Love and Law: A Protestant Conundrum

One way of characterizing an ongoing tension in early Protestant political theology, I will suggest, is as a tug-of-war between articulations of civil obedience in the key of Romans 13:1 and of Romans 13:8.  Both can claim Luther as an heir; both are attempts to square the crucial doctrine of Christian liberty with an ongoing duty to obey the legitimate authority of the magistrate.  On the one hand, liberty could be absolutely closeted away in the spiritual kingdom, and an uncompromising demand for obedience proclaimed in the civil kingdom.  Certainly many have seen this as the legacy of Luther's political theology—Quentin Skinner in particular.  This strand of Protestant political thought rests exegetically on a peremptory invocation of Romans 13:1: "Let every person be subject to the governing authorities.  For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God."  To the question, "How can we be conscience-bound to obey civil law if by Christian liberty, we are bound only to God" this line of argument answered simple, "To obey the magistrate is to obey God.  Therefore you are conscience-bound."

 On the other hand, another line of reflection could take its cue from Luther's fascinating "free lord of all/dutiful servant of all" dialectic, in which the Christian's outward subjection in this life was compatible with his inner freedom because the Christian was one who, by love, subjected himself to authority for the sake of others.

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Freedom from Oppression or Freedom that Oppresses?

The great apostasy of modernity, argues David Bentley Hart in Atheist Delusions, lies in its concept of freedom, its abandonment of the Christian (but indeed, not merely the Christian; Aristotle understood this quite well too) understanding that freedom was about being true to one's nature and proper end, not simply about the removal of every external impediment to one's actions.  Modernity, indeed, says Hart, has gone to the extreme of regarding every consideration, every objective value outside of the abstract individual will as an "external impediment," and hence is committed to a kind of nihilism:

"Modernity's highest ideal—its special understanding of personal autonomy—requires us to place our trust in an original absence underlying all of reality, a fertile void in which all things are possible, from which arises no impediment to our wills, and before which we may consequently choose to make of ourselves what we choose.  We trust, that is to say, that there is no substantial criterion by which to judge our choices that stands  higher than the unquestioned good of free choice itself, and that therefore all judgment, divine no less than human, is in some sense an infringement upon our freedom." (21)

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Consumed: A Book Review

It took me more than a year to finish this book--sometimes, that should tell you something about me, but in this case, that should tell you something about this book.  While Barber's overall thesis is compelling and important, his presentation of it seemed calculated to alienate any possible allies.  Pompous and blustering, he writes most of the book's 339 small-font pages in a breathless, melodramatic tone of fervent moral passion and outrage (I suppose the subtitle should've warned me adequately: "How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole").  Now, this would understandable as an occasional device.  The subject is one that calls for moral passion and outrage, and I, for one, am sympathetic to the desire to indulge in rhetorically-charged passages chock-full of unusual polysyllabic words.  But intense rhetoric is only effective as an occasional device, as a departure from the benchmark of more restrained rhetoric.  Unfortunately, for Barber, the bombastic was the benchmark, from which he almost never departed.  And as you can imagine, that begins to grate on one. 

As part of his tirade against consumer culture, he seeks to include pretty much every example and phenomenon he can think of, regardless of whether it's relevant or compelling.  Instead of a focused account of some of the most alarming trends and damning evidence, Barber is determined to offer a comprehensive account of everything that is wrong with the world today under his heading of "infantilization."  Couple that with the fact that he seems to have been too pompous to have accepted any advice from his editor, and one has to endure many pages of irrelevant or laughably overblown laundry lists of complaints.

And yet, I did the book the honor of reading till the end, because I believe his overall thesis is compelling and very important.

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Libertine Legalists

(This is an excerpt from a thesis chapter I am drafting, "Richard Hooker and the Freedom of the Christian Commonwealth"--it explores the paradoxically libertine yet legalist implications of the Puritan rejection of human authority)

For Hooker, the problem with Puritanism is a warped doctrine of Christian liberty which will assuredly destroy the liberty of the Church (and along with it, the State and the individual).  As we have seen already, the doctrine of Christian liberty declared that Scripture alone had authority over the conscience, and that therefore, no other authority outside Scripture could bind the believer.  Given the original thrust of this doctrine as a weapon against papal authority, it is no wonder that it should tend to abridge the liberty of the Church, pitting against it the freedom of the individual and the authority of Scripture.  Rightly qualified, of course, this exclusive authority of Scripture applied only in matters of faith and salvation, in “the spiritual kingdom” into which, by definition, no man could reach, and the doctrine did not need to pose any threat to suitably humble human institutions.  But as the Puritans had made Church discipline and ceremonies to be matters of faith and salvation, a clash was inevitable.  

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Freedom From Oneself: Christian Liberty in the Lutheran Reformation

For the past week, I've been so engrossed in trying to write an epic narrative of the rise and fall of the doctrine of of adiaphora--"things indifferent"--in the Reformation, that I've had no time for blogging, alas.  I haven't even had time to distill some of the salient bits properly to post here.  So instead, I will just offer you a raw, uncut, uncensored, unedited excerpt from my rough draft.  This is the bit on Luther, who always makes for an exciting read.  

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The three standard components of the doctrine of Christian liberty, stated later most lucidly by Calvin, are as follows:

1. “that the consciences of believers, in seeking assurance of their justification before God, should rise above and advance beyond the law, forgetting all law righteousness.” (III.19.2)
2. “that consciences observe the law, not as if constrained by the necessity of the law, but that freed from the law’s yoke they willingly obey God’s will.” (III.19.4; also particularly well-put by Melanchthon: “freedom does not consist in this, that we do not observe the law, but that we will and desire spontaneously and from the heart what the law demands.”)
3. “regarding outward things that are of themselves ‘indifferent,’ we are not bound before God by any religious obligation preventing us from sometimes using them and other times not using them, indifferently.” (III.19.7)

It is critical that we understand the doctrine of adiaphora in this context if we are to understand its inner logic and guard against the misunderstandings that quickly took hold among both opponents and supporters of the Lutheran Reformation and were to plague all the reformations of the sixteenth century. 

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