Fighting for the Kingdom of Christ

Mornay’s Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos is nothing if not thorough, and alongside its complex arguments for the legitimacy of armed resistance to civil tyranny, it mounts a parallel case for the right of armed resistance to religious persecution.  While this may seem unsurprising at first, as religious persecution was the chief form of tyranny that prompted the writings of the Huguenot resistance theorists, this is actually quite a remarkable move.  For Mornay is of course not saying, as a modern might, that religious persecution constitutes a violation of one of a citizen’s core liberties, thus justifying forcible resistance in defence of liberty toward an authority that has overstepped its bounds.  Mornay is ahead of his time, but not that ahead.  Rather, what Mornay ends up arguing is that religion as such--the Church as such--is defensible by arms.  

Such a move, it would seem, throws a big wrench into the gears of a two kingdoms theory.  Most Reformation theorists, while happy to admit various kinds of civil oversight of and protection of religion, and earnest to develop justifications for resistance to rulers aiming to stamp out Protestantism, affirmed a sharp distinction between the coercion that could and should be wielded in protection of the civil kingdom, and the peacefulness and exclusive use of spiritual weapons that must operate in the spiritual kingdom.  Hence resistance theories always appealed to the need to defend the commonwealth--not the Church as such--against the depredations of rulers who were oppressing the true religion upon which, it was argued, the commonwealth depended.  The reason for this kind of two kingdoms distinction was straightforward--their whole goal was to refute any papist idea of the Church as an independent polity, a trans-national kingdom which might wield coercive power or on behalf of which coercive power should be mobilized. 

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A 400-year-old Warning against Wars of Intervention

Most of America’s wars during the past century have been justified on the basis that we were coming to the aid of oppressed peoples and liberating them, which, incidentally, is the same justification the Romans used for most of their imperial expansion.  The abuse of this justification has often led me to wonder whether such intervention is ever justified, and so I was intrigued to find the discussion of the question in Quaestio IV of the Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos.  Although he is actually about to argue in favor of foreign intervention on behalf of oppressed citizens, particularly Christians, Mornay begins by offering a very insightful caution: 

“And indeed there are many who have readily judged it to be lawful, once they have hoped to augment their own wealth by affording assistance.  For in this way the Romans, Alexander the Great, and many others frequently extended their frontiers on the pretext of repressing tyrants.  Not long ago we saw Henri II, king of France, waging war on Charles V under the pretence of delivering and defending the princes of the Empire, and Protestant ones at that; just as also Henry VIII, king of England, was ready to render assistance to the Protestants of Germany, in order to create trouble for Charles V.  But if there is danger to be feard, or little profit may be hoped for, then you will certainly hear most princes debating whether it is lawful or not.  And as the former concealed ambition or pursuit of gain under the cloak of piety, so the latter proclaimed the justice of their inactivity.”

It is this principle, of course, that explains why Kuwait was desperately oppressed enough to warrant a full-scale war, while Rwanda merited no intervention.

Secular Resistance Theorists?

Anyone who read this blog last summer probably feels that I owe David VanDrunen a break, after my exhaustive vivisection of his Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms.  Of course, to that I might reply that I have given him a break of several months, and as the crucial chapters of his book overlap with my Ph.D research so much, I find myself forced to continue to use him as a foil as I study the relationship of Scripture and “natural law” in late Reformation political theology.

In chapter four of his book, focusing on the use of natural law in the Reformed resistance theorists, VanDrunen sought to show that in the largest body of sixteenth-century Reformed political writings, it was natural law, rather than Scripture, that played the decisive role.  In the context of VanDrunen’s project as a whole, this claim serves to help undergird a narrative in which it was the use of natural law and two kingdoms doctrines in the Reformed tradition that helped open up a separate “secularized” civil sphere, insulated against the sacred concerns of the spiritual realm.  In other words, it was Reformed thinkers who helped create the notion of a political science that was for the first time not “political theology,” the notion of a state that existed to serve civil ends, not to foster religion.  

This narrative, of course, is hardly new with VanDrunen, even if his use of it to endorse a certain theological agenda is somewhat idiosyncratic.  A similar story was told by Quentin Skinner in his magisterial Foundations of Modern Political Thought, although Skinner was at pains to make the point that the contributions of the “Calvinist resistance theorists” were not uniquely “Calvinist” at all, but were in fact borrowed from the Lutherans or the Catholics.  The effect, however, was to develop, at least among the Huguenot resistance theorists, a general foundation of the people’s political rights against unjust political rule, a model of political justice and rights that did not depend on any theological agenda or program for church/state relations.  These theorists, believes Skinner, succeeded for the first time in isolating “political science” as an independent discipline that could leave theology on the sidelines; and of course, Skinner is very happy about this development. 

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