both ways.

This flavor of English and Dutch piety made its way to the New World in the seventeenth century. And by the mid-eighteenth century, added to it was the Pietist impulse of the

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PIETISM HAD BOTH INDIVIDUAL- AND WORLD-CHANGING ASPIRATIONS, THE LATTER OF WHICH WERE MANIFESTED IN MANY OF THE MISSIONS MOVEMENTS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

German Reformed Count Nicholas Ludwig von Zinzendorf (1700–60), who arrived on the East Coast of North America in 1741 with his Moravian assistants. The influence of Zinzendorf and his Moravian missionaries extended to other parts of world, including South Africa. In 1737, the first Moravian minister admitted to the colony was Georg Schmidt (1709–85), although his evangelism of the Khoisan (the non-Bantu indigenous peoples of southern Africa) fell short of establishing a new 4 church among the Reformed.

The eagerness of the Moravians was followed in time by the comparable fervor of missionaries from the Baptist Missionary Society (founded by Particular or Calvinist Baptists) and the interdenominational London Missionary Society (LMS) in 1772 and 1775, respectively. Both parachurch organizations grew out of the soil of British Evangelical Revivalism and Methodism, rooted in seventeenth-century Puritanism. In time, the LMS would be joined by other missionaries of the nonconformist stripe, such as the Scots Presbyterians, the (mostly Congregationalist) American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, and the Berlin Mission Society. With the exception of the Scots, these missionary outfits often bypassed setting up local churches; instead, they founded schools, organized various humanitarian and economic enterprises, and 5 policed morality.

In short, the Pietistic pursuit in early American and South African colonies was of a pure religion, evidenced both in the immediate and subjective realm of born-again pious experience and in heartfelt social and political action.

That is, Pietism had both individual- and worldchanging aspirations, the latter of which were manifested in many of the missions movements 6 of the eighteenth century.

REVIVALISM AND THE TRANSFORMATIONIST CALVINISM OF APARTHEID Arguably, the most significant factor in tilting the historic Dutch Reformed tradition in

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South Africa into an updated Pietistic direction of Revivalism was the introduction of Scottish clergy. Because of a shortage of ministers at the dawn of the nineteenth century, the English governor, Lord Charles Somerset, permitted the 7 importation of Scottish Calvinist pastors. By 1824, the Scottish ministers had gained full control of the Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk (Dutch Reformed Church; DRC), having persuaded the colonial government to cut synodical 8 ties with Classis of Amsterdam.

Arguably, the most influential British import was Andrew Murray (1794–1866), who landed in the Cape Colony in 1822, along with his large family. In a small church in the cape that Murray pastored, five of his six sons were ordained and four of his five daughters were married off to influential ministers in the DRC. The older of his sons, John Murray (1826–82), was one of two professors appointed in 1859 at the establishment of Stellenbosch Faculty of Theology—the institution that in subsequent years trained almost every predikant (pastor) entering the DRC. Furthermore, another son, the younger Andrew Murray (1828–1917), who had an extraordinary sixty-eight-year ministry, became a powerful figure at the DRC Cape synods from 1860 until the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902).

Concurrent with the gradual entrenchment of a Pietist strain within the DRC during the nineteenth century was the development of the Afrikaner self-identity as a “chosen people.” A critical event in this history was “the covenant” entered with God during the Great Trek before the Battle of Blood River on December 16, 1839 (the Day of the Vow). That the Trek-Boers survived this battle against the native Africans would be used to later solidify the mythology of Afrikaner nationhood: the Great Trek being that Exodus from bondage under British rule in the cape, followed by years of struggle in the wilderness, only to finally arrive one day in the Promised Land of the Boer Republics.

Such myths and symbols drawn from the Old Testament would in the mid-twentieth century become powerful ideological tools to advance the cause of Afrikaner nationalism through

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CONCURRENT WITH THE GRADUAL ENTRENCHMENT OF A PIETIST STRAIN WITHIN THE DRC DURING THE NINETEENTH CENTURY WAS THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE AFRIKANER SELF-IDENTITY AS A “CHOSEN PEOPLE.”

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Afrikaner Calvinism, which helped produce apartheid. This blending of sacred and secular horizons to produce a kind of civil religion—a “light to the nations”—was not unlike that which emerged in the early United States through the blending of Puritan spirituality with the strug9 gles and ambitions of the founding fathers.

The world-changing aspirations of the Pietist strand in the DRC mixed together with racially prejudiced British imperialists and the Dutch settler belief in their own God-ordained racial identity and superiority, eventuating in an ethnic conception of covenant and the implementation of segregation along the lines of skin color both inside and outside of Mother Church.

Most notable perhaps is the role the Murray family played, on account of the weakness of some, in seeing to it that equality be confined to the spiritual realm.

The landmark synodical decision came in 1857. At this assembly, in which Andrew Murray Senior and Junior played pivotal roles, the DRC voted for the segregation of churches along racial lines. The result was the formation of a separate (though not free of paternal oversight) mission church known as the Nederduitse Gereformeerde Sendingkerk in Suid-Afrika (the Dutch Reformed Mission Church in South Africa). Under the guise of covenant and mission, this decision ominously portended the formation of an Afrikaner fusion of church and state that helped give rise to the institutional 10 form of apartheid. This embodiment of faith in public action, while judged in retrospect to be of the most heinous kind, evidences a Pietistand Revivalist-like attempt to transform all of life according to a certain, and most unbiblical, racial conception of Christ’s coming kingdom.

The rise of institutional apartheid in the twentieth century is complex. It represents the evolution of the social, political, and religious ambitions of the heirs of the Dutch, English, and French Huguenot settlers. The adaptation of religion—particularly a kind of Calvinism or Kuyperianism interwoven with Pietism—to legitimate apartheid cannot be underestimated. This diverse ecclesiastical family, consisting of orthodox-conservative,

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evangelical, and progressive Reformed sympathies, was guilty of supporting a racialized ideology of group interest for sociopolitical ends. Whether at the Lord’s Table, or sitting on a bus or a beach, the cultural vision of Afrikaner nationalist “sphere sovereignty,” rooted in divine orders of creation shaping re-creation, determined that the lives of most Afrikaans Reformed Christians precluded mixing with people of color. The National Party, which came to power in 1948 with its racial segregationist civil policy, was a political triumph that depended on the support, explicit and otherwise, of the Afrikaans Reformed family 11 of churches, particularly the DRC. In short, the church could not resist the temptation to shape public life according to a sanctified separate identity by usurping the authority of other institutions, such as the state, and denigrating the image of God in the process.

SOCIAL JUSTICE ACTIVISM IN A POSTMODERN “PINK” CITY Pressures from the 1940s onwards, both inside the church and outside the church, would see apartheid begin to be dismantled. Remarkably, by 1986, the DRC was brought to repentance internally by the disciplining intervention of 12 the World Alliance of Reformed Churches.

No longer would ethnic division be allowed at the Lord’s Table or at synodical levels—a good example of recovering the third mark of a true church (Belgic 29). But despite the failure of apartheid (at least officially) and the chastisement that came with it, the now more racially diverse Reformed family of churches could still not contain their world-changing impulses.

Spurred on still to leave an indelible imprint on broader society, the faith of the Reformed would continue to be politicized—this time, by immersing itself in helping to realize Nelson Mandela’s dream of a liberal democracy aimed at equality for all. Just as the Bible had once been used to help colonize the cape and underwrite apartheid, it would now serve more noble civil ends toward a new South Africa.

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Although there has been qualified Christian endorsement of certain tenets of political liberalism (particularly by those of free-market British colonialist descent), the predominant emphasis within the liberating and prophetic wing of the broadly Reformed tradition in South Africa has tended in a liberation theology direc13 tion. This is not surprising considering the collectivist-socialist elements of both Afrikaner nationalism and the African nationalism of Mandela’s party, the African National Congress, 14 which came to power in 1994. Federations such as the DRC and the Dutch Reformed Mission Church in South Africa have drawn from the insights of liberation theology, along with the neo-orthodox emancipatory tradition of Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and the Barmen Declaration (1934). The manifestation of this legacy in South Africa has perhaps been most conspicuous in the socio-politically liberating Belhar Confession (1982), the Kairos Document (1985), and the Road to Damascus (1989).

The church’s self-conscious political role has become more pronounced since the advent of South Africa’s new political dispensation in 1994, for several important reasons. For one, many Christians have embraced with enthusiasm the liberal democratic concepts of equality and freedom. This is very understandable. South Africans, who lived through the oppressive effects of colonialism that helped give rise to Afrikaner nationalism and its segregationist agenda, have felt empowered by these concepts. Further, what white South African, millennial and older (especially male), does not have some measure of guilt concerning the oppressive history of apartheid?

How can white churches, which were at least implicit in their endorsement of apartheid, not do their part in helping to rectify the wrongs of the past? And so, for white middle-class churches, Reformed and otherwise, the pressure for church involvement in nation-building has been great, and the liberal democratic concepts of freedom and equality have seemed to many the most promising way forward.

Further encouraging the advocacy stance of the Reformed tradition in South Africa has been the Western turn since the 1950s toward

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postmodernism, with its refined and applied social justice agenda in the new millennium.

Because of apartheid and the sanctions that came with it, South Africa’s relative isolation has meant her coming late not only to liberal democracy but also to the deconstructive and yet highly politicized counter-Enlightenment 15 movement of postmodernism. These realities have increased the complexities as well as the vulnerabilities of Christians seeking to do right in a time when the notion of an objective and societal justice, let alone the church’s role in achieving it, has become increasingly destabilized along social constructivist lines.

Arguably, at the leading edge of setting the human rights agenda in South Africa has been her most well-known city, Cape Town. Symbolic of this history is the life of Mandela, who made his journey from being a revolutionary prisoner on Robben Island to becoming the first Black president of South Africa’s fledgling democracy.

A noble and inspiring story of South Africa’s struggle against its unjust past. However, the quest for justice in Cape Town, like in many of the world’s large Western cities, has evolved beyond political liberalism to incorporate a vision for postmodern social justice.

While currents of a more classic Marxism still inform the South African political scene, the cultural elites have widened the category of the “oppressed” to include not only the lower class (particularly those of color) but also a variety of intersecting and marginalized identity groups. Progressive institutions such as the universities of Cape Town and Stellenbosch have helped to forge the public policy of Cape Town such that it now has the reputation as the “pink” (queer) city: inclusive of people of color, women, and children, but also those who 16 identify as LGBTQ+. Increasingly, churches of Reformed persuasion and otherwise have mirrored these broader cultural trends under the banner of “gospel liberation.” Most notably, evidence of a hermeneutical shift toward postmodern critical theory and ethics can be seen in the heated theological debates around colonialism, systemic racism, women in office, same-sex 17 marriage, and transgenderism.

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RECOVERING CRUCIFORM CONFESSIONALISM

BOTH SCRIPTURE AND THE REFORMED CONFESSIONAL TRADITION INSTRUCTS CHRISTIANS TO BE GOOD CITIZENS IN BROADER SOCIETY BY SEEKING JUSTICE FOR THE OPPRESSED. MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

There is little doubt that part of what it means to reform as a disciplined church is to root out prejudice, which includes racism and misogyny (Belgic 29). Furthermore, both Scripture and the Reformed confessional tradition instruct Christians to be good citizens in broader society by seeking justice for the oppressed (Gen. 18 8–9; Rom. 13; BC 36; Heidelberg LD 39). Yet many churches in South Africa consider it their duty as an institution to help transform Alan Paton’s “beloved country” into a kind of new Eden on the order of the Beatitudes. Again, this impulse is understandable considering the above-mentioned historic challenges in southern Africa. Nevertheless, this desire is also arguably in large part due to a thick element of updated Pietism. If it is true that Pietism and Revivalism have built within them a world-changing impulse that is impatient with the constrained order and mundane nature of a counterintuitive spiritual polity, then it should come as no surprise that a political lobbying agenda has been attractive as an addition to or even a replacement of the official ministry of the church.

The continental Reformed churches in South Africa (as well as confessional Anglicans, Presbyterians, and Lutherans) have within their traditions resources necessary to correct what are the unhelpful elements of postmodernism and political activism, which, when taken up into the church, not only misconstrue the mandate of the church but also cloud instruct objective moral truth when it comes to gender, sexuality, and race relations. By its very nature, to be confessional is to have respect for and be in conversation with the wisdom of previous generations that has spanned the globe. Reformed confessionalism, with its appreciation for the truths revealed by both special revelation and natural revelation, is not endlessly deconstructing and destabilizing in construing “truth.” Christians affirm the spiritually destabilizing historical particular of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection at a specific time and in a specific place. This good

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news, like the practical wisdom found in Proverbs (or God’s natural law), is also of global application, which transcends and brings to nothing the relativizing power plays of socially engineered group interests: Afrikaans, colored, transgender, or otherwise.

In fact, like the ordering patterns of natural law justice, Reformed Christians confess that the humiliating sign of the cross necessitates restraining forms, which the theologian of glory would like to bypass. The church has always made use of the order of pancultural, self-correcting creeds, thereby hemming in the imaginative 19 pride of fallen man. Central to this creedal heritage is Jesus and his affirmation of the body by assuming the frail form of human flesh in order to save sinners (1 Cor. 15:1–11). Our worship of this Savior and the exercise of his spiritual gifts are constrained by formal means as well, which

include appropriate gender roles and sexual decorum in worship (1 Cor. 11:2–16; 26–40). Yet even while certain embodied creation distinctions continue within the church, the exercise of Christ’s power through them is of an upside-down nature (1 Cor. 1:18–25).

All this to say that the cross-centered form and content of Christ’s spiritual polity are such that ecclesiastical activism is precluded (John 18:36; Belgic 7; 30–32). Beyond the fact that Scripture does not provide a blueprint for civil policy, the inverting ethic of the church is unworkable in a liberal democracy, or any body politic for that matter. In the church, one finds a peculiar community where honor is bestowed on those who are last and least, where injustice is met with the other cheek, and where those who suffer often get more of the same out in the world (Matt. 5–7; 1 Cor. 1:26–31; 12:21–26).

1. See Richard Elphick, The Equality of Believers: Protestant Missionaries and the Racial Politics of South Africa (Scottsville, South Africa: University of KwaZulu–Natal Press).

2. André du Toit, “No Chosen People: The Myth of the Calvinist Origins of Afrikaner Nationalism and Racial Ideology,” The American Historical Review 88, no. 4 (1983): 920–52.

3. Richard Elphick and Rodney Davenport, Christianity in South Africa: A Political, Social, and Cultural History (Cape Town: David Phillip, 1997); and Dolf Britz and Victor d’Assonville, “Calvin in Africa,” in The Calvin Handbook, ed. Herman J. Selderhuis (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), 505–6.

4. Elphick and Davenport, Christianity in South Africa, 21–23, 28.

5. Elphick and Davenport, Christianity in South Africa, 9, 21–25. As to the influence of Calvin on South Africa in the nineteenth century in general, see Britz and d’Assonville, “Calvin in Africa,” 506–7.

6. David Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in the Theology of Mission (New York: Orbis, 2011).

7. P. F. (Flip) Theron, “From Moral Authority to Insignificant Minority: The Precarious State of the Dutch Reformed Church in a Post-Apartheid South Africa,” Journal of Reformed Theology 2 (2008): 230–31.

8. S. E. Duff, “The Dutch Reformed Church and the Protestant Atlantic: Revivalism and Evangelicalism in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony,” South African Historical Journal (2018): 8.

9. See John W. de Gruchy, Liberating Reformed Theology: A South African Contribution to an Ecumenical Debate (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), 26, 129–30, 264; and David J. Bosch, “The Roots and Fruits of Afrikaner Civil Religion,” in New Faces of Africa: Essays in Honour of Ben (Barend Jacobus) Marais, ed. J. W. Hofmeyr and W. S. Vorster (Pretoria, 1984), 14–35.

10. De Gruchy, Liberating Reformed Theology, 23–25, 190–91.

11. In summary, the Afrikaner Calvinism behind apartheid can be described as the uneasy mixture of nineteenth-century evangelical piety and adapted Kuyperian neo-Calvinism forged in the fires of the Afrikaner struggle for cultural identity and political and economic power. This included blending Afrikaner “sacred history,” with the Afrikaner volk as a “chosen people,” and neo-Calvinism, with its “sovereignty of spheres,” thereby providing the powerful ideological base for Afrikaner nationalism and apartheid. See De Gruchy, Liberating Reformed Theology, 27–29.

Willie Jonker helpfully characterized the DRC as reflecting three force fields (kragvelde); namely, its association with the Afrikaner people, its

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Hence, the church as an institution would do well to resist taking its cues from civil renderings of “social justice,” let alone attempt to reconfigure the same in biblical terms, for pragmatic cultural effect and relevance.

To be sure, Christians individually scattered in their vocations can and must affirm the biblical and divine natural law insights into civil government and the human body—but without any grandiose illusions that this con20 stitutes “ministry” or the Great Commission.

Church ministry in a confessional key is cruciform because it centers on Christ given to his church through outwardly weak and impotent means of word and sacraments to weak people, who often remain that way until glory (1 Cor. 1:18–2:5; 4:8–13; 7:17–24; Heb. 11; 1 Pet. 2:11). Furthermore, Christians are called to imitate Jesus in “foolish” rights-relinquishing

servanthood within the covenant community, even while fulfilling their vocations in the public square as dual citizens (1 Cor. 2; 9:19–23; Rom. 13; Eph. 5–6).

Like in other global contexts, bypassing the peculiar cruciform rendering of the church in South Africa has never ended well. A recovery of the best of Reformed confessionalism—that is, a spiritual polity that is apolitically crosscentered—is central to avoiding the errors of the past and bolstering a gospel witness in the present and future.

SIMON JOOSTE is pastor of Reformed Church Southern

Suburbs in his native Cape Town, South Africa. He is also a research associate with Stellenbosch and North-West Universities. Prior to returning to South Africa, he spent fifteen years in the United States, which included a career in finance and studies at Westminster Seminary California.

Reformed doctrinal heritage, and a Pietistic form of spirituality. “Kragvelde binne die Kerk,” Nederduitse Gereformeerde Teologiese Tydskrif 30 (July 1989): 11–14. See also P. J. Strauss, “Abraham Kuyper and Pro-Apartheid Theologians in South Africa: Was the Former Misused by the Latter?” in Kuyper Reconsidered: Aspects of His Life and Word, ed. Cornelius van der Kooi (Amsterdam: VU Uitgeverij, 1999); George Harinck, “Abraham Kuyper, South Africa, and Apartheid,” Princeton Seminary Bulletin 23:2 (2002): 184–87; Dirk J. Smit, Essays on Being Reformed: Collected Essays 3, ed. Robert Vosloo (Stellenbosch: SUN, 2009), 185–292; and Simon N. Jooste, “Recovering the Calvin of ‘two kingdoms’: A historical-theological inquiry in the light of church-state discourse in South Africa” (PhD diss., University of Stellenbosch, 2013), 78–89, https://scholar.sun.ac.za/handle/10019.1/80065.

12. The full text of the 1982 WARC statement on racism and South Africa is quoted in Appendix 9 in John W. de Gruchy and Charles Villa-Vicencio, Apartheid is Heresy (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983), 168–73. See also J. A. Loubser, “Apartheid Theology: A ‘Contextual’ Theology Gone Wrong?,” Journal of Church and State 38.2 (Spring 1996), 330–31.

13. See Anthony Thiselton, New Horizons in Hermeneutics (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1997), 419–27.

14. See James Leatt, Contending Ideologies in South Africa, ed. Theo Kneifel and Klaus Nürenberger (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986).

15. See Stephen R. C. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism: Scepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Dublin, OH: Ockham’s Razor, 2011), esp. chs. 1–2.

16. See the 1996 South African Constitution, https://justice.gov.za/legislation/constitution/SAConstitution-web-eng.pdf. See also the Beyers Naudé Centre for Public Theology at Stellenbosch University, http://www.sun.ac.za/english/faculty/theology/bnc/about-us; and the work of Pierre de Vos, professor of constitutional law at the University of Cape Town, http://www.publiclaw.uct.ac.za/pbl/staff/pdevos.

17. See, e.g., Jeremy Punt, “Power, liminality, sex and gender and Gal. 3:28: A postcolonial, queer reading of an influential text,” Neotestimentica 44.1 (2010): 140–66; K. T. Resane, “White fragility, white supremacy and white normativity make theological dialogue on race difficult,” in die Skriflig 55.1 (2021), a2661, https://doi.org/ 10.4102/ids.v55i1.2661; and Nadia Marais, “Refugees, strangers and aliens? Reformation as a cry for life,” Reformed World (2019), 15–27.

18. See, generally, David VanDrunen, Politics after Christendom: Political Theology in a Fractured World (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2020).

19. See R. Scott Clark, Recovering the Reformed Confession: Our Theology, Piety, and Practice (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2008), 193–225.

20. See Michael Horton, The Christian Faith: A Systematic Theology for Pilgrims on the Way (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2011), 712–14.

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Book Reviews 54

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Reformed Theology and Contract Law

Duplex Regnum Christi: Christ’s Twofold Kingdom in Reformed Theology

The Same God Who Works All Things: Inseparable Operations in Trinitarian Theology

Liberty for All: Defending Everyone’s Religious Freedom in a Pluralistic Age

by Jonathon D. Beeke

by Adonis Vidu

REVIEWED BY

REVIEWED BY

REVIEWED BY

REVIEWED BY

Samuel Bostock

Drew Martin

K. J. Drake

Timon Cline

Theologians and Contract Law: The Moral Transformation of the Ius Commune (ca. 1500–1650)

by Andrew T. Walker

by Wim Decock

Lutheran Theology and Contract Law in Early Modern Germany (ca. 1520–1720)

by Paulo Astorri

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Reformed Theology and Contract Law

By Samuel Bostock

Theologians and Contract Law: The Moral Transformation of the Ius Commune (ca. 1500–1650)

By Wim Decock Lutheran Theology and Contract Law in Early Modern Germany (ca. 1520–1720)

By Paulo Astorri

he two intimidating looking studies that form the basis of this review essay might not appear to be promising territory for students of Reformation theology.

They offer highly detailed descriptions of the development of contract law in the early modern period, a subject that an exasperated David Hume, himself a sometime law student, once called “an infinitely complicated” idea, for which even a “hundred volumes of laws, and a thousand volumes of commentators have not been found sufficient” to define. For students of legal history, then, these carefully researched studies are a tremendous resource in that they condense, if not thousands, then certainly several hundreds of closely argued Latin volumes

by Roman Catholic and Lutheran commentators into relatively accessible synthetic and historical accounts. But, we may ask, what has Reformation theology to do with early modern developments in contract law? We will suggest these two volumes together demonstrate at least three important connections.

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FIRST IMPORTANT CONNECTION Tom Holland’s 2019 best-seller Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind has been widely discussed in recent years. Holland’s argument is that, historically speaking, without Christianity, the values that contemporary Western secular liberals hold dear would not have developed: individualism, human rights, progressivism, and secularity itself. To make his case, Holland brilliantly weaves together the work of a number of other scholars, such as Brian Tierney on natural rights, or Harold Berman on law and religion more generally. The two studies discussed here are not referenced by Holland, but they provide further strong support for his thesis that Christian values transformed the classical inheritance.

In the medieval period, civil law across most of Europe was based on Roman law, as collected by the Emperor Justinian in the sixth century. Roman law offered what Decock calls a “closed system” of specifically named contracts. Contracts outside of this were only enforced where

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one party had already performed their side of the contract (such as an orange seller giving his oranges to his customers) or where a solemn agreement (stipulatio) had been made. The Roman principle can be summarized as stating that “naked” pacts, those resting only on mutual consent, were not legally enforceable.

However, alongside the civil law there was also the canon law, the evolving law of the church made for use in ecclesiastical discipline. These two legal traditions were in some tension, including in the area of contract law. On the basis of the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount, which were understood as an exposition of the law of nature that directed all human beings to a life of mutual love, the law of the church made precisely the opposite judgment to Roman law: all agreements or pacts, however naked, were binding.

Medieval civil lawyers, as good Christians, sought to use the arts of scholastic exegesis to interpret Roman law in light of the teaching of Christ. But by the beginning of the sixteenth century, jurists were beginning to argue that the civil law needed to be brought explicitly into line with the demands of natural law, as understood from Scripture (with some help from Aristotle).

In fact, this is what happened, starting in Spain.

In a number of authorities across Europe, the civil law “swallowed” the canon law principle that if the parties (or even just one party) willed to enter an agreement, the agreement should be considered legally binding. This had far-reaching implications. In effect, every individual became a sort of private legislator, constructing, on the basis of their mere will, binding agreements that the state was expected to enforce. Today, the doctrine that a contract is valid on the basis of mutual consent is a staple of international contract law. But its roots can be found in the specifically Christian understanding of the requirements of natural law.

Wim Decock’s study focuses on the contributions of a number of early modern Spanish scholastic theologians. These theologians provided the theoretical foundations for these developments in contract law. Initially they

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The appeal to natural law was . . . an integral part of the church’s task of equipping people to stand in the Last Judgment. Before God’s all-seeing eye, simple promises bound the conscience just as much as oaths.

were Dominicans, such as Francisco de Vitoria and Domingo de Soto, but later the impetus mainly came from Jesuits, such as Francisco Suárez and Luis de Molina. Decock repeatedly draws attention to the importance of the religious framework within which these theologians operated. Following Augustine, the church taught that there could be no salvation for those who had made illegal profits unless they made restitution. As business practices became increasingly sophisticated in the sixteenth century, priests hearing confessions needed ever more detailed guidance in order to give absolution. As a result, some of the most important discussions of contract law were found in manuals for Jesuit confessors. In this arena, keeping a clean conscience before God was critical, far more than the looser dictates of civil magistrates. Here the appeal to natural law was not a sign of abstract secularizing thinking, but an integral part of the church’s task of equipping people to stand in the Last Judgment.

Before God’s all-seeing eye, simple promises bound the conscience just as much as oaths. As

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Decock says, “The view sub specie conscientiae allowed the Western legal tradition to depart from the classical legacy and radically re-think the foundations of contract law” (146).

While Theologians and Contract Law is part of a wider rediscovery of the central role of Roman Catholic scholastics in providing the theoretical foundations of modern contract doctrine, Decock’s study is particularly valuable for the wider theological connections he makes. Decock shows that the Spanish scholastic theologians analyzed the proliferation of contracts within the context of an understanding of the human person as made in God’s image, with the right to have dominion over the goods of the earth, and the freedom and responsibility to order his own will, and this in order to reach his eternal destiny. The result was a philosophical-theological synthesis in which contract law became “part of a broader theological story about man, his goods and the divine telos of life on earth” (168).

SECOND IMPORTANT CONNECTION Two questions arise as we turn to consider the relevance of this research for Reformation theology. First, if the essentials of modern contract law emerged as a result of the pressure applied by the demands of the Roman Catholic confessional, then what of the relationship of Protestant theology to these legal developments? And second, if the Spanish theory of contract law was part of a wider Roman scholastic “theological story,” then what of the relationship between contract law and the all-encompassing theological story that would develop in certain quarters of the Reformation traditions: that is, covenant theology?

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We take the second question first. The suggestion that an increasing emphasis on contractualism in legal thought might have contributed to the rise of federal theology was first made at least a hundred years ago in Germany, and repeated by Perry Miller at Harvard in his classic study of The New England Mind (1939).

In 1970, building on Miller, the Scottish theologian J. B. Torrance charged federal theology with falling into the sin of late Judaism. Torrance felt that in the hands of legalistic federal theologians, the biblical and strictly unconditional covenant of grace had been recast as a conditional contract, even being called a “bargain.” Noting that important developers of the federal tradition in Scotland— such as David Dickson, James Durham, and Samuel Rutherford—were at the same time highly active in promoting the National Covenant and Solemn League and Covenant, Torrance suggested that their theology was more influenced by “certain socio-political concepts of covenant than it probably ever realised” (see James B. Torrance, “Covenant or Contract? A study of the theological background of w o r s h i p i n s e v e nt e e nt h century Scotland,” Scottish Journal of Theology 23 [February 1970], 61).

While Torrance’s sharp distinction between a gracious covenant and a conditional contract has now long passed its sell-by date, it is notable that studies of the development of federal theology among the Reformed since have tended to stress that the Reformed doctrine of the covenant had its own, biblical inner logic. The question of covenantal conditions continues to be a delicate topic, as though Torrance’s ghost might appear to spoil the federal party.

Decock’s study of early modern contrac­­ tualism, though, suggests that many of these

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worries might be caused by a classic example of anachronism. While terms like “bargain” and “contract” might seem to us, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as being obviously loaded with ideas of self-interest, competition, and profit, for the early modern scholastics these terms meant something quite different.

For the Catholic theologians, making contracts was meant to be an exercise in commutative justice in a way that would not be recognized by Roman or modern Western courts. Although they understood that the market was a kind of contest, overall the moral theologians still judged it sinful to enter into a contract that was not characterized by “fairness in exchange,” a “just price,” or “equity” for both parties. As Decock puts it, the theologians he surveys, ever anxious to protect the souls of millions of people from falling into sin, taught that “contracts should not amount to zero-sum games” (601).

However, returning to the first question of this section, given the very scholastic and Roman roots of the early modern reformation of contract law, perhaps Protestant theologians simply ignored these developments, even as they sidelined the practice of confession and, as humanist lawyers advocated for a return to Roman law, wiped it clean of its scholastic cobwebbing.

Here is where Paulo Astorri’s volume on the relationship between Lutheran theology and contract law is so helpful. Astorri’s work is a

revision of his dissertation, completed under Decock’s supervision at Leuven. Lutheran theologians do seem to have been less systematically interested in the study of contract law, and so Astorri takes a more sweeping approach than Decock, looking at catechetical materials all the way through to jurists’ rulings, from Martin Luther through to early eighteenth-century responses to the secular natural law theories of Samuel Pufendorf. Astorri acknowledges that the Lutheran doctrine of salvation was the polar opposite of the Catholic teaching. But this did not mean that theologians could step away from jurisprudence. Although Lutherans believed they were saved through faith alone and not by keeping the law, Luther taught that one’s thanksgiving for salvation ought to flow into a life of charity toward one’s neighbor. And so, while Roman Catholic moral theologians had to help priests decide whether to bind or to loose sins against justice, Lutheran theo­logians still had to help pastors guide their flocks on how best to keep the command to have “no debts outstanding, except to love one another” (Rom. 13:8). And natural law remained the benchmark for living a life of love, even in commerce. As a result, Lutheran theologians often provided similar guidance to their Roman counterparts, accepting, for example, the signature canon law principle that naked pacts were binding and the importance of equality in exchange. Such was the positive view of

Anyone hoping to understand how the theological story of federal theology emerged needs to engage with the theological reformation and celebration of contracts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—on both sides of the Tiber.

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contracts justly made and kept, that Luther’s successor Philip Melanchthon could teach that they were daily reminders of God and even of the gospel.

These volumes make it clear that anyone hoping to understand how the theological­ story of federal theology emerged needs to engage with the theological reformation and celebration of contracts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—on both sides of the Tiber.

THIRD IMPORTANT CONNECTION We mention briefly a third area of obvious interest from these studies, before offering some recommendations. Both of these volumes examine cultures in which theologians and jurists were mutually dependent on each other as they sought to build a more Christian society. In these cultures, theologians could not avoid offering counsel on morally tricky areas of business and

The numerous examples . . . of pointed discussions over the application of the commandments against theft or bearing false witness, for example, are a valuable resource for contemporary moral theology.

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life. The numerous examples contained in these volumes of pointed discussions over the application of the commandments against theft or bearing false witness, for example, are a valuable resource for contemporary moral theology.

These are some of the questions of contractual justice and fidelity discussed by early modern moral theologians. Are sellers obliged to mention defects in their wares or does the responsibility belong to buyers to inspect them? How about if the sale is of possibly toxic debt? Conversely, are buyers obliged to point out if they know that a product is being heavily underpriced by the seller or are they allowed to take advantage of the seller’s mistake? Is a Christian allowed to profit from inside knowledge of future market conditions? Should sex workers who become Christians be counseled to keep their ill-gotten gains or to follow the example of Zacchaeus and give it to charitable causes in order to demonstrate repentance? If the former, does this mean that contracts for sexual services ought to be considered legally enforceable in a Christian society?

Astorri’s book is particularly interesting for its clear analysis of the grounds on which Lutheran theologians completely revised the medieval prohibition against lending at interest for profit (“usury”). Astorri includes a fascinating account of the dispute at Regensberg over the new theology of usury that highlights the interactions between canon law, developing Lutheran theology (led by Jacob Andreae), and Lutheran lawyers.

Alongside these practical questions, there is also the question of method in moral theology.

Decock notes how little Roman Catholic moral theologians drew on Scripture to formulate their doctrines. The opposite was true for Lutheran theologians, who were mostly derivative of the Catholic scholastics for the analysis of contract law, but made up for it in their attempts to ground those doctrines biblically. Pressing slightly further, Astorri’s work highlights that below the surface there were in fact two different “spirits” in Lutheran moral theology. Some

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Lutherans were more focused on scriptural sufficiency, which—given that Scripture did not speak into all the areas of contract law, such as when exactly a contract becomes binding— meant allowing a greater role for the magistrate in binding conscience. Others, like Balthasar Meisner, were closer to the Roman moral theologians in being more confident about using human reason to develop detailed guidance for troubled consciences from the basic principles of natural law, as expounded by Christ.

These bulging volumes show clearly the intertwining of theology and contract law in the early modern period; and for that reason, ought to be taken seriously by those interested in Reformation theology.

CONCLUSION These bulging volumes show clearly the intertwining of theology and contract law in the early modern period; and for that reason, ought to be taken seriously by those interested in Reformation theology. They offer a fascinating picture of a time when the doors of the church led quite directly into the colorful world of the early modern marketplace. If the details are sometimes too much for non-lawyers, good structure and repeated summaries throughout the books help to make them accessible.

However, there is no doubt that these are both rather technical and at times somewhat dry academic works.

As publications by two different Brill imprints, they are also rather expensive. While we will leave to one side the question of whether a just price is being charged for these volumes, those without access to them might need to consider alternative options. Those interested in the practical results of early modern Roman Catholic discussions could consider Decock’s translation of some of the Dutch Jesuit Leonardo Lessius’s work, titled On Sale, Securities, and Insurance (CLP Academic), or Hugo Grotius’s On the Rights of War and Peace (various translations), who produced his own creative synopsis of Lessius and others and transmitted it to Protestant audiences. For a broader overview of the place of medieval and early modern contract law in relation to modern

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doctrines, James Gordley’s The Philosophical Origins of Modern Contract Doctrine (Oxford) remains the best discussion. As per the title, Gordley’s emphasis is on the role of Aristotelian philosophy more than distinctively religious influences, and for those we have to look to the work of Decock and Astorri. Decock has a useful summary of recent work in this area in The Oxford Handbook of European Legal History; but for the details of the various debates, one will need to return to these dissertations (of which Astorri’s remains embargoed).

However, given the value these volumes contain for historical, ethical, and systematic theologians, there is no doubt that they both belong in the collection of every library wishing to facilitate cutting-edge research into the intricate relationship between law and theology in the decades after the Reformation.

SAMUEL BOSTOCK is an assistant minister at Bloomfield

Presbyterian Church in Belfast.

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Duplex Regnum Christi: Christ’s Twofold Kingdom in Reformed Theology

By Jonathon D. Beeke Brill, 2020 272 pages (paperback), $64.00 s Christians who identify with the Reformation traditions have wrestled with Christian social responsibility and the Christian’s place in the public square, few topics have generated more controversy than the nature of Christ’s rule and kingdom. For readers interested in the historical development of Lutheran and especially Reformed thinking regarding these issues, Jonathan Beeke’s Duplex Regnum Christi is essential reading.

It is hard to have a debate when debaters use the same terms with different meanings. The two sides inevitably talk past each other. Beeke’s fascinating study challenges historians and theologians to attend to their terms carefully to ensure they understand their texts, not to mention one another. Conversations about the nature of Christ’s kingdom and rule frequently have generated more heat than light, not to mention plenty of confusion. Beeke’s careful reading of primary sources, terminological precision, and charitable engagement with secondary literature is both refreshing and insightful.

Whereas contemporary participants in these conversations typically utilize language referring to Christ’s “two kingdoms,” Beeke observes that their early modern predecessors preferred to use the language of Christ’s “twofold kingdom” (duplex regnum Christi):

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The majority of the Reformed orthodox did not distinguish Christ’s mediatorial kingdom from his essential kingdom on the basis of scope or boundary, but on the basis of the mode of Christ’s governance (i.e., covenantal administration). Thus, Christ’s essential kingdom and mediatorial kingdom comprise one kingdom that is universal in

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scope, but the two aspects of this kingdom are administered according to different covenantal arrangements, each then with a very different purpose and end. (21) After a brief survey of early and medieval sources, Beeke examines key texts from the sixteenth-century Reformers Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Martin Bucer in Part 1 of the book. In Part 2, he compares these Reformers with their theological heirs in the influential Reformed universities in Leiden (Franciscus Junius and Antonius Walaeus), Geneva (Francis Turretin and Bénédict Pictet), and Edinburgh (Johannes Scharpius and David Dickson).

Beeke concludes the study with three central observations regarding theological continuity, development, and motivations.

First, building on the historical work of Richard Muller and others, Beeke argues that the range of diversity and development between the sixteenth-century Reformers and their seventeenth-century theological heirs (together with the continued diversity within the later tradition itself) exists within a framework of general continuity and agreement on essential theological and methodological concerns. Beeke makes a convincing case that both the early and later Reformed traditions were united in affirming Christ’s sovereignty on the one hand and the twofold nature of Christ’s rule on the other. He also offers compelling illustrations of diversity in the tradition. For example, some followed Pictet in making Christ’s universal reign of power a subset of his mediatorial reign, whereas others followed Gulielmus Bucanus in identifying Christ’s universal reign with his reign of power and distinguishing these both from Christ’s particular reign over the church, a reign identified with Christ’s reign of grace (110–11). In other words, Reformed theologians were united in affirming Christ’s twofold rule, but they differed in how they defined and connected the two “folds.” Another example relates to eschatology. Some theologians (e.g., Amandus Polanus) held that Christ’s

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mediatorial reign would continue into eternity, while other theologians (e.g., Junius) held that Christ would hand over his mediatorial kingdom to the Father upon his return on the day of judgment (134; see also 116–18).

Beeke’s second central observation is that one area of significant development in the tradition relates to the locus or placement of the doctrine of Christ’s rule within the theological system.

According to Beeke, the early Reformers were more likely to discuss the nature of Christ’s kingdom and rule in the context of ecclesiology and the relationship between temporal and spiritual authority, whereas later Reformed thinkers tied discussions of Christ’s kingdom and rule more closely to Christological reflections regarding the person and work of Christ.

Beeke may be correct, but it is not possible to know from the book. His own citations of the six “representative centers” of the later tradition clearly contradict the claim that the doctrine was treated in relation to Christology rather than church government. Beeke himself points out that Turretin treated the doctrine under the headings of both Christology and church government (165, 182), as did Sharpius (192, 197). In his commentary on the Westminster Confession of Faith, Beeke observes that Dickson only treated the doctrine under the headings of church government and civil magistracy, and he did not treat it under the heading of Christology at all (210, 212). Pictet, we are told, located the doctrine in relation to Christology and covenant theology (180–82). From the evidence presented, only Junius and Walaeus appear to fit Beeke’s claim that Christ’s twofold kingdom was typically treated as an aspect of Christology rather than ecclesiology.

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Beeke’s downplaying of ecclesiology is related to his downplaying of politics. This downplaying runs counter to the developing scholarly consensus that there was a high degree of overlap between political theory and the doctrines of God, Christ, covenant, humanity, salvation, church, and eschatology during the early modern period. Therefore, it would have strengthened Beeke’s political observations (found throughout the book) if he had engaged more of the rapidly growing academic literature on the relationship between the development of theological and political ideas during the period of Reformed orthodoxy. Furthermore, his third central observation is not clear. To say that theological development was not determined by varying political contexts (19, 124, 216) seems obviously true, but to imply that theological development was not driven significantly by political concerns (217–19) again runs contrary to much of the academic literature and would need to be substantiated more thoroughly.

While the decision to downplay ecclesiology, political context, and the political implications of early modern reformed Christological debates is not the most compelling part of the book, this does not take away from the work’s major contribution in relation to terminology and concepts. Beeke’s careful reading of the early modern sources illustrates the theological connections between biblical Christology, anthropology, soteriology, and eschatology, and the relative facility of different theological terms in handling these concepts. What is the relationship between the authority Christ possesses in accordance with his divine nature (his essential kingdom) and that which he possesses in accordance with his taking on a human nature (his mediatorial

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or economic kingdom)? In what sense is that authority shared universally with all human beings created in his image? In what sense is that authority shared particularly with those human beings who are members of the visible church? How was that authority experienced before the fall, under the old covenant, and now under the new covenant? How will that authority be experienced after the second advent of Jesus? Beeke’s rich exploration of the Reformed tradition’s reflections upon the Scriptures offers a wealth of wisdom for retrieval as well as for constructive Christian theology and ethics.

Beeke also offers some extremely helpful practical suggestions for more fruitful debate and further study of these matters. He encourages his readers to replace the terminology of Christ’s “two kingdoms” with the terminology of a Christ’s singular but “twofold kingdom” (220).

Some participants in the conversation about the nature of Christ’s authority and rule desire to avoid an unhealthy dualism between the realms

Beeke’s rich exploration of the Reformed tradition’s reflections upon the Scriptures offers a wealth of wisdom for retrieval as well as for constructive Christian theology and ethics.

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of “nature” and “grace” by emphasizing the universality of Christ’s sovereignty over all things (223). Yet other participants are concerned to emphasize that Christ does not rule all things in the same way, either by distinguishing “spiritual” matters from those that are “temporal,” or by distinguishing matters shared by believers and unbelievers in “common” from those that are more “distinct” (221). Beeke suggests that a terminological shift from “two kingdoms” to Christ’s “twofold kingdom” might help to increase the common ground between these perspectives by emphasizing that the proper distinction is modal rather than spatial. In other words, instead of asking, “In what sphere does the activity of the Christian plumber belong?”

Beeke suggests asking, “In what manner does Christ rule the plumber who confesses Christ as redeemer?” (225). Finally, Beeke commendably warns against historical flattening that ignores the diversity of the Reformed tradition on these issues, or anachronistic narrations of Christian history as the inevitable march to one position or another, usually the preferred interpretation of the scholar (225–26).

Beeke’s study is a truly remarkable demonstration of the relevance of Christology to Christian political theology. As a work of historical theology, its terminological and conceptual findings are instructive and its practical suggestions are promising. Though they differed in important ways, Reformation theologians from Luther, Bucer, and Calvin forward generally agreed that Christ rules all things, but Christ does not rule all things in the same manner at the same time. Duplex Regnum Christi offers rich food for thought for those who seek to follow Christ in this present age as we await his second coming.

DREW MARTIN (PhD, Vanderbilt University) is adjunct pro-

fessor of theology at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary (Charlotte, North Carolina) and co-pastor of West Charlotte Church. He is a contributing author to the Oxford Handbook of Reformed Theology and is currently writing Vital Christianity: Francis Grimké on the Christian Life (Crossway).

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The Same God Who Works All Things: Inseparable Operations in Trinitarian Theology

By Adonis Vidu Eerdmans, 2021 368 pages (hardback), $50.00 donis Vidu endeavors to offer a fully orbed definition and defense of the inseparable operations of the Triune God. The doctrine of inseparable operations has been a steadfast rule in Trinitarian theology since the patristic period with the rejection of Arianism, most famously expressed in Augustine’s dictum that opera trinitatis ad extra sunt indivisa: all external works of the Trinity are indivisible. The center of this doctrine is a commitment to the unity and oneness of God in his tri-unity. However, the idea of inseparable operations has been challenged and revised in twentieth-century academic theology, especially with the position known as Social Trinitarianism, which, stated simply, posits each divine person as an independent center of will and consciousness. Vidu’s work calls the church to avoid the errors of tritheism and modalism and preserve the catholic confession that we “worship the Trinity in unity and unity in Trinity.”

Vidu is not content with a partial presentation or defense of inseparable operations, but he seeks to demonstrate the multiple aspects of the doctrine across theological disciplines. He begins with biblical, historical, and philosophic theological explorations of the formulation of the doctrine before engaging in a thorough dogmatic theology of how the understanding of the inseparability of the Triune operations

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illuminates the doctrines of creation, the incarnation, the atonement, and the Holy Spirit’s indwelling believers.

This work is a masterful model for Trini­ tarian dogmatics that blends exegetical sensitivity, interactions with Christian theolo­ gians from across the millennia, and a rigorous argumentation that, nevertheless, never relinquishes the proper humility, reverence, and awe due to God. Given Vidu’s depth and breadth of treatment, however, this work will only be of real profit to those already well-versed in the theology of the Trinity; it is not an introduction but an advanced and technical study.

That being said, The Same God who Works all Things offers several points that will benefit every believer to help us understand God’s work in the world: the biblical basis for the unified acts of God, the incarnation in Trinitarian perspective, and the atonement as a Triune work. Let us begin by defining what is meant by inseparable operations more thoroughly.

The doctrine of inseparable operations is fundamentally a grammatical rule for our speech about God. As such, it aids to speak rightly about his actions, doing justice to both his substantial unity and tri-personality. The Father, Son, and Spirit are eternally three, distinguished only by the Trinitarian eternal processions—the un-begotten Father begets the Son, and the Father and the Son spirate the Holy Spirit—yet, the three persons are one in substance as God with one shared will, power, glory, majesty, and so on. Because of this divine unity of substance, the Triune persons do not act singularly toward the creation but act by “one will, one power, one energy” (52), which Vidu offers as shorthand for the inseparable operations. He clarifies,

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The only attributes that are properly to be attributed to the persons are relational attributes, such as being unbegotten, begotten, inspirated. This rule must be strictly observed if one wishes to retain the unity of the divine substance. (68) The danger in not observing this rule is that it gives the impression that the external works of God may be divvied up among the persons—e.g., the Father creates, the Son saves, and the Spirit perfects—as if the persons may be separated. On the other hand, observing this rule does not mean that the definite external acts of God cannot be attributed to individual persons of the Trinity.

That the Father creates or the Son saves are true, for example, but are true according to what theologians call “appropriation,” which Vidu helpfully defines as “even though the created effect is commonly caused by the whole Trinity, it nevertheless refers back in particular to a single person” (282– 83). Ultimately, to speak of the singular work of the one God that at the same time illuminates the tri-unity of God is a confession of the mystery and transcendence of God. Basic Trinitarian concepts cannot be directly explained and fully defined. The darkness of ignorance necessarily envelops them. In

Ultimately, to speak of the singular work of the one God that at the same time illuminates the tri-unity of God is a confession of the mystery and transcendence of God.

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this case theological progress takes the form of gradual purification of our speech about God, by stipulating grammatical rules rather than shining the light of comprehension on transcendent realities. (95) Vidu establishes the biblical basis for inseparable operations by engaging with contemporary studies in New Testament Christology. The key is to show that the New Testament ascribes the same acts to the Father, Son, and Spirit to identify each as YHWH, the Creator of the heavens and the earth and the covenant God of Israel. The most significant and telling act to identify God is creation itself, since “the action of creation firmly establishes the ontological distinction between God and everything else: Only God creates, without any help” (50). In short, there are only two types of beings: God who is eternal, uncreated, and infinite; and that which he creates, which is temporal, contingent, and finite.

The New Testament attributes to Christ the act of creation throughout. Since Jesus is the creator, Jesus is God. The inseparability of the identity of Jesus and YHWH thus reveals the inseparability of the Father and the Son as YHWH. Likewise, the inseparability of work of the Holy Spirit with the Father and the Son must be established. Vidu traces the connection of the Spirit from Jesus’ birth, his ministry, his death, and resurrection, and then focuses on the continued relationship of the Spirit as the Spirit of the Ascended Christ. Christ both works through the Spirit and, after the ascension, the Spirit as sent works together with and through Christ.

Thus the New Testament witness shows us the true revelation of God’s self through the mission of Jesus and the Holy Spirit, while avoiding any division in God or subordination.

The doctrine of the inseparability of divine action—all actions of God toward creation are the work of the Triune God rather than any one person—raises an immediate and pressing theological objection: How does such a picture account for the incarnation of the Son alone?

This is a perennial question in the history of

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Christian Trinitarian reflection. Building on the work of Augustine and Aquinas, Vidu observes a distinction between an act and a state. An act is an intentional event that produces change in the world, while a state is an arrangement of properties and relations in the world. Vidu provides the helpful analogy of dressing (action) and being clothed (state) (160–61). Thus, from this perspective, we can understand the assuming of the human nature of Christ as both an act of the Triune God’s single will and power, while acknowledging that it was the Son alone who took the state of being incarnate. As Vidu summarizes: From an action perspective the agency in the case of the incarnation-assumption belongs to the Trinity as a whole. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are together causing the assumption. . . . However, from a state perspective it is said that the action terminates in the Son, namely that the action results in a state that characterizes the Son alone. (162) What is the significance of framing the incarnation according to inseparable operations?

First, and most obviously, this allows us a way of speaking about the actions of God in Christ that account for God’s tri-unity. Statements of Jesus such as John 5:19 become intelligible, “Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise.” Additionally, as Vidu notes at several places, speaking of the Son’s incarnation according to the inseparably operations of the Triune God helps us to avoid any sense of mythologizing or subordinationism in the incarnation. Jesus is no one less than the transcendent God in flesh. There is no dispute, debate, conflict, tension, and so on between the Father and the Son in the incarnation, nor was the Son ordered to come as some sort of inferior.

Rather, the assuming of our flesh was according to the one will and power of the Father, Son, and Spirit in the perfect unity of the divine nature. This is particularly helpful as we think

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The doctrine of the Trinity is about nothing less than the identity of the God whom we worship and who saves us and draws us to himself.

of Christ’s atonement on the cross. The whole Triune God wills and accomplishes our salvation through the humanity of the Son. And importantly, the wrath that is borne is not the Father’s alone but that of the Father, Son, and Spirit. In suffering on the cross, Christ is not swaying a reluctant father, but accomplishing the work of redemption according to the unified will and power of the Triune God. The doctrine of the Trinity is about nothing less than the identity of the God whom we worship and who saves us and draws us to himself.

The Christian church comes to the confession of the Triune God not in the spirit of pride and needless speculation but in humble reception of who God has revealed himself to be through the missions of the Son and the Holy Spirit to the glory of the Father. As Vidu reminds us, “Humanity is created for union with the Trinity precisely in the person of the Son, whom the Father loves in the Spirit” (157).

K. J. DRAKE (PhD, Saint Louis University) is Sessional

Assistant Professor of History at Redeemer University in Ancaster, Ontario. He is the author of The Flesh of the Word: The Extra Calvinisticum from Zwingli to Early Orthodoxy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).

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Liberty for All: Defending Everyone’s Religious Freedom in a Pluralistic Age Andrew T. Walker Brazos Press, 2021 267 pages (paperback), $19.99 he past decade has been marked by seismic shifts in American political opinion. Remarkably, h o w e v e r, m o s t A m e r i c a n s, despite many recent high-profile court battles, still support religious liberty—at least insofar as they do not want their sincerely held beliefs impinged. What exactly religious liberty does or should entail is likely less clear to the average voter. Lately, religious expression has come into conflict with questions of birth control, same-sex weddings, and transgenderism. Is religious liberty a sword or a shield? Is it shorthand for bigotry? Is it a public good or merely a private preference?

In his new book, Liberty for All, Andrew Walker, a professor of ethics at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, aims to convince believers and unbelievers alike that religious liberty is a common good, indispensable in our pluralistic age. It is the most tightly argued case for religious liberty made by any evangelical in recent memory.

Liberty for All proceeds by a tripartite framework: eschatology, anthropology, and missiology. In treating the kingdom, image, and mission of God, astute readers will quickly identify Walker’s evangelical and Baptist leanings. The crux of Walker’s eschatological argument is somewhat predictable, which is not to say boring or unoriginal. The familiar already/not yet reality of Christ’s kingdom informs Walker’s “age of contestability” in

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which we now live (30, 73). This age is marked by competing truth-claims. With the assurance of Christ’s final triumph, Christians are to live patiently in this context with a posture of “humility toward religious diversity” (44).

Religious liberty is a temporary temporal doctrine that aids Christians in this parenthetical endeavor. This requires commitment to pluralism because coercion, advises Walker, “will not produce the kingdom of God” (187).

What is more, Christian coercion—whether in service of over-realized eschatology or not—runs afoul of Walker’s second argument: the dignity of man. The “interim social ethic” permits individuals, as moral agents, to freely seek after God without molestation of their consciences or persons (155). Humans are “truth-seeking creatures” who will worship something: whatever they think is true, commands authority, deserves adoration, and instills authenticity (19, 104). This requires freedom to pursue truth and “space to be wrong in hopes that individuals will come to the knowledge of the truth” (20).

This is not relativism or licentiousness here, but rather the belief that “we do not seek to criminalize, persecute, or marginalize people whose beliefs are sincere and are animating them toward lives of purpose, meaning, and goodwill” (19). Within limits, Walker advocates for giving space to people to “act in accordance with what they believe is choice-worthy and will produce flourishing” (20). Because “no human is a perfect arbiter of truth,” we are not to “impose truth on others; truth must be discovered after thorough, rigorous examination.” The same ethic is also evangelistically instrumental in that it “foster[s] the ideal conditions for the mission of Christ to continue [through the church]” (161). This is the missional argument.

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The impassioned case for religious liberty in Liberty for All alone is worth the read. It is refreshing to witness Christians zealously developing public theology, refusing to let the nakedness of the public square deter them.

Walker’s prose is lively and readable, his arguments winsome, cogent, and concise. The Christian patience and confidence imbedded throughout Walker’s appeal is inspiring, especially in a political environment where utopian proposals abound. But Liberty for All, like any polemic, is not without problems.

NO NEUTRALITY Walker rightly wants readers to reckon with their own fallibility. At the same time, he is confident in objective truth and “rigorous examination” as means of grasping it. These confidences justify a wide berth for inquiry.

All of this is predicated on a liberal neutrality wherein people are free to maintain their sincerely held beliefs and insert them into the public conversation, because no one opinion has been declared orthodox from on high.

In this world, persuasion works because it is undergirded by dueling assumptions of the attainability of objective truth and the limited

capacity of fallen humans to do so. This is a basically Christian worldview, the maintenance of which at the public level—that is, the preconditions for religious liberty—requires the cultural presence of Christianity. In short, Walker’s religious liberty is not only a Christian value; it also requires the Christian worldview to be publicly favored for it to flourish, for persuasion to yield consensus. This is the paradox of a position that assumes a kind of neutrality—which is not to imply that Walker is disingenuous.

Obviously, the cultural preconditions for Walker’s model are eroding, fast, and not simply because of Christianity’s diminished dominance, but for reasons akin to Stanley Fish’s 1 provocative criticism of “free speech.” Values like religious liberty and free speech cannot persist as content neutral. The utopia wherein no one’s sincerely held beliefs are marginalized or slighted is no more possible than one wherein fairness and equity exist detached from a particular, content-laden standard of justice. As David Foster Wallace (whom Walker quotes) realized, our object of worship dictates our thought patterns, desires, and virtues. For Walker, Religious liberty is the principle of social practice wherein every individual, regardless of their religious confession, is equally

The utopia wherein no one’s sincerely held beliefs are marginalized or slighted is no more possible than one wherein fairness and equity exist detached from a particular, content-laden standard of justice.

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free to believe, or not to believe, and to live out their understanding of the conscience’s duty . . . without threat of government penalty or social harassment. (24) Further, it lets people “respond to their understanding of divine truth and to manifest the obligations of that divine truth in every dimension of life” (25).

This level of equal equality is simply not possible unless governments are morally neutral, wherein no moral compass is required to guide law and policy. This is impossible in theory and fact. No regime is morally neutral. Some ethic dictates decisions. Implicit in Walker’s argument is that for religious liberty to flourish, a Christian ethic must inform policy and constitutional limits. Is this not a violation of religious

Implicit in Walker’s argument is that for religious liberty to flourish, a Christian ethic must inform policy and constitutional limits.

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liberty unto “every dimension of life”? Is this not favoring one belief system and marginalizing others?

Secular scholars like Khyati Joshi think so.

In White Christian Privilege, she writes: “The Protestant norm has shaped laws and court decisions on religious freedom. . . . Christian privilege is built into the edifice of American law.” This is evident, Joshi argues, in everything from the “action/belief divide” in Reynolds v.

U.S. (1879) to the designation of marginal religious practices as public health hazards in Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye v. Hialeah 2 (1993). Joshi argues, then, that if laws controlling religious practices are going to be called “facially neutral,” then “we must recognize Christianity as the ‘face’ against which other traditions are being compared.” To Joshi, religious liberty, as popularly conceived, is a lie. She is partially right; it could not flourish outside of a context conditioned by Christianity, and without that ethic acting as the sinews to its bones.

And as Justice John Paul Stevens once pointed out, the original understanding of the Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses in the First Amendment—upon which Walker’s Baptist forbears like John Leland exerted much influence—was far more limited than contemporary 3 readers like Walker would guess. To the founding generation, in general, toleration did not entail equal preference for all religions. Rather, as the Reverend Jasper Adams later argued, an ecumenical Christian ethic, though not a statesanctioned establishment, was an indispensable foundation for society and the liberties intri4 cate thereto. Indeed, as the U.S. Constitution’s preamble makes clear, it is not liberty itself but the “blessings of liberty” that is the object of cultivation and preservation.

If the state insists on denying—Joshi would say disingenuously so—any such past influence of Christian morality, and refuses to perpetuate those constituting principles, then the basis for religious liberty will be severely diminished.

Walker’s advocacy for “soul competency” is, after all, a decidedly Christian conception of

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spirituality, anthropology, and cosmology—an analogy that, for example, would convince no interlocutor who rejects the existence or immortality of the soul (238). Of course, Walker asserts religious liberty from an explicitly Christian perspective, backed by Christian confidence.

However, like other sincerely held beliefs in Walker’s paradigm, this perspective has no claim to societal privilege over any other, even as a justification for affording competing beliefs a wide berth.

The point is that some level of favoritism— which is not synonymous with coercion—for a basically Christian ethic is a prerequisite for the value of religious liberty, as Walker defines it, to be embraced in theory and practice, even in a pluralistic society. Religious liberty, traditionally understood, is predicated on at least a residual of Christian conceptions of truth, morality, and justice. Walker’s position, however, formally precludes any such favoritism and rather assumes the neutral, secular state as the best vehicle for securing liberty for all.

Religious liberty, traditionally understood, is predicated on at least a residual of Christian conceptions of truth, morality, and justice.

DEATH BY INDIFFERENCE That the maximalist religious liberty Walker champions is built upon the edifice of neutrality runs into another self-defeating problem: namely, the Jefferson trap. For Thomas Jefferson, religion was merely an “additional incitement” to virtue—a decidedly instrumentalist view that nevertheless assumed some kind 5 of blend of Christian and classical morality. Its utility was in protecting liberties for their own sake; there was no higher end to which liberties were to be ordered. At the same time, Jefferson argued that religious conviction was exclusively private and that the state had no interest in promoting or demoting any religious beliefs in particular. Liberties had “no dependence on 6 our religious opinions,” and only unfettered inquiry could combat error. But the vantage point from which he defined “error” was circular and anemic.

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Per Thomas Pangle (whom Walker cites to different ends in chapter 1), Jefferson doubted that there was “discoverable any core of religious truth.” Rather, there was “nothing but irresolvable diversity of opinion in religious matters . . . mere expression of native disposition, taste, and 7 prejudice.” (Walker rather feebly distinguishes religious conviction from choice in chapter 5.)

Religion could be celebrated as an expression of diversity, not a proclamation of truth. Jefferson believed that submitting all religious opinions to the “tribunal” of free inquiry would finally disprove all such superstitions, as if faith and reason are mutually exclusive rather than com8 plementary. Pangle writes:

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The real aim of toleration and free speech [for Jefferson] is not the encouragement of progress in theological or metaphysical science, but the trivialization of theology and metaphysics . . . not vigorous debate progressing toward agreed-on truth, but conformity based on indifference.

But as Pangle rightly discerns, “By manifesting indifference to theological controversy, government necessarily promotes indifference among the citizenry,” thereby undermining any appeals made by Jefferson’s contemporaries for the necessity of religion for a virtuous society.

The Jeffersonian model does not coerce or suppress religion by force; rather, it chokes it out by the stifling indifference to religion inherent in a maximalist doctrine of religious liberty predicated on neutrality and expansive toleration.

We can see the fruit of this even now. Religious liberty has never been more legally protected in America, and religion has never had less purchase in public discourse. Religious liberty precedent has done little more than ensure that citizens can be privately bigoted, while more radical “orthodoxies” gain favor.

Yet Walker wants to justify religious liberty on basically Jeffersonian grounds: namely, the attainment of truth, authenticity, and fulfillment through free inquiry, while simultaneously maintaining that religious liberty is a common and substantive good that honors the imago Dei and restrains arbitrary government.

Unfortunately for Walker, the Jeffersonian cake must either be had or eaten.

Walker does not want religion to atrophy, but the model he has adopted has proven to yield no other result. He thinks the pursuit of religion universally valuable, and that the government should provide the material conditions for this pursuit, without intervention, favoritism, or restraint—beyond what public safety requires, of course. But the neutral state that neither promotes nor discourages has no interest in religion at all, and religion is, accordingly, relegated to the private sphere, where things go to

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die from indifference. By adopting something of the Jeffersonian vision, Walker has unwittingly left us with a case for religious liberty that is, in the end, self-defeating.

Despite the above critique, Walker has made a real contribution to the renewed discussion of church and state in the liberal order. A Christian theocracy is, obviously, not a workable (or desirable) solution, but neither is a case for religious liberty that trades in the secularized notions of religion and liberty that have under9 mined the same. Doubtless, religious liberty is good. The remaining question refers to its confines and justifications, a question that needs answering before the value can be asserted with fresh vigor. Walker’s book will prove a success if it moves others to consider the topic of religious liberty anew, even if that begins with critique of his own position.

TIMON CLINE is a graduate of Rutgers Law School, West­

mins­ter Theological Seminary, and Wright State University. He has published in Areo Magazine, The American Spectator, and National Review, and he writes regularly on law, theo­logy, and politics at Modern Reformation and Conciliar Post.

1. Stanley Fish, There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech: And It’s a Good Thing, Too (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).

2. Khyati Joshi, White Christian Privilege: The Illusion of Religious Equality in America ((New York: NYU Press, 2020), 32–42.

3. Van Orden v. Perry, 545 U.S. 677, 726–28 (2005).

4. Daniel L. Dreisbach, ed., Religion and Politics in the Early Republic: Jasper Adams and the Church-State Debate (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1996).

5. “Letter from Thomas Jefferson to Peter Carr” (August 10, 1787), https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-12-02-0021.

6. Notes, 236 (“An Act for establishing Religious Freedom”).

7. Thomas Pangle, “Religion in the Thought of Some of the Leading American Founders,” Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics & Public Policy 4, no. 37(1990): 44–45.

8. See, e.g., “Letter from Thomas Jefferson to Charles Thomson” (January 29, 1817), https://founders.archives.gov/documents/ Jefferson/03-11-02-0024.

9. Consider, perhaps, the middle road between the establishment of Massachusetts Bay and the free-for-all of Rhode Island, offered by the Puritan Separatists of Plymouth Colony. J. M. Bumsted, “A WellBounded Toleration: Church and State in the Plymouth Colony,” Journal of Church and State 10.2 (1968): 265–79.

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SHARE THE GIFT For nearly thirty years, Modern Reformation has provided thinking Christians with thoughtful resources. MR is not simply a theological magazine, but a theological magazine for engaging in the public intellectuall life of our culture—to start, change, and shape conversations with astute, insightful, and timely articles, reviews, and more. Share the gift of theological thought with a friend this Christmas.

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B AC K PAG E

First the Temple, Then the City

by Michael Horton

n 1994, Klaus Schmidt discovered a temple in southwestern Anatolia (Turkey) that dates back almost 10,000 years—the earliest Neolithic period, just after the last ice age. As usual, he said, “First comes the temple, then the city.” Human beings are innat ely r elig ious. We know t hi s fr om Scripture, of course. In Romans 1, Paul explains that all people by nature know God, but they refuse to worship him and instead invent a religion that “works” for them. If there were no genuine sense of God and his revelation in nature, there couldn’t be any idolatry. First the temple, then the city.

It’s not just that religion has always had hobbyists and ardent adherents. In every civilization from the Mayans to the Mishihase and the Mesopotamians, from the Zande to the Xia, the temple was the center, and its priesthood and rites were the foundation for their art, culture, and science.

In ancient Athens and Rome, public religion integrated all of life, from the home to the village to the national festivals. Historians refer to the Byzantine-medieval era as “Christendom,” because the church or cathedral was the center of the action and priests were the leading scholars in literature, law, politics, and science. This was also true well into the Reformation era among Protestants. When the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, they first built a church and then their own homes. First the temple, then the city.

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Ours is the first era in which, at least in “modernized” nations, the temple doesn’t seem to have much of a place in our cities. People are still religious but their new religion is modernity, which enshrines the individual self so that the “temple” is within each of us. Increasingly, even professing religious adherents find themselves losing confidence or interest in ultimate questions, values, and concerns. Cut adrift from dependence on a transcendent source of our existence, “now” has no connection to the “hereafter.” Even Christian preaching (if it’s to survive, we’re told) is thought to require accommodation to the assumption that there is “no heaven above us or hell below us,” as John Lennon once sang.

But the root of our culture’s problem isn’t that the temple no longer occupies the center of our cities. Everyone is obsessed with daily headlines, fearing one another other and reducing the kingdom of God to an agenda for either making America great again or revolutionary social experiments.

The root problem is that God is not the center of our own hearts and lives. As Paul says, “There is no fear of God before their eyes” (Rom. 3:18).

Only when we all meditate soberly on this diagnosis will we be ready to hear and proclaim the good news Paul offers, which begins in the very next verses.

MICHAEL HORTON is the J. Gresham Machen Professor of

Systematic Theology at Westminster Seminary California and the executive editor of Modern Reformation.

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JUS T IFIC AT ION

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Dr. Michael Horton

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Join Michael Horton and friends of Modern Reformation for a special weekend experience as we delve deeply into the topic of justification. Registered participants will receive Dr. Horton’s two-volume work Justification as well as a justification reader in order to prepare for the weekend in advance. Together, we will spend the weekend listening to stimulating lectures and engaging in lively conversation. You will leave this weekend with a deepened understanding and appreciation of the wondrous salvation of God.

IN JESUS, WE SEE ONE WHO USED POWER TO SEEK JUSTICE; AND IN CHRIST, OUR DISORDERED LOVES ARE REORDERED SO THAT WE TOO CAN SEEK JUSTICE WITH OUR POWER. K R I ST E N D E E D E J O H N S O N