Professor Peterson – my good friend, Ben – develops a careful account of liberal fear of religion and religious discourse. The “liberalism of fear,” however, means that liberalism jettisons the very resources any society requires to be open and flourish. The irony is that because of the absolutism of Christianity’s moral precepts that it provides a firmer foundation for principled religious toleration than either secular-foundationalist or anti-foundationalist forms of liberalism.
Our agreement on this topic encompasses far more territory than any disagreement. Nonetheless, I think we do disagree, at least in focus and emphasis, regarding what the New Testament teaches about the permissible scope of civil authority over religious free exercise and religious establishment. To be sure, Ben asserts one perfectly admissible form of civil-ecclesiastical accommodation. I would suggest, however, that the Bible admits a broader set of accommodations than what I take Ben to identify in his essay (and in his chapter more broadly in the Civitas book).
Ben and I have discussed the area of our agreement and our disagreement on this point over the years. In reflection of his own generosity of spirit, Ben invited me to comment to his essay.
Drawing on Judith Shklar’s language of a “liberalism of fear,” Ben criticizes traditional forms of liberalism for loading the deck against Christianity (and religion more generally). Based on an argument from a high degree of risk aversion, the “liberalism of fear” leads to liberalism’s opposition to any religious involvement in public discourse and public policy. The gamble is too risky, liberals assert. But the gamble, Ben suggests, is not what liberals make of it. Rather, liberals have loaded the argumentative dice to roll against Christianity.
Liberal arguments are well-known, if not actually trite by this point. Ben quotes John Rawls, the liberal political philosopher par excellence whose 1971 book A Theory of Justice set the agenda for political theory for the last generation. Rawls asserts, “The most intractable struggles, political liberalism assumes, are confessedly for the sake of the highest things for religion, for philosophical views of the world, and for different moral conceptions of the good.”
This is little more than a highfalutin version of the centuries-old “religious wars” objection to religion in politics. Albeit one expanded to include absolutist secular ideologies such as Marxism and fascism – indeed, to sweep any commitment to a moral conception of the good – into this stock condemnation of a commitment to any form of moral objectivity whether religious or secular.
For liberals, interjecting any form of true belief into politics is fraught with danger. Ben quotes Rawls with the critical, if standard, assertion, “A continuing shared understanding on one comprehensive religious, philosophical, or moral doctrine can be maintained only by the oppressive use of state power.”
To this Ben responds with three arguments: First, by forbidding religious argument in public discourse liberals themselves indulge the very same oppression they condemn in others. Because they consider policy views based on foundationalist premises to be illegitimate, liberals would have the state exclude Christians and other religionists and ideologues from asserting their distinctive foundationalist views in public discourse.
Even Rawls recognized this problem with his form of liberalism, and spent the next twenty years trying to square the liberal circle, the results of which he published in his 1993 book, Political Liberalism. (Professor Dave Reiter also discusses related arguments in his chapter of the Civitas book.)
Secondly, and more significantly, Ben argues that liberals have stacked the deck against religion by their one-sided obsession with foundationalist injustice. In reply, Ben makes the obvious point – obvious, it seems, to everyone but liberals – that people who lack moral principles can, and do, act as cruelly, perhaps even more cruelly, as people committed to foundationalist moral principles.
This cruelty extends from the casual cruelty of the street thug, who is a true nihilist (even if not knowing the word means), all the way to national leaders and followers whose effective nihilism allows them to indulge a taste for violence and the will-to-power without moral scruple. Indeed, there is arguably a hybrid category in which nihilists pursue their cruelty under presence of foundationalist premises. That is, nihilists who exploit religion or other foundationalist commitments as a cover for their nihilist cruelty.
Third, Ben then argues that Christianity and its moral absolutism actually provides a foundation for the religious tolerance that liberalism values but is unable to justify for itself. (Gary Young and I advance related arguments in our chapters in the Civitas volume.)
The argument draws from the very heart of the Gospel, that just as God loves – and died for – those estranged and alienated from him, Christians who are re-made in his image in Christ are to do the same (Ro 5.10, Mt 5.44-45). This is reflected in the Old Testament, not only in the instruction to “love your neighbor as yourself” (Lev 19.18) but in the injunction to “love [the stranger] as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Lev 19.34). So, too, at the very root of God’s call to Abraham, in a passage that Paul terms “the gospel” itself (Gal 3.8), God tells Abram that, in his call to him, God will in fact bless the very nations he had just judged in the previous chapters at Babel (Gen 12.3, cf., Gen 11.7-9, 10.5, 20, 31-32).
While Ben and I agree on these basics, it is at this point that I think we disagree in application or emphasis. I think that the Scriptures admit a broader scope for Biblically permissible institutional relationships between church and state than Ben’s suggests they do. To be sure, the set of Biblically permissible institutional relationships includes the relationship than Ben describes, but I suspect the scope of permissible church-state relationships extends beyond the boundaries Ben identifies in the Scriptures.
For example, Ben argues that “the idea that the civil magistrate or a church official should execute a person for blasphemy, heresy, or apostasy in relation to the new covenant established by Christ has no direct root in the New Testament.”
Now, first, I might chide Ben for a little for the tendentiousness of the bit about execution. I read Ben’s argument to apply to any civil punishment in general rather than to be one limited to the death penalty. Even in the Old Testament execution was a maximal penalty (see, e.g., Dt 25.2). And as I have discussed elsewhere, because of the sacrificial/sacramental aspect of the death penalty in the Mosaic Covenant, Christ’s death fundamentally alters the relationship of the faithful in the New Covenant to the death penalty there.
The claim that there is “no direct root” in the New Testament for civil government to share concurrent jurisdiction with the church over moral and spiritual matters – appropriately calibrated as I argue below – strikes me as a crabbed reading of the New Testament. In contrast, I would suggest that the role both Paul and Peter identify for the civil magistrate to promote the “good” in Romans 13.4 and in 1 Peter 2.14 extends beyond materialistic understandings of the “good” to include moral and spiritual dimensions as well.
Before developing my claim I should probably make my own position clear: I think the church can and has flourished under widely varied types of alignments with civil government, and widely varied forms of shared jurisdiction over some moral and spiritual matters. These various alignments extend from civil authorities being overtly hostile toward the church and Christians, to different levels of official indifference, to varied forms of civil protection and encouragement.
It merits noting, as Ben points out, and as I argue as well in the Civitas volume, that the church’s authority over moral and spiritual matters is in fact inherently greater than state authority.
It is an irony that modern Christians sometimes behave as though an assertion of civil power is more real than an assertion of ecclesial power. Yet whatever power the state asserts, its authority pales in comparison to ecclesial authority. After all, Jesus instructs his disciples not to fear him who has power only to kill the body but is unable to kill the soul, rather “fear him who is able to destroy both body and soul in hell” (Mt 10.28).
To be sure, many Christians today (and yesterday!) seem to prefer the church to conform to an insipid and emasculated ideal form, that is, their ideal form of the church is nothing more than a voluntary club of like-minded religious folk.
And if that ideal is in fact true, then civil government does have all the real power.
But that’s not what Jesus or the apostles tell us. Civil authority is at best a pale reflection of spiritual authority (Jn 19.11, Mt 26.53). Jesus gives the keys of the kingdom to his disciples (Mt 16.19, 18.18, Jn 20.23), and we see its exercise preeminently in both ecclesial judgment and absolution (1 Co 5.4-5, 2 Co 2.6-7, 10, Acts 5.3-4).
I agree with Ben’s point that “the ultimate form of punishment seems to be withdrawal of fellowship” through excommunication. But to say that civil authority pales in reflection of ecclesial authority is not perforce to say that civil authority can have no power or purpose over moral or spiritual matters.
I would suggest the proposition that the New Testament straight-forwardly teaches that the civil magistrate can share some concurrent jurisdiction with the church over spiritual and moral matters in prudentially calibrated circumstances.
To start with the obvious, well-known passages by Paul and Peter inform us that the civil magistrate is a servant of God “for good” (Romans 13.4, cf., 1 Peter 2.14).
The Greek word for “good” that Paul employs (and Peter employs in cognate form) is agathos. It certainly includes one’s material good, but also includes moral and spiritual good (see generally Lk 1.53, 6.45, 12.18, 16.25, 23.50, Jn 5.29, Acts 9.36, Ro 7.12, 15.2, 2 Co 5.10, Gal 6.6, Eph 2.10, etc.).
So, too, these passages teach that the civil magistrate responds to those who “practice evil” (Ro 13.4, cf., 1 Peter 2.14). The word for “evil” – kakos in Romans, the cognate, kakopoios in Peter – includes not only wrongs against people, but moral and spiritual wrongs against God as well (see, e.g., Mk 7.21, Ro 7.21, Jas 1.13, etc.).
Indeed, the broader context of Paul’s argument in Romans suggests the same. Paul’s argument in Romans 13 is a continuation of the discussion Paul begins at the end of Romans 12.
To wit, at the end of Romans 12, Paul (following Jesus) flatly prohibits individual vengeance-taking. “Never take your own revenge, beloved” (Ro 12.19). Paul tells us the reason, “Leave room for the wrath of God, for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay’ says the Lord.”
If we stop reading at the chapter division we might conclude Paul speaks only of God settling accounts on the Last Day. But Paul’s discussion of God’s vengeance continues into Romans 13. God’s vengeance does not always wait until the last day. Rather, the civil magistrate temporalizes God’s wrath, bringing (some of) it forward from the Age to Come into the here and now.
God’s vengeance is always a sobering phenomenon. But as applied in the here and now, the temporalization of God’s wrath is not necessarily a bad thing. God’s temporal vengeance can be a redemptive vengeance.
Recall in other contexts that Paul points out that “when we are judged, we are disciplined by the Lord so that we will not be condemned along with the world” (Ro 11.32, emphasis added; see also, Heb 12.9-10).
God’s temporal judgment – through the civil magistrate, through the church, through parents and others – can orient us to the eternal. During my years in prison ministry I often heard prisoners own that God used their conviction and imprisonment to shake them loose from their old lives and lead them to Christ. Another example: often overlooked in Sister Prejean’s ostensibly anti-death penalty book (and movie and opera) Dead Man Walking is that it is the imminency of death that prompts Matthew Poncelet finally to confess to the sin of murder, a confession that in the arc of the narrative is the pivotal admission that ultimately saves his soul.
As a result I would press against Ben’s claim that civil punishment for “blasphemy, heresy, or apostasy in relation to the new covenant established by Christ has no direct root in the New Testament” as too facile.
One might respond that the New Testament provides only a couple of short passages discussing this possibility; given the brevity of the discussion, I’m overreading the texts. Yet given the short time period in which the New Testament was written, and the newness of the church, as well as its cultural and political marginality, it doesn’t surprise me that the New Testament writers would focus on the immediate needs to the Kingdom of God and do not dwell on less immediate issues such as the possible scope of authority the civil authorities may have over moral and spiritual issues.
While brief or not, it seems to me that Paul and Peter employ language that easily encompasses – “directly roots” – civil authority in shared jurisdiction with ecclesial authority over moral and spiritual matters.
While historical experience need not provide authoritative examples of divine revelation, it is worth noting that in the U.S., state government “police powers” have been traditionally understood to provide states the broad “right to legislate in the interest of public health, the public safety, and the public morals” (Chief Justice Knowlton, Commonwealth v. Strauss, 191 Mass. 545, 550 (1906), emphasis added).
Now, lest my “let-a-thousand-flowers-bloom” attitude toward permissible forms of concurrent ecclesial-civil jurisdiction over moral and spiritual matters be misunderstood, all of this need be salted with a heavy dose of prudence.
Thus, for example, while Thomas Aquinas flatly asserts that “the purpose of human law is to lead men to virtue,” he nonetheless cabins the implications of his proposition with significant amounts of prudential guidance. For example, he writes in the Summa Theologica,
Now human law is framed for a number of human beings, the majority of whom are not perfect in virtue. Wherefore human laws do not forbid all vices, from which the virtuous abstain, but only the more grievous vices, from which it is possible for the majority to abstain; and chiefly those that are to the hurt of others, without the prohibition of which human society could not be maintained: thus human law prohibits murder, theft and such like (emphasis added).
And:
The purpose of human law is to lead men to virtue, not suddenly, but gradually. Wherefore it does not lay upon the multitude of imperfect men the burdens of those who are already virtuous, viz., that they should abstain from all evil. Otherwise these imperfect ones, being unable to bear such precepts, would break out into yet greater evils.
As I wrote at the start of this comment, the amount of agreement between Ben and me is significant; Ben’s discussion of the “liberalism of fear” in his essay and in the Civitas book is insightful and important. Perhaps I’m picking a bone with Ben’s analysis where one need not be picked. Nonetheless, given the age we live in, I think Christian political and legal theory need scrupulously to avoid genuflecting before liberal bromides that are not biblical. I’m not suggesting that Ben does so; our difference may be in terms of stress and focus. Nonetheless, I think it important to insist, in this day and age particularly, that the New Testament does provide a “direct root” for civil authority to seek to advance the common good in prudentially calibrated cases by sharing jurisdiction with the church over aspects of moral and spiritual life.
James R. Rogers is Associate Professor of Political Science at Texas A&M University and Contributing Editor at Law & Liberty. He holds a J.D. and a Ph.D., and teaches and publishes at the intersection of law, politics, and mathematical modeling. He has published articles in the American Journal of Political Science; the Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization; Public Choice; and in numerous other scholarly journals. He edited and contributed to the book Institutional Games and the Supreme Court and served as editor of the Journal of Theoretical Politics from 2006 through 2013. Rogers also chairs Theopolis’ s Civitas Group, and is a contributor and co-editor (with Peter Leithart) of Civitas’ s forthcoming volume, Hell Shall Not Prevail: Essays in Ecclesiocentric Postliberalism.
Professor Peterson – my good friend, Ben – develops a careful account of liberal fear of religion and religious discourse. The “liberalism of fear,” however, means that liberalism jettisons the very resources any society requires to be open and flourish. The irony is that because of the absolutism of Christianity’s moral precepts that it provides a firmer foundation for principled religious toleration than either secular-foundationalist or anti-foundationalist forms of liberalism.
Our agreement on this topic encompasses far more territory than any disagreement. Nonetheless, I think we do disagree, at least in focus and emphasis, regarding what the New Testament teaches about the permissible scope of civil authority over religious free exercise and religious establishment. To be sure, Ben asserts one perfectly admissible form of civil-ecclesiastical accommodation. I would suggest, however, that the Bible admits a broader set of accommodations than what I take Ben to identify in his essay (and in his chapter more broadly in the Civitas book).
Ben and I have discussed the area of our agreement and our disagreement on this point over the years. In reflection of his own generosity of spirit, Ben invited me to comment to his essay.
Drawing on Judith Shklar’s language of a “liberalism of fear,” Ben criticizes traditional forms of liberalism for loading the deck against Christianity (and religion more generally). Based on an argument from a high degree of risk aversion, the “liberalism of fear” leads to liberalism’s opposition to any religious involvement in public discourse and public policy. The gamble is too risky, liberals assert. But the gamble, Ben suggests, is not what liberals make of it. Rather, liberals have loaded the argumentative dice to roll against Christianity.
Liberal arguments are well-known, if not actually trite by this point. Ben quotes John Rawls, the liberal political philosopher par excellence whose 1971 book A Theory of Justice set the agenda for political theory for the last generation. Rawls asserts, “The most intractable struggles, political liberalism assumes, are confessedly for the sake of the highest things for religion, for philosophical views of the world, and for different moral conceptions of the good.”
This is little more than a highfalutin version of the centuries-old “religious wars” objection to religion in politics. Albeit one expanded to include absolutist secular ideologies such as Marxism and fascism – indeed, to sweep any commitment to a moral conception of the good – into this stock condemnation of a commitment to any form of moral objectivity whether religious or secular.
For liberals, interjecting any form of true belief into politics is fraught with danger. Ben quotes Rawls with the critical, if standard, assertion, “A continuing shared understanding on one comprehensive religious, philosophical, or moral doctrine can be maintained only by the oppressive use of state power.”
To this Ben responds with three arguments: First, by forbidding religious argument in public discourse liberals themselves indulge the very same oppression they condemn in others. Because they consider policy views based on foundationalist premises to be illegitimate, liberals would have the state exclude Christians and other religionists and ideologues from asserting their distinctive foundationalist views in public discourse.
Even Rawls recognized this problem with his form of liberalism, and spent the next twenty years trying to square the liberal circle, the results of which he published in his 1993 book, Political Liberalism. (Professor Dave Reiter also discusses related arguments in his chapter of the Civitas book.)
Secondly, and more significantly, Ben argues that liberals have stacked the deck against religion by their one-sided obsession with foundationalist injustice. In reply, Ben makes the obvious point – obvious, it seems, to everyone but liberals – that people who lack moral principles can, and do, act as cruelly, perhaps even more cruelly, as people committed to foundationalist moral principles.
This cruelty extends from the casual cruelty of the street thug, who is a true nihilist (even if not knowing the word means), all the way to national leaders and followers whose effective nihilism allows them to indulge a taste for violence and the will-to-power without moral scruple. Indeed, there is arguably a hybrid category in which nihilists pursue their cruelty under presence of foundationalist premises. That is, nihilists who exploit religion or other foundationalist commitments as a cover for their nihilist cruelty.
Third, Ben then argues that Christianity and its moral absolutism actually provides a foundation for the religious tolerance that liberalism values but is unable to justify for itself. (Gary Young and I advance related arguments in our chapters in the Civitas volume.)
The argument draws from the very heart of the Gospel, that just as God loves – and died for – those estranged and alienated from him, Christians who are re-made in his image in Christ are to do the same (Ro 5.10, Mt 5.44-45). This is reflected in the Old Testament, not only in the instruction to “love your neighbor as yourself” (Lev 19.18) but in the injunction to “love [the stranger] as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Lev 19.34). So, too, at the very root of God’s call to Abraham, in a passage that Paul terms “the gospel” itself (Gal 3.8), God tells Abram that, in his call to him, God will in fact bless the very nations he had just judged in the previous chapters at Babel (Gen 12.3, cf., Gen 11.7-9, 10.5, 20, 31-32).
While Ben and I agree on these basics, it is at this point that I think we disagree in application or emphasis. I think that the Scriptures admit a broader scope for Biblically permissible institutional relationships between church and state than Ben’s suggests they do. To be sure, the set of Biblically permissible institutional relationships includes the relationship than Ben describes, but I suspect the scope of permissible church-state relationships extends beyond the boundaries Ben identifies in the Scriptures.
For example, Ben argues that “the idea that the civil magistrate or a church official should execute a person for blasphemy, heresy, or apostasy in relation to the new covenant established by Christ has no direct root in the New Testament.”
Now, first, I might chide Ben for a little for the tendentiousness of the bit about execution. I read Ben’s argument to apply to any civil punishment in general rather than to be one limited to the death penalty. Even in the Old Testament execution was a maximal penalty (see, e.g., Dt 25.2). And as I have discussed elsewhere, because of the sacrificial/sacramental aspect of the death penalty in the Mosaic Covenant, Christ’s death fundamentally alters the relationship of the faithful in the New Covenant to the death penalty there.
The claim that there is “no direct root” in the New Testament for civil government to share concurrent jurisdiction with the church over moral and spiritual matters – appropriately calibrated as I argue below – strikes me as a crabbed reading of the New Testament. In contrast, I would suggest that the role both Paul and Peter identify for the civil magistrate to promote the “good” in Romans 13.4 and in 1 Peter 2.14 extends beyond materialistic understandings of the “good” to include moral and spiritual dimensions as well.
Before developing my claim I should probably make my own position clear: I think the church can and has flourished under widely varied types of alignments with civil government, and widely varied forms of shared jurisdiction over some moral and spiritual matters. These various alignments extend from civil authorities being overtly hostile toward the church and Christians, to different levels of official indifference, to varied forms of civil protection and encouragement.
It merits noting, as Ben points out, and as I argue as well in the Civitas volume, that the church’s authority over moral and spiritual matters is in fact inherently greater than state authority.
It is an irony that modern Christians sometimes behave as though an assertion of civil power is more real than an assertion of ecclesial power. Yet whatever power the state asserts, its authority pales in comparison to ecclesial authority. After all, Jesus instructs his disciples not to fear him who has power only to kill the body but is unable to kill the soul, rather “fear him who is able to destroy both body and soul in hell” (Mt 10.28).
To be sure, many Christians today (and yesterday!) seem to prefer the church to conform to an insipid and emasculated ideal form, that is, their ideal form of the church is nothing more than a voluntary club of like-minded religious folk.
And if that ideal is in fact true, then civil government does have all the real power.
But that’s not what Jesus or the apostles tell us. Civil authority is at best a pale reflection of spiritual authority (Jn 19.11, Mt 26.53). Jesus gives the keys of the kingdom to his disciples (Mt 16.19, 18.18, Jn 20.23), and we see its exercise preeminently in both ecclesial judgment and absolution (1 Co 5.4-5, 2 Co 2.6-7, 10, Acts 5.3-4).
I agree with Ben’s point that “the ultimate form of punishment seems to be withdrawal of fellowship” through excommunication. But to say that civil authority pales in reflection of ecclesial authority is not perforce to say that civil authority can have no power or purpose over moral or spiritual matters.
I would suggest the proposition that the New Testament straight-forwardly teaches that the civil magistrate can share some concurrent jurisdiction with the church over spiritual and moral matters in prudentially calibrated circumstances.
To start with the obvious, well-known passages by Paul and Peter inform us that the civil magistrate is a servant of God “for good” (Romans 13.4, cf., 1 Peter 2.14).
The Greek word for “good” that Paul employs (and Peter employs in cognate form) is agathos. It certainly includes one’s material good, but also includes moral and spiritual good (see generally Lk 1.53, 6.45, 12.18, 16.25, 23.50, Jn 5.29, Acts 9.36, Ro 7.12, 15.2, 2 Co 5.10, Gal 6.6, Eph 2.10, etc.).
So, too, these passages teach that the civil magistrate responds to those who “practice evil” (Ro 13.4, cf., 1 Peter 2.14). The word for “evil” – kakos in Romans, the cognate, kakopoios in Peter – includes not only wrongs against people, but moral and spiritual wrongs against God as well (see, e.g., Mk 7.21, Ro 7.21, Jas 1.13, etc.).
Indeed, the broader context of Paul’s argument in Romans suggests the same. Paul’s argument in Romans 13 is a continuation of the discussion Paul begins at the end of Romans 12.
To wit, at the end of Romans 12, Paul (following Jesus) flatly prohibits individual vengeance-taking. “Never take your own revenge, beloved” (Ro 12.19). Paul tells us the reason, “Leave room for the wrath of God, for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay’ says the Lord.”
If we stop reading at the chapter division we might conclude Paul speaks only of God settling accounts on the Last Day. But Paul’s discussion of God’s vengeance continues into Romans 13. God’s vengeance does not always wait until the last day. Rather, the civil magistrate temporalizes God’s wrath, bringing (some of) it forward from the Age to Come into the here and now.
God’s vengeance is always a sobering phenomenon. But as applied in the here and now, the temporalization of God’s wrath is not necessarily a bad thing. God’s temporal vengeance can be a redemptive vengeance.
Recall in other contexts that Paul points out that “when we are judged, we are disciplined by the Lord so that we will not be condemned along with the world” (Ro 11.32, emphasis added; see also, Heb 12.9-10).
God’s temporal judgment – through the civil magistrate, through the church, through parents and others – can orient us to the eternal. During my years in prison ministry I often heard prisoners own that God used their conviction and imprisonment to shake them loose from their old lives and lead them to Christ. Another example: often overlooked in Sister Prejean’s ostensibly anti-death penalty book (and movie and opera) Dead Man Walking is that it is the imminency of death that prompts Matthew Poncelet finally to confess to the sin of murder, a confession that in the arc of the narrative is the pivotal admission that ultimately saves his soul.
As a result I would press against Ben’s claim that civil punishment for “blasphemy, heresy, or apostasy in relation to the new covenant established by Christ has no direct root in the New Testament” as too facile.
One might respond that the New Testament provides only a couple of short passages discussing this possibility; given the brevity of the discussion, I’m overreading the texts. Yet given the short time period in which the New Testament was written, and the newness of the church, as well as its cultural and political marginality, it doesn’t surprise me that the New Testament writers would focus on the immediate needs to the Kingdom of God and do not dwell on less immediate issues such as the possible scope of authority the civil authorities may have over moral and spiritual issues.
While brief or not, it seems to me that Paul and Peter employ language that easily encompasses – “directly roots” – civil authority in shared jurisdiction with ecclesial authority over moral and spiritual matters.
While historical experience need not provide authoritative examples of divine revelation, it is worth noting that in the U.S., state government “police powers” have been traditionally understood to provide states the broad “right to legislate in the interest of public health, the public safety, and the public morals” (Chief Justice Knowlton, Commonwealth v. Strauss, 191 Mass. 545, 550 (1906), emphasis added).
Now, lest my “let-a-thousand-flowers-bloom” attitude toward permissible forms of concurrent ecclesial-civil jurisdiction over moral and spiritual matters be misunderstood, all of this need be salted with a heavy dose of prudence.
Thus, for example, while Thomas Aquinas flatly asserts that “the purpose of human law is to lead men to virtue,” he nonetheless cabins the implications of his proposition with significant amounts of prudential guidance. For example, he writes in the Summa Theologica,
Now human law is framed for a number of human beings, the majority of whom are not perfect in virtue. Wherefore human laws do not forbid all vices, from which the virtuous abstain, but only the more grievous vices, from which it is possible for the majority to abstain; and chiefly those that are to the hurt of others, without the prohibition of which human society could not be maintained: thus human law prohibits murder, theft and such like (emphasis added).
And:
The purpose of human law is to lead men to virtue, not suddenly, but gradually. Wherefore it does not lay upon the multitude of imperfect men the burdens of those who are already virtuous, viz., that they should abstain from all evil. Otherwise these imperfect ones, being unable to bear such precepts, would break out into yet greater evils.
As I wrote at the start of this comment, the amount of agreement between Ben and me is significant; Ben’s discussion of the “liberalism of fear” in his essay and in the Civitas book is insightful and important. Perhaps I’m picking a bone with Ben’s analysis where one need not be picked. Nonetheless, given the age we live in, I think Christian political and legal theory need scrupulously to avoid genuflecting before liberal bromides that are not biblical. I’m not suggesting that Ben does so; our difference may be in terms of stress and focus. Nonetheless, I think it important to insist, in this day and age particularly, that the New Testament does provide a “direct root” for civil authority to seek to advance the common good in prudentially calibrated cases by sharing jurisdiction with the church over aspects of moral and spiritual life.
James R. Rogers is Associate Professor of Political Science at Texas A&M University and Contributing Editor at Law & Liberty. He holds a J.D. and a Ph.D., and teaches and publishes at the intersection of law, politics, and mathematical modeling. He has published articles in the American Journal of Political Science; the Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization; Public Choice; and in numerous other scholarly journals. He edited and contributed to the book Institutional Games and the Supreme Court and served as editor of the Journal of Theoretical Politics from 2006 through 2013. Rogers also chairs Theopolis’ s Civitas Group, and is a contributor and co-editor (with Peter Leithart) of Civitas’ s forthcoming volume, Hell Shall Not Prevail: Essays in Ecclesiocentric Postliberalism.
-->