27.7.08

IT'S LIKE I DON'T EVEN EXIST! Demophilus:

In short, purveyors of the Social Gospel and Roman Catholic (and other) social conservatives commit the same mistake. They move too quickly from from one realm to another, from the City of God to the City of Man. There is no dialectical tension between one sphere and the other for Bottum and Schori. Politics, then, becomes the collision of Unified Theories of Existence. The political genius of confessional Protestantism is that, perhaps in theory more than practice (but note I am criticizing Bottum and Schori at the level of theory!), this tended to not be the case. Luther's dialectical thinking, Calvin's differentiation of spheres, the Puritan delineation of different covenants pertaining to different forms and levels of human relationships -- these were theoretical, theological, and philosophical reasons to conceive of politics in a more narrow way, as something of its own realm. Put differently -- and this may need to become part of something I spell out more clearly in the future -- Protestantism at its best gives us cultural foundationalism but political non-foundationalism. That is what we've lost with the death of responsible, serious Protestantism. And I lament it.


And yet, if you were to ask me, good conservative evangelical protestant that I am, where I fell, I'd say: of course Luther and Calvin get it more or less right. We're all good moral realists, and there is truth. Before we enter into the world of politics, those govern our interactions with others--and those go on form the basis of our interaction with politics. When it comes to political contestation, policy, law--those are all, for lack of a better way of putting it, socially constructed, a nice manifestation of will in the world, and subject to the dueling passions within each person; the best we can hope for is coherence and marginal improvement. (And the two are hardly of a piece: politics requires sacrifices personal life does not, as Luther recognized.* Also, if you asked me about the worth of a social program enacted by my church as opposed to the state, you'd get two different answers, because two different sets of considerations would be operative.)

(Note: I didn't read the underlying Bottom article, which I looked at and thought 'man, that's long.' I blame Google.)


*For this reason, Walzer's "Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands" has a special resonance for Protestants, or should.

1 comment:

Jacob T. Levy said...

"Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands" has a special resonance for Protestants, or should.

Just so; but so does its opposite, Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience," which is an appeal to clean hands and to a highly [Dissenting-]Protestant conscience. Having separated spheres, the Protestant may decide to reject the City of Man altogether and choose quietism and faith.

I think that the phenomenon Demophilus describes isn't modern social conservatism-- it's post-Aquinas Catholicism (as well as, in some ways, Judaism), seeking synthesis and reconciliation between the claims of moral purity and those of worldly obligation.