Review: Does Christianity Offer a Public Ethic?

First Quarter 2003

A. James Reichley, in Faith in Politics (Brookings, 2002), has no doubts about the Christian God's liberality, and he concludes that the American founders were right: "republican government depends for its health on values that over the not-so-long run must come from religion."

J. Daryl Charles knows evangelicals believe in God, but their engagement in politics shows that they are really quite "absent from the great ethical debates of the day" due to their very limited knowledge of the "great moral tradition" of the West. His book, The Unformed Conscience of Evangelicalism (InterVarsity Press, 2002), is designed to help them overcome that ignorance.

Dennis P. Hollinger, like Charles, is concerned about the lack of ethical understanding among Christians. His academic book, Choosing the Good (Baker Books, 2002), addresses that lack. It systematically explores various types of moral reasoning, but does so without saying much about the political vocation. The reason, perhaps, is that in Hollinger's view "Law and public policy can never do what Christian ethics can do." What can Christian ethics do? "From the biblical texts of long ago, we find guidance and comfort in the midst of our own moral journeys."

One will certainly not get the impression from reading Paul Marshall's God and the Constitution (Rowman & Littlefield, 2002) that the biblical texts are from "long ago." To the contrary, Marshall reads the Bible as a living and illuminating source for understanding real politics today.

Kraynak, who is a political science professor at Colgate University, and Marshall, who is a senior fellow at Freedom House in Washington, D.C., are the most original and provocative. Kraynak argues that it is a mistake to do what Reichley and Charles do, namely, to assume that Christianity naturally supports liberal democracy. That is to "exaggerate the ethical and spiritual significance of liberal democracy and to ignore the dangers of democratic tyranny." Instead, Kraynak argues, Christians should go back to Augustine's distinction between the City of God and the city of this earth for the foundations of their approach to politics. From that standpoint, one will recognize that whereas liberalism and the Bible both seek to defend human dignity, "they define human dignity in different ways and draw different conclusions. Liberalism equates dignity with autonomy of personality and mastery of one's destiny—political ideas that are inherently tied to democratic human rights. By contrast, the Bible equates the dignity of human beings with their relations with God, especially in their original immortality and their capacity for holiness—spiritual notions that permit spiritual hierarchies as well as undemocratic and illiberal politics."

The "highest priority of religious believers" today, says Kraynak, "should be to restore the proper balance between the spiritual and political orders and to reestablish proper hierarchies in each order." Christianity prefers no particular form of government, "but it does have a distinctive view of politics that can be summarized in the phrase 'limited government under God' and that we can recognize today as a type of 'constitutionalism." Assessing political life from an Augustinian point of view, we may conclude, says Kraynak, "that Christianity is a transpolitical faith—an otherworldly religion—that is not tied to any particular form of government or social order as a matter of divine law; accordingly, it permits a variety of political regimes as long as they publicly acknowledge the sovereignty of God and strive to attain the limited ends of the temporal realm while facilitating or at least not hindering the spiritual life of Christian believers."

Marshall does not take for granted the marriage of Christianity and liberal democracy, nor does he reduce Christianity to fit Reichley's general category of "transcendental idealism," which, for Reichley, "solves the problem of balancing individual rights against social authority by rooting both in God's transcendent purpose...." But neither does Marshall stop at Augustine as he reaches back for the authentic basis of a Christian understanding of government and politics. To the contrary, Marshall goes to the Bible in some detail and with a feel for its all-encompassing historical narrative that encompasses us even today. From that biblical point of view, Marshall offers highly illuminating insights into contemporary political life.

"It may seem strange to begin a discussion of politics with Genesis," Marshall writes early in his book. "However, something like this is quite common in talking about government. This is because our views of politics, whoever we are, reflect our more basic beliefs, such as our view of what human beings are." Marshall, like Kraynak, takes seriously the fact that a Christian view of life begins with assumptions different from those of modern liberal humanism. At the same time, Marshall finds more in contemporary constitutional democracy and less in Kraynak's older hierarchical patterns that merit Christian conservation and development.

Marshall's Chapter 3, "The Beginning of Politics and justice," which engages the biblical story of Cain and God's merciful retribution toward him, is worth the price of the book. Marshall draws a clear picture of the retributive responsibility God gave governments without suggesting that the origin of government is altogether due to human sinfulness. From the biblical revelation about creation and the fall into sin, Marshall then moves forward with the story of God's redeeming work, which is as relevant to politics as it is to every other sphere of human life. In the course of the book, Marshall discusses abortion, education policy, and civil rights; religious freedom, church-state issues, and morality and politics; modern economics, debt relief for poor countries, and international relations, including the 'just war" tradition of moral reflection on the use of force.

Everything humans do in this age has the character of a response to God—a responsibility that is a calling, according to Marshall. "Our own response to our political circumstances," consequently, "is not itself the word of God, and should never be carved in stone. All programs for an ideal society must be treated skeptically," Marshall concludes. "From the Constantinian hope of a Christian Empire, to the utopian communes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the history of Christendom, and nearly every political view, is littered with failed political dreams. Politics does not provide easy, clear, and simple solutions. It simply means taking up our responsibility for what governments do."

One of the chief promptings one feels from reading Marshall, compared with the other texts under review, is that political life has its own distinctive and irreplaceable role in human affairs and demands a specific kind of response to God. It is not simply a subcategory of "ethics" or a question for religion. Politics and government should be about the just use of power in God's creation for the public well being of humans in society. "Justice relates to the world, to creation," says Marshall. "Being just requires giving something its right, its created place in the world."

Hollinger, Charles, Kraynak, and Marshall all give considerable attention to the biblical terms 'justice" and "righteousness," and the overall thrust of each book determines the way in which each author gives attention to these important biblical norms. Marshall and Kraynak both discuss idolatry in politics and both consider the meaning of human identity as the image of God. And both Charles and Marshall discuss the seeming ethical dilemma that Christians face when confronted with the charge that they should not "impose their morality on others."

Reichley, who was for years a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and is now senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of Georgetown University, both in Washington, D.C., is engaged in this book (of 400+ pages) in tracking the history of politics and religion in America. To do so he uses an elaborate typology of seven value systems, four religious and three secular. The book's chapters cover different periods—the founding and the First Amendment, then the periods from 1790 to 1963, from 1964 to 1985, and from 1986 to 2002. His conclusion, based on a fairly sharp division between the "religious" and the "secular" is that, from the standpoint of the public good, "the most important service that religious bodies offer to secular life in a free society is to nurture moral values that help humanize capitalism and give direction to democracy."

Charles is associate professor of religion and philosophy at Taylor University. His volume tries to show that the Pauline, Petrine, and discipleship models on display in the New Testament all confirm a "moral impulse" in humans that should drive evangelicals to drink deeply from the "great tradition" of natural law ethics that was "particularized in the Mosaic code." Charles is concerned with a "pathetic disregard for the law" among evangelicals and wants to recover among them the realization that "the law creates the moral atmosphere in which human beings understand—and exhibit—divine standards of ethical conduct."

Hollinger holds several posts, including that of college pastor, at Messiah College. His textbook moves from the foundations of Christian ethics through various ethical contexts to the process of making ethical decisions and applying Christian ethics to culture and society. His conclusion about justice is that it needs love, even as love needs justice. "While love tends to be personal and justice institutional, separating them into distinct spheres (Brunner) or setting them in tension (Niebuhr) is not only contrary to biblical teaching but also fails to appreciate their mutual reinforcement in the midst of historic situations."

A final word should be said here about another book that appeared in 2002 in the disguise of a journal issue. The Acton Institute's journal, Markets and Morality (vol. 5, no. 1), is actually the proceedings of a remarkable conference that was held in Grand Rapids, Michigan in 1998 on the occasion of the centennial of Abraham Kuyper's 1898 Stone Lectures at Princeton University. The conference title was "A Century of Christian Social Teaching: The Legacy of Leo XIII and Abraham Kuyper." The journal volume of 300+ pages offers some excellent essays by Peter S. Heslam, James Bratt, James C. Kennedy, Michael Novak, Nicholas Wolterstorff, William R. Luckey, Bob Goudzwaard, Craig M. Gay, Mark Noll, Maciej Zieba, Avery Cardinal Dulles, John Bolt, Sander Griffioen, David Koyzis, Johan van der Vyver, David W. Hall, George Harinck, and Charles Colson. For information about this volume, call 800-345-2286.

—The Editor