The politics of prudence in the city of man

Chapter two of Robert Kraynak’s Christian Faith and Modern Democracy has a lot going on in it, so I’m going to break it into two posts (for my post on chapter 1, see here).

In chapter 2, “The Illiberal and Undemocratic Christian Tradition,” Kraynak makes the case that it isn’t just a historical fluke that for most of its 2,000-year history Christianity hasn’t supported democracy. Rather, he contends, there is a consistent Christian political tradition which, at least in the pre-modern era, did not entail support for anything like modern notions of human rights and government by popular consent.

He begins, naturally enough, with the Bible. The Old Testament shows Israel as having several forms of government, but none that particularly resemble modern democracy. Some liberation theologians point to the Exodus story as a paradigmatic tale of political liberation, which it certainly is, but it’s liberation from Egyptian slavery into theocracy! Kraynak calls the form of government under Moses a “weakly ruled theocracy,” i.e. a fairly loose confederation of tribes under a theocratic head (Moses) whose powers are delegated to others (such as Aaron and Joshua). Later the Israelites are granted a king, but this seems to be a grudging concession on God’s part, possibly with the hope that they will reject the king and ultimately turn back to God’s direct rule. The Hebrew prophets are often invoked as authorities for the cause of social justice, but, as Kraynak notes, they are often as concerned with idolatry as with the oppression of the widow and the orphan, and seem to see the ideal polity as a kingdom under a messianic and Davidic ruler. (pp. 46-51)

In the New Testament things get murkier still. There is very little of an explicitly political nature, and what there is doesn’t seem to commend or condemn any particular set of political arrangements. It is significant that from the very beginning the NT church is not founded as a political entity like the nation of Israel; it exists from the get-go as a kind of diaspora community within other political entities.

The political philosophy, such as it is, that has been drawn from the NT usually relies on a few scattered statements: Christ’s (rather enigmatic) teaching distinguishing duties to God and duties to Caesar (e.g. Matt. 22:21), Paul’s admonition that Christians are to be subject to the ruling authorities and that those authorities exist to maintain order and punish evil doers (Rom. 13), and Peter’s similar teaching (1 Pet. 2:13-17).

These teachings have lead to the development of a tradition of Christian political theology that distinguishes between “The City of God” and the “City of Man” and holds the purpose of secular authority to be primarily that of maintaining a certain temporal order:

For much of its two-thousand-year history, Christianity derived its views on authority from the doctrine of the Two Cities, variously stated as the Two Kingdoms, Two Powers, Two Swords, or Two Realms. It was developed quite logically from the New Testament where Christ distinguished the duties to God from duties to Caesar and said that His kingship is not of this world. While setting God above Caesar, Jesus insisted that earthly kings hold legitimate power because God ordains or permits them to rule, implying political authority is divinely sanctioned and should be obeyed in its sphere. In the centuries after Christ, influential figures such as St. Ambrose, St. Augustine, and Pope Gelasisus elaborated the distinction into a formal doctrine of two realms, the spiritual and the temporal, both authorized and ordained by God for the relatively distinct ends of heavenly and earthly happiness. (pp. 73-74)

According to this tradition, the temporal authority was responsible primarily for securing three distinct goods: civil peace or “tranquility of order,” moral virtue or moral order, and Christian piety, “meaning the highest good of recognizing God as the source of all earthly authority and more specifically the promotion of Christian faith by defending orthodoxy and punishing heresy as the church defined them” (p. 88). The degree to which each of these goods can be secured will depend on circumstances, resulting in what Kraynak calls a “politics of prudence.” For obvious reasons, securing basic civil peace is the most fundamental duty of any temporal authority, and in many cases that will be the most that is possible.

Kraynak traces the development of this tradition in four pre-modern theologians: Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin. All of them maintained the distinction between the Two Cities and applied the requirements of the goods of temporal order to their specific circumstances. Augustine, for instance, was fairly pessimistic that the temporal order could do much more than secure civil peace, whereas Aquinas, living at the apex of Christendom, allowed for a greater role for civil authorities in pursuing the goods of moral order and the defense of the faith. Luther was even more radically pessimistic than Augustine, calling princes “God’s hangmen” and denying the state any role in promoting virtue or religion, while Calvin went to the other extreme in advocating the creation of a “theocratic welfare state.” But all these thinkers are unified in separating the temporal authority from the spiritual authority, and none advocated anything like modern liberal democracy.

The point is that this political tradition is not simply rooted in pre-modern prejudices or authoritarianism, but in a coherent theological vision:

[T]he foundational doctrines of the traditional view–the Two Cities, the hierarchy of being, the prudential approach to politics, the demand for moral and spiritual perfection as well as civil peace–capture something essential about teh Christian religion. They are doctrinal formulations of Christ’s distinction between the realms of God and Caesar, of Christ’s admonition that His kingdom is not of this world, of divine election adn spiritual perfectionism, and of the limits of justice in the imperfect world of politics that will not change fundamentally until Christ returns in glory at the Second Coming and inagurates a New Heaven and a New Earth. (p. 106)