Based on greatly expanded knowledge about human being, individual and communal, even Christian churches which have passed through periods of excessive claims to authority have come around to acknowledge there are many realms of a complete and perfect human life which lie beyond their institutional understanding and authority. I’ve discussed this in various places in my writings—search my blog or download A More Exact Understanding of Human Being, for a discussion of this issue. Since I consider salvation to be a full and perfect human life (individual and communal) lived with God, I have concluded that the Body of Christ is more than the Christian Church, though it remains the central organ of that Body. The Body of Christ, as I see things, is more in the nature of a completed and perfect human civilization with the Christian Church as the central organ, but not a central organ which controls the rest of the Body.
The Body of Christ also has organs corresponding to the political and economic activities of men, the musical and literary activities, and so on; I would even propose that the activities which we know as the empirical exploration of this world and more (all of Creation, in my opinion) will continue in some completed and perfected form. We will be sharing God’s life and learning to participate as He continues as Creator and shaper of all and all of our knowledge-gathering pursuits, all of our most active pursuits, all of our empathetic and compassionate moments, will continue and will be perfected and completed as we learn to join the Almighty in His dynamic existence, His true life. Creation will not end with us magically joining God in some other realm of being; rather will this world be completed and perfected to be the fullness of Creation. Will we even expand beyond that so that we could share in the divine freedom which could have created a different Creation? Who knows?
My way of thinking would invalidate nearly all existing Western understandings of the relationships involving religious and political thought as well as the more concrete relationships involving religious and political institutions; this includes all of our inherited understandings: secularist or providentialist, Christian or non-Christian or anti-Christian. I don’t claim to know what the proper relationships and understandings are; my respect for God and His freedom as Creator, as well as my respect for the complexity and richness of Creation, leads me to believe that we have to discover those proper relationships and understandings by way of living our lives, sometimes experimenting with changes to our ways and sometimes being forced to take on changes. (The dual of secularist and providentialist will explained below in a discussion of a learned article about a learned book about the way the Founding Fathers probably intended to treat the problems of “church and state.”)
Narratives of those complex relationships remain valid under my way of thinking, those from the Bible or other historical or partly historical narratives including those from peoples different from us or societies different from ours. Not only the Bible and other religious works but the more serious sorts of novels remain valid, if valid in the first place—such as, for example, O E Rolvaag’s novels which tell of the weakening of Lutheran faith as the Scandinavian immigrants to the Dakotas made their peace with a country where Lincoln is a greater prophet than Isaiah and also a greater source of revelation than Jesus Christ.
In a recent essay which I published on this website, In a Complex World, the Community Must be Smart for the Individual to Be Smart, I claimed that much of our more profound and more demanding thinking takes place at the level of communities; in the case of a solitary thinker and writer such as myself, this might mean a conversation of sorts with thinkers over the centuries including a few living thinkers I’m not in direct contact with. If you manage to tear anyone out of his greater communities and force him to take on the role of some sort of pure individual, you will have a very vulnerable and manipulable creature, especially in recent decades when parents and other adults have allowed this to be done to their children.
Over the years, I’ve contacted serious thinkers about my thoughts, most of those contacts being made when my ideas were very primitive, to be sure. Those contacts sometimes resulted in some initial success but I’d soon find that nearly all of the best of these thinkers were actually scholars, speaking a bit unfairly—derivative thinkers wishing to restore a respect for Edmund Burke as they understood him or for some other thinker(s) they had studied in a disciplined (and usually highly constrained) way. A couple of those thinkers had no interest in me when they realized I felt driven to develop my own ideas—they just wanted pliant disciples to build up their reputations or to serve their journals or other organizations. The major exception was Stanley Hauerwas, the Episcopalian theologian, who appreciated the sort of effort I’m making though he was not fully sympathetic to my inclinations to what he perceived as “natural theology.” That’s actually a misunderstanding of what I was up to but it was the same misunderstanding I held in a less coherent form at that time—circa 2006-2008. And it was Hauerwas who gave me some bits of good advice, especially that I should have greater respect for metaphysics and especially for the work of Aquinas. (It was, in fact, my process of “making peace” with Aquinas which led to the maturing of my `empirical’ bias, that is, my respect for the freedom of God as Creator.)
The publisher Jon Stock of Wipf & Stock—upon the advice of Professor Hauerwas, also published two of my early books with early versions of my thought and those books flopped completely; the largely academic customers of Wipf & Stock weren’t at all interested.
I’ve been forced to strike out from an impoverished Christian base-camp to explore interesting and important realms of God’s Creation and my fellow-Christians aren’t much interested in my particular activities or, far more dangerously, aren’t much interested in those realms.
After entering the Catholic Church, I learned quickly but had to constantly re-learn that the members of that Church—including its ecclesiastical and intellectual leaders—have no interest whatsoever in Creation, that is, they have no interest as Christian thinkers. True it is that they have some shallow, modernist interest in the more colorful discoveries of science but such an interest is pagan, that is, it treats the universe as something shallow and transparent rather than as a complex and rich manifestation of certain thoughts of the Almighty.
When we split Universe from Creator, science from theology, we deny the greater unity which Christians must acknowledge. We are left with only a sort of loose, almost flabby, collaboration which is hardly even that on moral issues. “Is” has been split from “ought” and mathematical truths have been split from empirical facts.
All of this background is necessary because Creation is what it is and not something which can be `reconstructed’ in our minds by way of some simple human schemas or sets of axioms. I’ll move to a somewhat more focused discussion of the issue of religion vs science, God vs Creation. (Both uses of `vs’ are deceptive and ultimately wrong, as I pointed out above.)
So, I’ve denied that Christian churches have the competence or wisdom to rule over all the domains of human life and yet I’ve claimed that those domains are ultimately unified in a very deep sense. Political institutions have even less competence than religious hierarchies have over any significant range of human possibilities—governments can help make possible advances in prosperity, in literacy, in aesthetic quality, but mostly governments can do this—in traditional Anglo-American terms—by fulfilling their limited responsibilities to maintain a well-ordered society with the sorts of freedoms appropriate for good men and good women. I think similar comments can be made on the limited, though real, good which is possible through political clubs and political parties.
Most of the good in human life develops from the efforts of creative individuals, including those nearly invisible efforts which can take place over generations as farmers and metal-workers and physicists and medical doctors and supervisors of local public works departments learn to better and more efficiently take care of the needs of their clients, patients, taxpayers. The list of those who can be creative in the way of individuals or as members of communities can go on and on: philosophers and poets and novelists and musicians and architects and athletic coaches and all sorts of entrepreneurs, farmers and plumbers and parents.
One possible model for discussing all of this is the public square, a square into which Christians and Jews and skeptics or even atheists can step but their institutions cannot—though the individuals bring their communal human being along with their individual human being. Those men and women are also members of various sorts of communities, including political parties, clubs advocating forms of localisms or centralisms, informal groups pushing for social welfare programs, and so on.
The problem with this model is that it stopped working in many ways when men stopped being deeply Christians and deeply Jews; the only ones who still carry their beliefs and their particular forms of moral character into the public squares of the West are the skeptics and atheists. Even before there was outright hostility toward religious groups which refused to adopt the latest and most progressive beliefs, Christians seem to have quite willingly agreed to enter the public squares in an attitude of skepticism if not quite atheism.
What is to be done? Gerald J Russello has written an article, Country Before Faith, which discusses the viewpoint of Walter Berns, a political scientist and practicing Christian who probably pushed secularism too far, yet, I sympathize with his efforts though thinking he was, like too many unimaginative statesmen and generals, fighting the previous war. He was part of a classical liberal mindset which yet feared the Thirty Years’ War of 1618-1648 more than they feared the modern educational and entertainment systems which were already doing so much harm to the minds and moral characters of the youth and adults of the West, all to the benefit of the politicians and businessmen and cultural nabobs who wanted genial and pliable cattle. Perhaps it was a genuine fear of the bad behavior of many Christians which led to a willing bargain to adopt skepticism in the public square?
Russello tells us:
Among the most vexing problems Berns addressed over his long career was that of religion in the American polity. An Episcopalian of the old school, Berns thought religion important but something that, in James Madison-like fashion, must be kept under control for fear of causing “faction.” In 1963, writing in National Review on “School Prayer and Religious Warfare,” Berns chided the Supreme Court for delving into religious controversy when it did not have to do so.
A Roman pagan, bureaucrat or philosopher, from the early centuries after Christ would have supported Berns on this, which certainly doesn’t automatically mean the position is wrong. There is, in fact, a good deal of practical wisdom and an all-too-rare humility in such a position. It hits the target, though on the edge and a bit away from the bulls-eye.
In 1997, the sometimes feisty magazine, First Things, held a symposium on the state of the `public square’, where we all meet in our larger-scale political activities and economic activities. Some thought the American government had gone way too far in the program of secularization, even questioning the legitimacy of that government in light of the Christian traditions of the West. Russello tells us that:
[Berns’] reaction to the symposium is informative. The Supreme Court’s extension of its religious “logic” had created too many holes in the fabric of the polity. While other religious conservatives, myself included, rejoiced in the resistance to the “naked public square,” Berns lamented that it also meant the disintegration of a nation founded explicitly on the laws of Nature and Nature’s God, with religious freedom coming second to citizenship,
There is a big problem here. Why is a Christian scholar talking in terms of “Nature’s God”? It’s “God” and “the nature and natures created by God” and “the laws God enacted to regulate Creation”. I hope it was just philosophical shorthand, but it is the sort of talk which leads the children to believe the adults don’t fully believe in what they teach. To the extent that Berns was right, that the United States was “founded explicitly on the laws of Nature and Nature’s God, with religious freedom coming second to citizenship[,]” it was an ill-founding from the viewpoint of anyone who actually believes in the Creed and the Bible. The political systems of the Anglo-American regions, secularized and tolerant as they were, were founded in the context of a Christian civilization, but it’s certainly true that even some of the Founding Fathers, and many since, have thought to tame that Christian civilization to the needs of men more Enlightened, more recently to totally subjugate or even eliminate Christianity and other substantial religions.
A digression is necessary, one drawn from the ideas mentioned earlier and discussed in many of my essays as well as my book: A More Exact Understanding of Human Being. Human being is a complex entity with local manifestations in individuals and global manifestations in communities. The Bible itself teaches that salvation comes to us as members of communities (the People of Israel or the Christian Church). With the coming of what might be generally labeled, `liberalism’, and the strong tendency of first Protestants and then Catholics to adopt the radical individualism of that way of thought, men were taught they entered the public squares as individuals to do their public duties. At first, the general decay of the Christian West was mild enough that those individuals carried, perhaps, a strong version of their full faith in its communal form; then, they were like those who appear in the writings of Adam Smith—individuals of vague belief who were yet formed to the moral order of the Christian societies of their grandparents. More recently, men have been allowed to enter the public squares only if they agreed to pretend they had neither creedal beliefs nor an excessively strong attachment to the moral teachings of Christian societies or those which used to be Christian. Of course, there’s not a test before you go into the public square so much as there are rules which are understood; break the rules and you are about to be treated as a pariah or even to feel the lash of modern liberalism.
Russello sees this and concludes:
If [Berns] did not predict that a secularized Lockeanism could itself disrupt the constitutional balance that relied on a certain Christian understanding of self-government, he nevertheless defended that balance against the enemies of his time. May he rest in peace.
Berns hit the target, arguably a big one, but was far from the bulls-eye.
Russello seems strongly and honestly inclined toward the right sort of conservatism—one which respects but doesn’t blindly worship our traditions, but far too many such thinkers seem to know a lot about the trees and even large groves of trees but they no longer have that greater—“global”—understanding of Creation which is necessary for a true Christian worldview. Etienne Gilson said the Catholic intellectuals failed to answer the questions which had been raised in the Enlightenment as of 1800 or so—that is, they failed to produce a Christian understanding of Creation which encompassed both revealed truths and also the empirical knowledge which came from Newton and Euler and Columbus. There was no Christian organizations other than Catholic universities and houses of studies which were up to that task, and so Christendom as a whole began to show signs of psychosis, claiming to know the ultimate truths while being increasingly clueless about this world—including even human being. But there are degrees and Russello and other members of the “Russell Kirk” crowd, are at least a little bit less clueless than was Berns. In a strong sense, we’re all clueless, unless we isolate ourselves from the modern West.
Kirk and his followers had a different strategy, one more in line with the stereotypes of conservatives. They set up “permanent things” and turned to some sort of Platonism which gave us a set of truths knowable, in principle, to early men in their fullness. They essentially denied the greater dynamics which is so disturbing in modern science and history and other activities but was also present, though not continuously, in any time of great change. In the full sense, the “permanent things” so beloved by Kirk are still being revealed as God’s thoughts, manifested in Creation, are still showing themselves. Human being is becoming richer and more complex as human relationships and human knowledge of Creation deepen, become richer and more complex. When we participate in this process, we are being creative along with God—we’re not just observing an emergence of things already existing in some embryonic form.
Let me claim to be a meta-conservative against both the conservative tradition of Berns and that of Kirk. This is to say that self-proclaimed conservatives try to preserve traditional understandings of our last century’s understanding of the story God is telling, the story which is this world, and also the greater sort of story which is all of Creation while I try to follow along with God’s story-telling, respecting the past chapters and living in the present chapter and trying to anticipate future chapters. I seek to conserve for human understanding and human use not one stage of God’s story but rather His storytelling in all its dynamic confusion.
Let me move to another article, from the same website which published Russello’s article. This other article, Secularists vs. Providentialists, also deals with this issue of religion in the public squares. It was written by Richard Reinsch II who is a fellow at Liberty Fund. Reinsch is reviewing the book, The Rise and Decline of American Religious Freedom by Steven D Smith. Following Smith, Reinsch tells us:
Our legal mandarins have constructed a self-congratulatory narrative about their vindication of the First Amendment’s religion clauses. Supposedly, until the day in 1947 when the Supreme Court announced in the Everson v. Board of Education case that a “high and impregnable…wall of separation” must be maintained between church and state, religious entanglement prevailed throughout the land. Everson’s principle that government was to provide no aid to religion was subsequently re-grounded in the early 1960s prayer cases, Engel v. Vitale and Abington School District v. Schempp, which proclaimed that legislation must be neutral toward matters of religion and secular in its purpose. Other victories for “secular neutrality” followed. We now call this the standard version of American religious freedom. Some, apparently, don’t find it convincing.
I certainly don’t find this version desirable though I don’t claim enough knowledge of the history of this issue to be able to find this version convincing or not convincing in the fullest sense. What I, or other Christians find desirable, might not be what fits in with American beliefs and American practices. That is, I don’t assume the United States to have been so Christian as some do, and I often feel it was usually a Christian country only in a self-serving and self-righteous way.
Reinsch also tells us:
Smith begins with Augustan Rome, noting the confrontation that occurred between Christianity and polytheism. No less a figure than Edward Gibbon noted that Rome’s polytheism led it toward a tolerance and ease with varied religious practices that precluded the type of legally enforced religious conformity that would later mark European Christianity. Smith credits Gibbon’s limited point here, but he does so to illuminate what Gibbon misses about Christian belief and its contribution to religious freedom. Roman polytheism had not produced a principled case for religious tolerance: the devotions paid by Roman citizens to their chosen gods rarely caused sectarian strife, but as Smith shows, polytheistic toleration was merely pragmatic, and it could be and was dispensed with whenever religious practice posed a threat to state power.
While later Christian intolerance, particularly if allied with state power, could be vicious—an attempt to enforce an interior belief in the authority of divine revelation—Christianity developed superior rationales for religious freedom and political freedom alike. If interior belief is primary, then commitment to revelation must be freely given for it to be valid. That coerced belief was illegitimate was a concept taught by Lactantius, an advisor to Constantine. Smith examines this intellectual lineage to stress its evolution and continuity in Christian thought. Lactantius’s reflections are, in part, similar to John Locke’s case for religious toleration. Likewise, the idea that belief must be freely given is precisely Thomas Jefferson’s explicitly theological rationale for religious freedom in the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom.
I find this unconvincing if taken out of a limited context. The reason is the `mixed’ nature of human being: individual and communal. In fact, the communal nature of human being tells us, if we listen, that the liberal ideas of Locke, at least partly taught to Americans through Thomas Jefferson, are “coerced.” How can it be otherwise? Is American history taught to 14 year-olds who come to their duties as students already disciplined in the way of philosophers, already skeptical in the way of modern scientists or in the different but similar way of Medieval Scholastics brought up on the need to discover truth through debate? The problem is not that the State should be preferring specific religious dogmas but rather that the teaching of any view of history or of the nature of matter and time and space, will carry with it a viewpoint. Even when we deal with knowledge disciplined to formal standards, the book-publishers and educators will get around such elitism—many men and women of high general literacy skills have learned something of quantum mechanics from those bestsellers which teach it as a Zen koan but few there are who take on books teaching quantum mechanics by way of the mathematical formalisms which are the subject itself and not many more who will read a tightly reasoned metaphysics book on the subject. (Yes, I did say the precursor relationships which collapse to matter are the mathematical formalisms—we might eventually have better ways to speak but I know of no such better ways. This is an important concept for an understanding of of all concrete, thing-like forms of being. See two of my early blog essays, Einstein and Bohr’s debate on the meaning of reality and Quantum Mechanics and Moral Formation: Part 1 for short discussions of the primacy of relationships from the viewpoint of modern science and philosophy recognizing the discoveries of modern science and also—quite consistently—from the viewpoint of St John the Evangelist.
But there are few interested in a way of making good Christian sense of the world because even Christian leaders have learned from one of a few streams of thought about such issues as freedom or the role of religion in public life. How many high school students go on to explore the subjects, or many other subjects, from other viewpoints? Even if they become journalists or priests or teachers? What was taught to most when they were young will provide the limits of what they are willing to think, and perhaps of what they are capable of thinking.
So it is that the modern State defines freedom in its negative and positive forms in public schools and Catholic schools and Lutheran schools alike. Mostly, even in religious schools, history and related subjects will be taught to the standards of the State, of the Federal government in the United States. Anything taught by the families or communities of worship have to be fit inside the greater viewpoint they learned in public schools and maybe in reading newspapers or magazines or the websites of (mostly) mainstream organizations. Christian dogma becomes those weird ideas which don’t really fit into the general understanding you hold of reality. To reform a Marxist teaching to a more perfect truth: anything which is said is always said in the context of greater belief structures. Educators of the better sort have known this since the days of Plato or probably earlier.
The human mind, at least in some of its aspects, will be—so to speak—shaped by its greater understandings, however implicit, of reality. As our general understandings have become so many fairy-tales about how the United States is so exceptional, we end up with holes in our understanding. An hour each Sunday doesn’t generally do much to fill in the most important hole, largely because it is the greater part of the understanding of the world—but it isn’t there. Our minds are like unto a few upper levels in a building which is otherwise air; the very foundation is but an empty hole in the ground. By eliminating our particular Christian understandings, we Americans have left ourselves and our children vulnerable to whatever promises to fill in those empty spaces and, in some cases, to ease the pain of that emptiness. And so we absorb good stuff and bad stuff but can’t make sense of any of it, not the leftist but admirable and humane viewpoint of a Capra nor the fairly straightforward (and far from totally wrong) viewpoint of a mainstream public school history text nor, most certainly, the nihilistic viewpoint falsely read out of Nietzsche’s books by many under-educated teenagers and far too many of those who are legally adults.
Yet, I find Reinsch’s claims (or his exposition of Smith’s claims) to be convincing, even profoundly wise and also pragmatically wise—at least from the viewpoint of one who thinks we find truth partly by experimenting with our thoughts and feelings and ways of life. I find Smith’s claims, as discussed by Reinsch, to be quite convincing in this way when Reinsch tells us:
The significance for law and religion, writes Smith, is that our country has been in a great conversation throughout its history about the interplay between these two subjects. Squaring off from the beginning have been the “providentialists” and the “secularists.” Secularists have advocated the near total separation of religion and government, while providentialists have said that public acknowledgment of God by the state is warranted. Both groups have had their “eminent representatives: Jefferson and Madison (and, a bit later, Andrew Jackson) on the secularist side; Washington and Adams (and later Lincoln) representing the providentialist position.” Until the mid-20th century, the meaning of our Constitution’s religion clauses was “the product of the ongoing competition and collaboration between the providentialist and secularist interpretations of the Republic.”
There is a sense in which the pilgrim Body of Christ guides its own evolution and development in this mortal realm, but there is no individual organ or other part of the Body which is in charge. Going along with such processes requires humility and wisdom, patience and openness to reality—qualities not always to be found in those who seek and gain power and wealth. Supposedly, Christians and others in the West have learned not to trust churchmen to have too much power over human communities as those churchmen are themselves human with all that the human condition entails. But I would argue there is nothing reasonable, let alone necessary, about the idea that governments, or other political institutions, should have general powers over human communities as opposed to well-defined powers to, for example, administer an ideally neutral and unbiased judiciary system. If I’m right, it would seem likely that governments will be brought under control as was the Roman Church hierarchy and the Scottish Calvinist synod and other abusive religious hierarchies.
Unlike some, I consider the political organs to be evolving and developing toward being part of the perfected and completed Body of Christ. Political activities, and many other human activities, will take place in Heaven; we will not spend time without end in Church choir stalls.
Unlike some, I believe that the political organs should have far lesser powers than they have in this year of 2015.
No one organ should regulate its own behavior or that of other organs.
And, yet, each organ of the Body must regulate its own behavior and that of other organs and even of the entire Body.
The Body of Christ is developing and evolving in a world of self-organizing and self-regulating processes. Our ways of speaking don’t suffice to describe such processes; even the formal mathematics is yet under development.
I recommend we accept reality: “Ye gads, what other choice do we have,” to slightly paraphrase a comment of Thomas Carlyle. Reality is chaotic and complex, it is yet evolving and developing. In fact, biologists and anthropologists tell us the human race, as a collection of individuals and as a network of individuals and communities, is evolving and developing faster than ever.
As power and wealth grow, there is ever more temptation to take control, especially for those who seek power and wealth, and to control all of human society. Military conquerors and kings and other rulers have been this way as far back as we can trace. Popes and Protestant synods and elected representatives and appointed bureaucrats also tend to aggrandize their offices and sometimes their persons, sometimes to seemingly good purposes and sometimes to criminal purposes.
And so it is that, from an explicitly sacramental Christian viewpoint, I’ll endorse the position stated clearly by Reinsch and (I think) stated a little more weakly by Russello.
The position stated clearly is that we need a certain looseness and vagueness in our public squares, a bit of uncertainty as to whether we are a country of secularists or a country of providentialists and also a bit of uncertainty as to whether the political leaders and bureaucrats and judges or the religious leaders call the shots on matters of church and state relationships. This makes sense from the general viewpoint of human beings who should fear the corruption which comes with having power over others or the privations which come when others have power over us and it also makes sense from the viewpoint of any Christian who believes in the Body of Christ and is willing to view that Body in God’s terms as we can read them out of Creation.