Review: Mining the Reformation for Contemporary Public Theology

Third Quarter 2001

Two recent books speak of "public theology" in their subtitles. Both are concerned with contemporary life in the United States, yet both appeal to Reformation traditions—Lutheran and Calvinist—for a foundation on which to stand.

Robert Benne offers an updated Lutheran perspective in The Paradoxical Vision: A Public Theology for the Twenty-first Century (Fortress Press). John Bolt appeals to Calvinism in A Free Church, A Holy Nation: Abraham Kuyper's American Public Theology (Eerdmans). Benne admits that Lutherans constitute a very small percentage of the American citizenry, and Bolt knows full well that Kuyper was not an American. Yet both are convinced that they have what America needs if the bold republican experiment is to survive. Despite the parallel purposes of these books, however, they are very different.

Benne is a professor of religion at Roanoke College in Virginia. The Paradoxical Vision is an attempt to illuminate several of the contemporary changes taking place in American political life and to show how the "Lutheran difference" can make a difference. The most valuable part of the book is in the middle, where Benne articulates his paradoxical vision, details official Lutheran church statements, and then unfolds the arguments of Reinhold Niebuhr ("Christian realist"), Glenn Tinder ("hesitant radical"), and Richard John Neuhaus ("neoconservative"). This is a clearly written volume and anyone who wants to know more about American Lutherans and the Lutheran tradition will find it a most helpful introduction.

By "paradoxical vision" Benne means an outlook or attitude that can accept and work with "two statements that apparently contradict each other but are ultimately true." Christianity, particularly as interpreted by Luther, represents the strongest possible paradox, says Benne. The all-powerful Creator chooses to redeem the world through weakness. The Son of God goes to his death on a cross in order to save the world, and this "apparent ignominious defeat is in fact glorious victory." A "very specific event in time and space has universal and eternal significance." All of this is paradoxical.

Benne should expect challenge at several points. First, it is not altogether clear from the book whether Lutheranism generates a paradoxical public theology or whether a paradoxical attitude appeals to some Lutherans like Benne. In his discussion of the official Lutheran church statements, he is critical at points of their failure to be sufficiently paradoxical. And when he presents his paragons—Niebuhr, Tinder, and Neuhaus—he admits that the first two are not Lutherans and Neuhaus, a former Lutheran, is now Roman Catholic.

Second, Benne's chief aim is to contrast the paradoxical vision with the dominant American theological influence that he calls "Reformed" or "Calvinistic." The latter, he says has a "transformist vision" rather than a paradoxical one. And its main problem or error is that it leads to the belief that sinful humans can transform life in this world (particularly America) into the kingdom of God. This non-paradoxical belief leads to the idea of America as "a redeemer nation called to realize a new order for the ages." Americans, then, underestimate their own sinfulness, miss the radical character of God's grace, and expect that their own political efforts can bring in the kingdom. When some Americans, including leading mainline Protestants, became disenchanted with America because of its failures, they turned to Marxism and neo-Marxism to look for God's active power to bring the kingdom of justice to earth.

The difficulty with Benne's interpretation is that it confounds three quite different streams of influence. Calvinism is one of those streams, to be sure, and there can be no doubt that because of its seriousness about Christ's transforming power, it motivates believers to work transformatively in all arenas of life. But Calvin had as strong a doctrine of sin as did Luther and did not encourage the mistaken belief that redeemed sinners should try to bring God's kingdom to earth through their own efforts. The latter conviction—the second stream of influence—arose in the West precisely by way of the secularization and reduction of Christianity to a religion of humanism. Humans through the power of reason, science, and technology could now govern themselves and make the world into the kingdom they wanted. Enlightened reason—whether of the liberal or the Marxist variety—would displace God's revelation and transforming grace as the instrument of salvation. Finally, a third influence that arose from the combination of the first two in American politics is "new Israelitism" by which Americans identified the United States as God's chosen nation, liberated from the "Egypt" of Europe and given the promised land of this new country. These three streams of influence must be distinguished rather than lumped together as "the Reformed vision." The very picture Benne draws of liberal Protestants gradually secularizing the transformational vision into a this-worldly program of self-salvation is anathema to biblical Christianity, including Calvinism.

It is too bad that Benne does not do more in his own argument with the newer Lutheran insights of Gustaf Wingren and others whom he highlights briefly. Instead of simply pitting sin and law against grace and salvation, Wingren and others are exploring the biblical meaning of God's good and dynamic law for creation, which points to new ways for believers to practice love and justice in this world. This is the point at which Lutherans and Calvinists may find common ground for their fight against secularizing humanism, which overlooks sin and makes messianic claims for itself and for America.

Bolt's much larger volume covers ground that may surprise Kuyperians who have never thought comparatively about Kuyper in relation to Walter Rauschenbusch, Alexis de Tocqueville, Lord Acton, and others. Bolt, like Benne, however, fails to distinguish strongly enough the "civil religious" from the "Christian transformationalist" streams in American political thought. Consequently, Bolt does not emphasize enough Kuyper's criticism of humanism's secularizing influence, nor does Bolt criticize Kuyper's "new-Israelitish" nationalism sufficiently where the latter does seem to confound the two. In some respects, therefore, Bolt opens himself to Benne's criticism.

One of the strongest and novel things Bolt does is to highlight Kuyper's role as a "poetic" political leader. Kuyper rallied a large following for his political, educational, and ecclesiastical movements, using imaginative rhetoric befitting an inspirer and a motivator. Kuyper was a popular leader, not just an academic or "public theologian." Yet Bolt does not connect the poetic visionary with the great organizer.

Toward the end of his book, Bolt says that he believes Kuyper would approve the American statement titled "Evangelicals and Catholics Together (ECT)," written by Richard John Neuhaus and Charles Colson in the 1990s. The statement, says Bolt, "is a strikingly nonsectarian response to the sectarian conflict of America's culture wars." It takes sides "but it does so out of clear, articulated concern for the greater, public good." Kuyper's Protestants had cooperated with Catholics in The Netherlands, so Bolt thinks Kuyper would approve this cooperative ECT venture a century after his time. The difference that Bolt misses, however, is that Kuyper did not simply join with a few Catholics to publish a theological/ ethical statement. Kuyper organized a Christian (Protestant) political party that took sides against both Catholics and secularists. He organized a free university to stand against the secularizing universities. He helped organize distinctively Protestant schools. Only in the process of organizing these public efforts did Kuyper ask how Protestants and Catholics might cooperate in the struggle against secularism. Kuyper was indeed able to cooperate with Catholics and even liberals and socialists on occasion, but he did so on a strong, Reformed, anti-revolutionary basis of his own, not as a general "nonsectarian" movement against sectarianism. Moreover, his independent stance in politics was oriented toward reform of the state so that there would be equal proportional rights for all citizens—for all schools, all political parties, all churches, and all newspapers. Neuhaus and Colson and their fellow declaration-signers have come nowhere near the organizational boldness and thoroughness of Kuyper. Their declaration does not significantly challenge the existing churches, universities, or political parties from an alternate organizational standpoint.

In the end, Bolt implies too much by suggesting that the Dutchman Abraham Kuyper offered an American public theology. Kuyper's transformational, not paradoxical, vision exhibited power not primarily because Kuyper was a great orator—a poet on the stump. It had power because he was leading followers and encouraging leaders to respond in obedience to God in all areas of life by organizing action in ways that were appropriate to each sphere of a rapidly differentiating modern society. Kuyper is quite un-American in this regard. He relinquished the kind of civil-religious nationalism that would not be satisfied until Holland became a Christian nation once again. He was not afraid to admit that Christians were a minority and ought to accept that status even as they stepped boldly into the public arena to contend both for their own rights and for a new kind of pluralist political order that would give the same public rights to everyone.

Bolt presents a rich picture of Kuyper and his era, including Kuyper's visit to the United States in 1898. But unless one reads critically, with a knowledge of Kuyper's actual organizing strategy, one could come away from Bolt's book thinking that Kuyper was an American Tocqueville, Acton, Martin Luther King, Jr., Colson, or Neuhaus. That would be a mistaken picture of Kuyper who offered not so much a public theology as a way of organizing human responsibilities in all the different spheres of modern life. The flawed as well as the successful Kuyper held out no hope that Christians could bring God's kingdom to earth through politics. What he would say to conservative and neoconservative American Christians today, I believe, is that they ought to quit trying to save "nonsectarian," civil-religious America and work, instead, to exhibit obedience to God in Christ in every sphere of life. And if such work requires new organizations—new schools, new universities, and new political parties—then American Christians should not be satisfied with just giving speeches and publishing statements within the present institutional context. They should discipline and organize themselves for Christian obedience. Kuyper, it seems to me, was closer to calling for a holy church in many free nations around the world than he was to calling for a free church in a holy nation.

—The Editor