"Rational Christianity": A Contribution of Medieval Political Thought (via 3rdWAVElands)

In honor of the Republican debate tonight and all the Tea Party talk of the founding of our Nation and mentions of God I thought I would re-post this on the Christian roots of the Declaration of Independence. This was originally written here at American Creation andI  have begun to re-post my stuff from here on my business blog 3rdWAVElands where the historical ideas discussed here are applied to modern issues. Click here to read the post and join the discussion.

Romans 13 Re-post at 3rdWAVELANDS

Jon Rowe did a few posts recently that started up the discussion about Romans 13, interposition, resistance theory, 1 Peter 2, and what is part of Christianity is dissenters. This has coincided with my wanting to re-post all my American Creation stuff on my blog site. It used to be a Real Estate site but is now a site where all aspects of society are discussed. One of the main themes is how the modern world was launched, what ideas helped do it, and what ideas we need to examine as we move forward into another era of History. Some is germane to this blog some is not but please come join my partner and best friend Tracie and I as we sift through issues that affect our world and the History needed to put them in the right context.

With that little commerical done, here is a link to a re-post of my first response to Dr. Greg Frazer on Romans 13 for those who are new to this blog and would like to partake.

Rationalism, Passions, and the Cloak of Intellectualism Farce

I was watching the video that Jon Rowe linked below about George Washington and reading his post about David Barton a few minutes ago. Both inspired a comment that I think, once again, I should share on the main page:

I think all on this site agree that Barton has outlived his usefulness in the "Christian Nation" discussion. With that said, I have to agree with Tom that most of what he, and others that work with him, have written is correct and at worst debatable. He has harmed his own cause by clinging on to irrelevant nonsense that has been soundly refuted. It seems that he is in a pissing contest with his critics and we all know that no one wins a pissing contest.

BUTTTTTTTT

I will have to continue to point out that the pot is calling the kettle black in that a group of supposed rationalists seem to be just as blinded by their passions and have turned from truly intellectual discussion and resorted to spewing venom and activism as well. Ben states that Barton is an activist not a Historian. I agree. However, I would add that the rationalist crowd are activists not intellectuals. In other words, they need to stop cloaking themselves in the intellectual garb that they feel allows them to dismiss the "idiot" Christians.

For the most part they take on the chaff of Barton's argument and ignore the wheat. It is honestly pathetic. My hope is that they live up to what they claim to be and begin to tackle the wheat. That is to say at the very least. I will lose my sincere disappointment in otherwise brilliant people(not the rabble that worships them but really do not have a clue) when they tackle the best of the Christian World like Brian Tierney, not the low hanging fruit.

The anti-Barton movement needs to watch the video Jon posted on George Washington. He, and other founders, were very leery of men whose passions overruled their reason. It all starts with the man in the mirror and I know I have allowed my passions to override my reason at inappropriate times and have discredited myself in some ways as well. Here is to all of us committing to raise the level of discussion. That is if we really want to get to the bottom of this whole American Creation thing?

My Response to Jon Rowe and Dr. Hanley

Below is a comment I posted under Jon's post on the paper he and Dr. James Hanley co-authored. Below that is what started as a comment(with some editing since it is now going main page) but got so long I decided to just do a post in response. It is probably better I do so in that I got busy and did not respond to their comments in a timely manner.  As usual both ask great questions that deserve and answer so here is mine:


Jon stated:

"Islam is an Abrahamic religion. So I'd like to ask why if imago dei is key why Judaism, Islam, Mormonism, certain forms of Deism are not equally entitled to that claim which would make America more a theistic or Providential nation in a political sense. NOT a "Christian Nation." I think there is a good political-historical basis for SCOTUS' "ceremonial deism" doctrine. Though I agree it treats atheists and polytheists like outsiders which is something I am not in favor of."

Ever since I read the paper on the History of Islam that was presented at your other blog this summer, I have wondered a great deal as to if Islamic Theology places any importance on imago dei. That would be a good study. With that stated, even if they did, their view of it would be very different to the Christian view in that Muslims see the characteristics of God differently then Christians do.

It was actually what led to the split according to my somewhat limited historical readings on the topic. Nonetheless, it seems that they believed that the Christians and Jews had perverted the original message as given to Abraham.

As far as Judaism I am no expert in Ancient Hebrew philosophy or the Jewish religion but I think the split with Christianity has nothing to do with different views on Imago Dei.

Mormons and other supposed offshoots along with your second comment outlining what a "Christian" is seems to stray off the tracks in my view. You appear to deem it more important to look at individual founders or influential preachers and analyze what they personally believed and if it was different than the "orthodox" at the time. The goal seems to be label them "non-Christian" and then use that as evidence that because "key founders" strayed from the path America was not founded to be a "Christian Nation".

This is poor evidence to support the bold claim you and James make in the paper. Or I should say in the intro that was posted here because I have not had time to read the paper. But as Tom says above, We have discussed this enough that I am fairly sure I know your thesis and how you go about supporting it.

I maintain that the more important questions:

1. What ideas influenced the founding of America?

2. Where did these ideas come from?


are the accurate frame in which this discuss should take place.




James/Dr. Hanley stated:

"I concur with Jon's response. I would also add that from my considered perspective, the Declaration of Independence is irrelevant to the understanding of the Constitution. The two are entirely separate documents, created for entirely separate purposes, and the DofI has only the barest of influences on the Constitution (in fact many anti-federalists saw it as an abandonment of the ideals of the DofI, which is a bit of an over-reaction, but as contemporaries their view is significant).

Consequently, whatever influence imago dei might have had on the DofI does not necessarily translate into any meaning whatsoever for the meaning of the Constitution.

I'm not saying no argument along your lines is possible, but I see it has having two tough objections to overcome, the one explicated by Jon and the one I've presented here."

First, I want to say that I have really enjoyed our interactions at your other blog and at Ed's blog over the years. I have found you to be fair and accurate though at times we disagree. I would say the same about Tom. I hope that both you can see that about each other at some point. 

Second, I want to apologize for some of my behavior at Dispatches. I discredited myself as a rational thinker and Christian. It was a rough time in my life that I am just coming out of now. 

In short, I value your opinion and most certainly invite you to sift through any thoughts I would have on this topic and others we both seem to enjoy discussing.

As far as your comment, I think it is fair but in my view I think you are wrong.

I go back to Jack Goldstone's paper a while back at Cato. He broadened the discussion to what launched the Modern World and maintained that it was a climate of liberty that allowed room for innovation. He took it in the economic sense but I think it can just as easily be applied to political innovation as well.

Kind of ironic we were speaking about it here at AC long before Obama and business leaders made it a hot topic a few months back when it was the main idea of his SOTU address.

Nonetheless, I would most certainly state that ideals expressed in the DOI were the back bone of the form of government we chose. 

If one looks at the words of Aquinas and the DOI on the same topic the similarity is un-mistakable. This tells me that at least 500 or so years(at the very least in that these ideas go back a lot further than Aquinas) of Western History was heavily impacted by the Bible and man's belief that we are made in the image of God. All Christian philosophy and theology flows from that tree.

In fact, as discussed here in the past, this root concept is at the foundation of the golden rule in that we honor God by loving his image in ourselves and as we begin to understand who he is it becomes clear who we are. It is this realization that should help deter us from marring that image in another.

One can most certainly choose not to believe it. But one cannot deny the central impact that this idea had on Western Thought for centuries. A system of thought that made it around the world beginning when Columbus set sail.

A system of thought responsible for both great evil and great good depending who promulgated it.


Gladstone seems to point out only the evil and in my view unduly dismisses the role that Christian thought had creating a climate of liberty that helped to launch the modern world.

Here is the excerpt of his paper that jumped out to me and profoundly changed my life:

What I believe is most critical to insist upon is the degree to which Europe itself had to repudiate central elements of its own history and culture — the absolute authority of hereditary rulers, the prohibition of diverse religious beliefs in any one society, the elevation of the rights and needs of political and social status elites above those of ordinary inhabitants — in order to develop and implement the idea of society as a community of free individuals sovereign over a limited state. Yet this was necessary if the marriage of engineering culture and entrepreneurship was to survive and flourish, and produce the economic and technological miracles of the last two centuries.

The DOI was based on the idea of "free individuals sovereign" and the Constitution was an attempt at a "limited state".   I think your argument, as outlined above, puts the cart before the ox. 

The Origins of the Ideas That Positioned America to Launch the Modern World

In light of Jon's request for more posts, and my insane lack of time lately,  I decided to post this from my Real Estate blog where I write about innovation a great deal. My interest in this topic started here at American Creation when I first started posting on the origin of ideas that lead to America that can be seen in my post about Alvin Toffler's Third Wave and Jack Goldstone's posts on what launched modernity. The focus on this post is not modern political squabbles. It is to open up our discussions to the right historical frame. So please no political hand grenades. 

Here is the post:


Those of us who blog about innovation, entrepreneurship, and the power of great ideas have to be encouraged that this was the theme of a large part of The State of the Union speech last night.


Here is an excerpt from the speech with some thoughts of mine below the fold:

"The future is ours to win. But to get there, we can’t just stand still. As Robert Kennedy told us, “The future is not a gift. It is an achievement.” Sustaining the American Dream has never been about standing pat. It has required each generation to sacrifice, and struggle, and meet the demands of a new age.

And now it’s our turn. We know what it takes to compete for the jobs and industries of our time. We need to out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world. (Applause.) We have to make America the best place on Earth to do business. We need to take responsibility for our deficit and reform our government. That’s how our people will prosper. That’s how we’ll win the future. (Applause.) And tonight, I’d like to talk about how we get there.

The first step in winning the future is encouraging American innovation.

None of us can predict with certainty what the next big industry will be or where the new jobs will come from. Thirty years ago, we couldn’t know that something called the Internet would lead to an economic revolution. What we can do -- what America does better than anyone else -- is spark the creativity and imagination of our people. We’re the nation that put cars in driveways and computers in offices; the nation of Edison and the Wright brothers; of Google and Facebook. In America, innovation doesn’t just change our lives. It is how we make our living. (Applause.)

Our free enterprise system is what drives innovation. But because it’s not always profitable for companies to invest in basic research, throughout our history, our government has provided cutting-edge scientists and inventors with the support that they need. That’s what planted the seeds for the Internet. That’s what helped make possible things like computer chips and GPS. Just think of all the good jobs -- from manufacturing to retail -- that have come from these breakthroughs.

Half a century ago, when the Soviets beat us into space with the launch of a satellite called Sputnik, we had no idea how we would beat them to the moon. The science wasn’t even there yet. NASA didn’t exist. But after investing in better research and education, we didn’t just surpass the Soviets; we unleashed a wave of innovation that created new industries and millions of new jobs.

This is our generation’s Sputnik moment.

Leaving all politics and the debates over the different avenues to bring the picture that President Obama is trying to paint here to fruition, I have to say that I whole heartedly agree with every word stated above. In fact, I am inspired. Nonetheless, I think Umair Haque hit the nail on the head when he tweeted, "'We need to think bigger'". Exactly. WAY bigger than Obama's thinking now. Like reimagining GDP, corps, bottom lines, jobs, etc..."

Again I am not going to delve into the politics and solutions today. My goal with this post is a Socratic one of making sure we are asking the right questions before we start looking for answers. With that said, I think the question we need to ask ourselves as a nation is what magnitude of a moment are we going to need to keep our preeminent place in the world today? Or perhaps more importantly the preeminent place that our ancestors that helped form the Western World handed to us?

I dare to say that challenging us to rise to the task of "Our Sputnik" not only lessens the magnitude of the moment at hand but leaves us sorely lacking a true understanding of what is really needed to forcefully take hold of it. I hate to keep going back to my Columbus analogy but I think it perfectly captures both aspects alluded to in the last sentence. Just like in his time, there is something truly transcendent hanging out there just beyond the horizon that will shape the next 500 years the same way he helped shape the last. I think the President missed his "moment" last night by appealing to generational change at the expense of the larger trends of history before us.

In short, We are not just transitioning from one generation to another but from one era of History to another. It is my contention that Columbus was the catalyst to the 2ndWAVE and it is going to take a generation looking for CHANGE beyond the horizon to catch the 3rdWAVE currently forming to take us there...

Charles J. Reid on Brian Tierney Part 3



Hello My Name Is Gratian And I Think I Might Have Something To Add To This Discussion


Hello again American Creation family! I hope you all remember me in that I do not think I have posted here since Summer. This was due to the time consuming re-launching of my real estate business after it turned out that the oil had not ruined the part of the Gulf Coast I live in forever after all.  Anyway, I am going to dive in and pick up right where I left off:  Charles J. Reid's review of Brian Tierney's book, The Idea of Natural Rights: Studies on Natural Rights, Natural Law, and Church Law 1150 to 1625.  Before doing so, I think it wise to summarize where we were in the discussion 4 months ago, the first two parts in this series, and the concept of a "zone of autonomy" being at the core of the Christian argument for natural rights. 

Four months ago we were involved in a debate over my challenge to the idea articulated by Ed Brayton, Gregg Frazer, and Jon Rowe that, "that the Bible nowhere speaks to the concept of unalienable rights, especially an unalienable right to religious and political liberty." I pointed to the work of Brian Tierney and his contention that the pre-Aquinas development of Canon Law heavily impacted the evolution of the Western Legal Tradition which in turn had great influence on our founding era idea of natural rights. Then I followed that general overview of Reid's book review with a post that began to sort through some of the details. I started with Reid's brief summary of the contributions of Justian, Gratian, and the "decretists" as he follows Tieney's account of the evolution of the idea of natural rights.

The "decretists" were the Canonists that sifted through the works of Gratian per Justinian and attempted to address some of the inherent contradictions they saw in his work. In the process they began to articulate a coherent case for natural rights that I think is summed up best by Rufius,

Rufinus began, "'a certain force instilled in every human creature by nature to do good and avoid the opposite.' ' This force, he continued, "'consists in three things, commands, prohibitions, and demonstrations. . . . It cannot be detracted from at all as regards the commands and prohibitions . .. but it can be as regards the demonstrations, which nature not command or forbid but shows to be good."'

The "demonstrations" alluded to above are actions that the Bible neither commands nor prohibits and leaves to each man's own discretion as to whether "nature" shows it to be "good".  It is my contention that our discussions of the differences between "Classically Conservative" vs. "Classically Liberal", "Enlightenment" vs. "Christendom", and "French Revolution" vs. "American Revolution" should all start with the question of, "Liberty" or "License" per Locke via Hooker. 

Thus, my question to Brayton, Rowe, Frazer, is how we can even begin to have this conversation about the "Christian" idea of rights until we enlarge the historical discussion to include the men I have mentioned above and their contributions to the Western Legal Tradition?

Charles J. Reid on Brian Tierney II

In light of my discussion with Jon Rowe about the Bible and rights, here is some more about the origins of the concept of natural rights from the book review The Medieval Origins of the Western Natural Rights Tradition: The Achievement of Brian Tierney by Charles J. Reid:

Tierney begins his study with the canon law of the twelfth century. The twelfth century was a time of "renaissance"-a revolutionary new age that decisively broke away from past practices.' It was also a distinctively "legal" century.  In the late eleventh century, Pope Gregory VII declared the independence of the Church from Henry IV's empire.  Although several decades of struggle and polemicizing followed, the contestants reached a series of compromises in the first decades of the twelfth century that allowed Church and State to coexist uneasily for the next three hundred years.'

The polemicizing that occurred in the late eleventh century, furthermore, was of a uniquely legal nature. By the early twelfth century, after peace was achieved between Church and State, the new universities proved to be the ideal forum for the continued sustenance of the sort of sophisticated legal analysis that had grown out of the struggle between papacy and empire.  Education in both the Roman-law texts of Justinian and the new canon law of the Church became very popular undertakings. Indeed, at the dose of the twelfth century, a developing process of "professionalization" emerged that would establish canonists as "professionals" in a sense easily recognizable by today's legal practitioners.

In the middle of the twelfth century, at the hands of a mysterious figure named Gratian, the canon law received a systematic structure which it would retain until the twentieth century. We can safely say more about Gratian's methods than about his background and training. Adapting his approach from the dialectical reasoning common in the schools of philosophy, and building on the work of predecessors such as Ivo of Chartres, Gratian produced a massive work of synthesis around 1140. Divided into three parts, the Concordia discordantium canonum ("A harmony of conflicting canons")-a name quickly changed to "Decretud'-was intended to reconcile the many inconsistencies that had arisen from a millennium of ecclesiastical legislating and teaching.

Gratian's textbook soon became the foundation for training in the canon law. It quickly attracted its share of commentators, who came to be known as the "decretists" because of their work on the Decretum.  As is the case with any truly great book, the Decretum generated as many questions as answers, and the decretists set about imbibing the wisdom of Gratian's work as well as addressing its shortcomings.

In this context, lawyers and others began to talk about rights in entirely new ways. Tierney elicits a number of examples.  "Gratian himself wrote of the iura libertatis, the rights of liberty," which one cannot lose even when "held in bondage".  But these usages, Tierney cautions, still do not amount to a theory of specifically natural rights.

To be sure that one has discovered a theory of natural ights, Tierney continues, one must traverse a "semantic minefield."  His own concern is with the Latin term ius naturale. While twelfth-century canonists found that this expression had a variety of meanings, Tierney is "concerned mainly with ius as meaning either objective law or subjective right, and with 'natural' as meaning either a primeval state of affairs or an intrinsic permanent characteristic of any being, as when we speak of 'the nature of man."' 

The term ius naturale in the writings of such classical and post classical authors as Cicero or Ulpian meant "natural law" or "natural order," not "natural right." By the seventeenth century, however, the term clearly embraced subjective rights as well. When and under what circumstances, then, did the natural law of Cicero and Ulpian also acquire the meaning of natural rights?

Tierney answers these questions by identifying texts that carried a subjective meaning of ius naturale as early as the first decretist commentaries on Gratian. Gratian himself gave ius naturale an objective definition in the opening words of the Decretum, stating: "'Natural law(/us) is what is contained in the Law and the Gospel by which each is commanded to do to another what he wants done to himself and forbidden to do to another what he does not want done to himself."' Gratian subsequently offered other, competing objective definitions for the term ius naturale, but never attempted to reconcile these with each other or with the meaning he obviously preferred.

Commentators on the Decretum, however, were forced to deal with these inconsistencies, and sought to resolve them by proposing that ius naturale had multiple meanings. In elaborating on these meanings, the canonists introduced a notion of subjective rights into the analysis of ius naturale. Tierney explains:

Gratian himself used the word ius consistently to designate systems of objective law in the opening chapters of the Decretum-e.g. he considered in turn natural law, customary law, civil law, military law, public law as different species of ius, but the canonists who commented on his texts lived in a world where, in everyday discourse,the word ius commonly meant a subjective right. Hence, in their commentaries, they would shift from one meaning to the other, unreflectively it seems, and without seeing any need for explanation, evidently confident that their meaning would be plain to contemporary readers.

Between the 1150s and the 1190s, the decretists worked out a series of definitions of ius naturale as subjective right. Around 1160, the decretist Rufinus proposed a two-part definition for the term that would shape future canonistic thought on the subject, and continues to condition our thought today. lus naturale was, Rufinus began, "'a certain force instilled in every human creature by nature to do good and avoid the opposite.' '  This force, he continued, "'consists in three things, commands, prohibitions, and demonstrations. . . . It cannot be detracted from at all as regards the commands and prohibitions . .. but it can be as regards the demonstrations, which nature not command or forbid but shows to be good."'

Tierney notes that both parts of this definition of ius naturale-"the initial subjective definition of ius and the following tripartite division" into commands, prohibitions, and demonstrations-were subjected to further analysis and refinement.  On the one hand, decretists quickly developed the idea of ius naturale as a natural force of the "human personality."  Indeed, "the greatest of them all, Huguccio, . . . insist[ed] that this was the one primary and proper meaning of the term."

On the other hand, the decretists did not fail to analyze the second part of Rufinus's definition-the idea of ius naturale as an area where nature does not command or forbid. Tiemey finds that a group of English decretists active in the 1180s were especially creative in emphasizing the notion of ius naturale as "'a zone of human autonomy,'" or "'a neutral sphere of personal choice."' The author of the Summa, In nomine, for instance, proposed as a meaning of ius natural.

 "licit and approved, neither commanded nor forbidden by the Lord or by any statute, which is also called fas, as for instance to reclaim one's own or not to reclaim it, to eat something or not to eat it, to put away an unfaithful wife or not to put her away."

Tierney emphasizes that these passages can only refer to a concept of natural rights:

In the texts we have just quoted ius naturale plainly does not mean restrictive law; the term is used to mean what we should call a natural right-to eat what one chooses for instance. The right of nature in these texts is what is permitted by the law of nature.

Thus the canonists fashioned definitions of natural rights congruent with our own understanding. This conclusion is not anachronistic. Tierney has no intention of superimposing a modem conceptual apparatus onto medieval sources. Rather, he argues that twelfth-century lawyers were the first to articulate and acknowledge this basic feature of the Western juristic and philosophic landscape.  The remainder of Tiemey's book explores the ways in which this idea grew and was adapted in the centuries that separate Gratian and Hugo Grotius."

There is a lot here but the thing that jumped out to me was the "zone of autonomy" where God neither commands nor prohibits something.  I also see the "golden rule" is in there.  My question is how does the former tie into the latter?  In other words, how is liberty held in check by the "golden rule"? 

Maybe this is what Jefferson was referring to when he stated, "But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."  But on the other hand, would not the rightness of worshipping the true God be written on men's hearts from creation? I guess it comes down to if positive law allows for people to violate natural law in the name of  liberty. I think that when Jesus asked the hypocrites who was willing to throw the first stone should give us some insight to a possible biblical answer for this. Nonetheless, I think Jon Rowe is hitting on an important theme with his religious freedom posts.  The floor is open for thoughts.

Charles J. Reid on Brian Tierney

In light of the ongoing discussion between Jon Rowe and myself on rights and the Bible, I thought it would be a good idea to do some posts about Brian Tierney as we attempt to uncover the medieval contribution to the political thought that helped shape early America. Accordingly, here is the introduction from Charles Reid's book review entitled The Medieval Origins of the Western Natural Rights Tradition: The Achievement of Brian Tierney:

"Brian Tierney has established himself over the course of forty-five years of writing and teaching as one of the world's leading authorities on the history of medieval canon law and political thought. In a series of foundational works, he has offered important new interpretations of the origins of Western constitutionalism, tracing many concepts believed to be modem or early modem innovations to the work oftwelfth-century canon lawyers.' He has spent the past fifteen years exploring the origins of the Western notion of natural rights.2 In his new work, The Idea of Natural Rights,3 Tierney draws on a decade-and-ahalf of research as well as a deep knowledge of Western constitutional history to present a radical reconceptualization of the history of natural rights thought in Western civilization.

Natural rights historians and scholars have expressed numerous opinions concerning the origins of the Western rights tradition. In the Anglo-American world, scholars have commonly viewed the seventeenthcentury as a radical departure from an older tradition that hademphasized the existence of an objectively just order in which individual rights were impossible. 4 On the Continent, by contrast, scholarshave tended to view the fourteenth century as decisive for the formation of individual rights: it was then that William of Ockham, the brilliant English logician, succeeded in dissolving the thirteenth-century synthesis of Thomas Aquinas in an acid bath of nominalistic analysis, reducing Thomas's conception of ordered justice to the competing interests and claims of individuals.5 Both schools of thought tend to view the creation of natural-rights theories as an aberrant development, either harmful to society, or, at best, of dubious benefit.6

Tierney challenges this scholarly consensus in several fundamental ways. His central contention is that theories of natural rights did not emerge as an aberrational feature of Western political and legal thought at some late date, but rather comprised an integral part of Western intellectual life from the birth of universities and the revival of legal studies in the twelfth century.7 He is concerned as well with tracing the lines of transmission and development by which twelfth century legal texts came to shape the philosophical reasoning of the seventeenth century.8

The book is divided into three large parts: "Origins," "Ockham and the Franciscans," and "From Gerson to Grotius."9 In the first part of his book, Tierney begins by examining the important role canon law played in the shaping of rights discourse, and by demonstrating that thirteenth-century scholastic philosophers-near contemporaries of Thomas Aquinas-were quite capable of posing rights-based questions that would stimulate and challenge their successors for generations. 10 In the second part of his book, Tierney then considers the impact the Franciscan poverty controversy had on the development of rights thought." This controversy, Tierney demonstrates, was one of the most important early sources of rights-based discourse. 12 The third part addresses the problems of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries: the Great Schism and the conciliar theories to which it gave rise, the great debates that erupted in the sixteenth century over the rights of the native peoples of the Americas, and the rights-based synthesis forged by Hugo Grotius in the early seventeenth century.13

This Review will consider some of Tierney's main arguments about the development of rights, assessing the deep originality of his contributions to each of these periods. It must be stressed that Tierney's book is a vast treasure house of information about rights, and one cannot hope to do justice to the complexity of his thesis in the course of this Review.14 It will, however, be evident that Tierney's book will become the starting point for all future efforts to address the origins of the Western natural rights tradition."

I read the first 70 or so pages of Tierney's book and I learned a lot of new and interesting things.  I was going to start with Gary Amos or David Kopel but since both cite him extensively I thought we would get it straight from the horses mouth.  Or at least a good review of the book to lay out the arguments in a simple way to prepare us to dig into Tierney himself. Then hopefully we can hash through some of the primary sources he uses that can be found on the internet.  All of which I hope gives us a better understanding of some of the lesser known/unknown Christian intellectual roots of our founding.

Soteriology, Political Theory, and the Manegoldian Missing Link of Relevance

Or

A Plea for Clarity as to the Relevance of Asking if George Washington Took Communion or Not, and Other Similar Soteriological Questions About the Founders, In Regards to the Study of the Political Theology that Helped Shape Early America



I responded to Jon Rowe's post about Gregg Frazer and Governor Morris's supposed theistic rationalism with the following comment: 

"What does his behavior have to do with Frazer's dispassionate 10 point theory? This is where his beliefs run into his history. It would have been more credible to leave this out in that it has absolutely nothing to do with Frazer's thesis.

Not that it really matters because you have failed, after repeated requests by Tom, to produce the link between the sotierology and political theology.

Without that link, at best, all you can do is prove some facts from Barton wrong and be a pest to the Religious Right. The more intellectual arguments for Christian Influence on America remain untouched at this blog and elsewhere.

It is a shame because I think when you look back you will find that there was a libertarian stream of thought not that dissimilar to yours. Yes, some kinks were there in regards to freedom of worship at times but overall the more rational branches seem to opposeat least some of the premises of the modern religious right.

The Culture Wars go on..."

Now I can be a little overzealous and come on strong.  I also have a hard time of letting things go when it is time to move on.  I understand that and realize that sometimes people do not respond to my arguments because it would take more time than they have.  Understood.  But I have never heard you state that about Tom who has essentially made the same critique and was the first person to ask you for the link of relevance. First your words italicized then his response:

"The folks I see as NOT being able to claim the political theology of the American Founding are the orthodox Christians, those who believe Jesus was 2nd Person in the Trinity, an Incarnate God.

Clearly an old piece of yours, Jon, since it's now clear you must show a necessary link between Christian political theology and its soteriology, and there is no link. You can believe Jesus is God [Samuel Adams] or not [John Adams], and the political theology comes out the same."

Here is a comment I left on a post of mine recently that I think lays out some of the context and points to the dangers of bringing sotierological assumptions and conclusions into a discussion of the history of political theory:

"The Kopel thing is powerful. It traces the entire story of the development of Scholasticism all the way to the Revolution. Seems Cicerro, Aristotle and Emperor Justian were instrumental. The latter seems to have kicked it all off and the other two gradually became more prominent.

Though he states that Aristotle was probably the most prominent in the end because Aquinas used him and Scholastic education was Catholic Education until the early 20th Century.

This goes through the whole Investiture Controversy and the power that the Holy Roman Emperors had over the Popes. Many people forget that Hitler was trying to establish a Third Reich. Which was the Third rise of the Holy Roman Empire. The first was pre-Investiture and the second was with Charles the grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella.

He also goes into how the thought of Justin, Ciccero, and Aristotle as synthesized with Christian thought became Canon Law and how Canon Law influenced secular law like Common Law.

The Magna Carta was a part of this process.

I think I am going to start with him to outline the arguments and then we can get to the sources, if we can find them, and check him.

Amos overstates his case just like Manegold in reference to the dangers of pagan philosophy. The Greeks and Romans need to be given more credit than most Christians give them as far as political theory.

There is a balance and I think Amos and Manegold miss it. I think Kopel nails it.

At least at first glance that is. I think, despite the fact that he does a better job than most on this issue, Amos's soteriology clouds his political theory as well.

It is just as bad to label Greek thought as exclusively Christian as it is to label Christian or Christian/Greek thought as exclusively Enlightenment.

I think Christianity added some unique things but natural law and the wisdom of the ages did as well.

Amos kind of does the same thing Frazer does (though not near as egregiously) just from the other side in that he mixes Greek soteriology with political theory when one does not have to and labels things as not compatible that are. How Manegoldian of him  :)

THE MANEGOLDIAN MISSING LINK OF RELEVANCE!"

Or is it?  Ball is in your court Jon.  Tom(though I hesitate to speak for him) and I have laid out our case.  It is essentially the case of David Kopel. (More from him in the coming months) It seems that Frazer and Amos are in a pissing contest for the heart of modern Evangelical political theory. With all do respect to John Mac Arthur and Peter Lillback,  let's leave that to them and broaden the discussion.  Unless,  that is,  you can find the the Manegoldian Missing Link and give us all a reason as to why this intramural Evangelical matter needs to play such a prominent role in these discussions.  And yes, I am moving the goal posts but only because they urgently need to be moved.



HT to JRB who has hounded me about not minimizing the role of Greek and Roman thought and TVD who warned me about some of the pitfalls inherent in remaining in Mc Arthur/Lillback Land more than a few times.  Maybe it is not harder to convince me of things that it would have been for the Pope to have convinced Luther. Though I do not think I have Luther beat by much sometimes.  :) 

Brief Reply to Jon Rowe

It his last post Jon Rowe stated:

"My estimable co-blogger King of Ireland has taken issue with my claim (along with Ed Brayton, Gregg Frazer, Robert Kraynak and others) that the Bible nowhere speaks to the concept of unalienable rights, especially an unalienable right to religious and political liberty.

I think the problem between us is one of semantics, that is we need to clarify concepts and premises underlying our claims. There is a certain "literal" interpretation of the Bible which looks at what the text says on its face and cites verses and chapters of scripture as specific proof texts. The specific/literal approach, one many evangelicals are fond of following. In that sense, the Bible does not speak to unalienable rights, political or religious liberty. I've read the parts that supposedly do from cover to cover. It's an open and shut case."

I just want to ask Jon if literalism is the only valid method then where do Frazer and others get the Trinity and Original Sin from?  They are concepts some see in the Bible.  Just like rights based on imago dei. They whine when people do it and come up with interpretations they do not like but do the same themselves.  The only thing that really matters for our purposes is that both approaches are historically Christian.  Augustine was open to Genesis being an allegory for crying out loud.

Now is this being a tar baby? Or is this a valid critique of a weak argument?  So as not to be accused of the former I do not "demand" that you respond unless you want to and think it will add to the discussion. 



*Update- Jon has said that he did not mean this "tar baby" thing personally and I think I understand what he was saying. The problem is that the genie is out of the bottom and some others have taken it to  mean that the argument for rights from the Bible is equlivalent to an absurd argument made only by fools.  Here is my response down in the comments section here. I think we might need some clarification*

*The tar baby discussion continues at Best One Way*

Gary Amos, Christian Principles, and the Secularist Straw Man

About 9 months ago, I did a post where I quoted Gary Amos as stating that the Declaration of Independence was a document of interposition. The hope of that post was to generate a discussion about how Christian thought had impacted, or not, the birth of our nation. And a discussion we did have: 9 months worth of parsing the words of Aquinas, Hooker, Locke, Calvin, and others "to death". I think it was a job well done by all.

Nonetheless, I think it is time to move forward with some of Amos's other points about the Declaration and the impact that Christian thought had on our founding. Accordingly, I would like to start with what I would call the general Evangelical argument for Christian America. An argument that I feel has been misrepresented by secularists a great deal in that it seems that many set up a straw man to knock down instead of addressing the actual argument being made. This muddies the waters and makes the quest for truth in regards to the founding and religion an elusive endeavor.

All that being stated, I give the floor to Gary Amos to lay out the argument for a Christian America in order to expose the straw man, un-muddy the waters, and bring into the light what Christian America emphatically does not mean despite protestations to the contrary:

"Now for the surprise: Hardly anyone in the colonies fit this description.{that of a Deist} No one who played a key role in the writing of the Declaration or approving it thought this way in 1776, not even Thomas Jefferson.

The "clockmaker God" idea about deism and the founding fathers was invented by teachers in the 1890's and later years to explain the religious ideas of the colonies. A small handful of the French and English philosophers in the mid-1700's had believed this way. Sloppy interpreters of American history too took that obscure European view and pasted it to the history of the American Revolution. As a device to explain the general view of the founders fathers, it is all wet.

For example, John Adams has been called a deist. He helped write the Declaration of Independence and was a key player in the American Revolution. Adams once wrote in his diary that a nation that took the Bible for its law book would be the best of nations. On another occasion he wrote: "The great and almighty author of nature; who at first established the rules which regulate the world, can as easily suspend those laws whenever his providence sees sufficient reason for such suspension. This can be no objection, then, to the miracles of Jesus Christ." Adams sometimes strongly criticized those who had used organized religion as a way to control people politically. But he was far from critical about the principles of Christianity. He thought Christian principles were the heart an the soul of the effort for nationhood and independence:

Who composed that Army of fine young fellows that was then before my Eyes? There were among them, Roman Catholics, English Episcopalians, Scotch and American Presbyterians, Methodists, Moravians, Anabaptists, German Lutherans, German Calvinists, Universalists, Arians... Deists and Atheists... Never the less all educated in the general principles of Christianity: and the general principles of English and American liberty... The general principles, on which the Fathers achieved independence, we... the general principles of Christianity.

But did not John Adams, as president, sign the Tripoli Treaty (1797) that said that the government of the United States was not in any sense founded on the Christian religion? Yes he did. But what did he mean? He meant simply that "the Christian religion" as a formal institution was not a part of the American government in the same way that the religious structures of Islam are a part of Islamic governments. From many things that Adams and his contemporaries wrote it is clear that they did not use the word religion to exclude Christian ideas or principles as some do today. True, the founders did not make institutional religion part of the government. But they never thought of excluding Christian principles.

Another example is Thomas Jefferson. He doubted the deity of Christ and the inerracy of scripture. He even railed against the abuses of organized religion, but not against Christian principles. He believed that the moral principles found in the four gospels should be the guide of every man's life. As President, Jefferson read from a collection of these principles nightly. Because he took Christian principles seriously, he was extremely troubled by the immoral practice of slavery, saying: "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.... The almighty has no attribute which can side with us."

Jefferson is a notable example of how a man can be influenced by Biblical ideas and Christian principles even though he never confessed Jesus Christ as Lord in the evangelical sense.  Like most of the founders, he was very supportive of Christian principles, even going so far as to call Jesus of Nazareth "our savior" but he could never bring himself to accept the Christ of Christianity: God in the Flesh.

Must a political leader confess Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior to be able to at all accept and act on Biblical principles for government?  Many people seem to think so.  We are told that since Jefferson denied the deity of Christ, he could not have accepted any other truly Biblical ideas.  Every legal and political idea he had must, therefore, have been non-Christian. 

This sort of thinking breaks a number of rules of logic and is out of step with the Bible itself.  It is not remarkable for us to assume that Christians can easily be influenced by non-Christian ideas, but somehow non-Christians cannot be influenced by Christian ideas?  The point is, even if Jefferson had confessed Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, some would still trace his legal and political ideas to deism.  A "born again" Jefferson would not automatically mean that the Declaration contained Christian ideas.

Another more subtle claim lies just beneath the surface of such thinking. If the Declaration can only contain Biblical and Christian ideas as long as Jefferson and others confessed Christ in an evangelical way, then a Christian view of government excludes un-believers.  To have a Christian nation would require all leaders to believe in eternal redemption before they could have the slightest grasp of God's plan for civil justice.  Only Christians would be competant to do anything where civil government is concerned.

Ultimately the church would have to be merged with the state, and Christians would be in charge of the state. Rather than seeing that a government is "Biblical" or "Christian" if its laws and structures agree with what God has said about civil justice and social order, a "Christian" nation would be one where "confessing Christ" becomes the test by which a person's political and legal ideas are approved.  Such a state would be primarily concerned with salvation rather than justice. It would confuse God's redemptive plan with his creation plan." --Defending the Declaration pp. 9-11

There is a lot here but I think his main point that one does not have to be an Evangelical to see the merits of Christian politial ideas is key.  This destroys the straw man that Christian America means a nation run by Evangelical Christians. It most certainly does not mean a return to living under Mosaic law as some think.  It simply means establishing a nation based on the Christian idea of justice as a part of God's "creation plan".  Does anyone deny that this was the goal of most of the founders whether they were Evangelical or not?

Plato's Noble Lie?

In accord with the discussion about Leo Strauss and Platos's Noble Lie in the comments section of my last post, I thought I would produce this quote by Thomas Jefferson:

"Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath?"

My question is did Jefferson really believe that rights came from God or was he only concerned that the people believed this "myth" to preserve an ordered society?

Robert P. Hunt on Leo Strauss III

In honor of Phil and Eli, here is one last excerpt from Robert P. Hunt's essay Christianity, Leo Strauss, and the Ancient/Modern Distinction:

"Strauss’s concern about the practical political dangers caused by (the Christian) adherence to immutable first principles of natural law arises precisely because Strauss (and, one could argue, many of those who adopt a Straussian reading of intellectual history) believes that “the guiding theme of political philosophy is the regime rather than the laws.” The fundamental questions of political life become “regime questions.” In his analysis of Plato’s Laws in What is Political Philosophy?, Strauss provides the following definition of “regime”:

Regime is the order, the form, which gives society its character.Regime is therefore a specific manner of life. Regime is the form of life as living together, the manner of living of society and in society, since this manner depends decisively on the predominance of human beings of a certain type, on the manifest domination of society by human beings of a certain type. Regime means that whole, which we today are in the habit of viewing primarily in a fragmentized form: regime means simultaneously the form of life of a society, its style of life its moral taste, form of society, form of state, form of government, spirit of laws. We may try to articulate the simple and unitary thought, that expresses itself in the term politeia, as follows: life is an activity which is directed towards such a goal as can be pursued only by society; but in order to pursue a specific goal, as its comprehensive goal, society must be organized, ordered, constructed, constituted in a manner which is in accordance with that goal; this, however, means that the authoritative human beings must be akin to that goal.14

In short, “classical political philosophy”—that form of political philosophy which Strauss most admires—“is guided by the question of the best regime.” And the best regime itself is, in principle, concerned with the comprehensive ordering of society consistent with its collective telos.15

To argue that Strauss wants merely to return to the classical model of politeia as the self-sufficient and comprehensive form of human association is to miss the point here. For example, Strauss would undoubtedly find the modern liberal regime’s commitment to religious liberty to be an improvement upon the classical view of society. Yet in his very adoption of the classical idea of “regime,” he seems to endorse at the political level what John Courtney Murray described as “a single, homogenous structure, within which the political power stood forth as the representative of society in its religious and in its political aspects.”16 Strauss’s very embrace of the question of what constitutes “the best regime” and his philosophical assumption of a conflict between reason and revelation cannot permit him—or anyone, for that matter, who commits himself to classical regime questions in the same manner as Strauss—to appreciate the extent to which a revelation—inspired worldview renders such classical regime questions largely irrelevant.

John Courtney Murray has cogently argued that Christianity has “freed man from nature by teaching him that he has an immortal soul, which is related to matter but not immersed in or enslaved to its laws. . . . It has taught him his uniqueness, his own individual worth, the dignity of his own person, the equality of all men, the unity of the human race.”17 For the committed Christian, this conception of man’s personal spiritual dignity does not sit atop the classical conception of man as a rational animal. Rather, it transforms that conception with the light of its radiance into something other than “Platonic,” “Aristotelian,” or “Kantian” Christianity. In freeing man from nature, it has rendered the most fundamental of classical regime questions largely irrelevant since no “regime” short of the Kingdom of God in its fullness can satisfy man’s thirst for heaven. In fact, the very effort to answer such a question (i.e. “What is the best regime?”) in anything resembling political terms (either “ancient” or “modern”) might be indicative of the fact that one has applied categories of political analysis more characteristic of a resident of the earthly city.

Strauss’s discomfort with any premature reconciliation of the possible truths made known through reason itself and the truths known through promulgation of the Divine Law forces him to “distinguish” political philosophy from political theology. “By political theology we understand political teachings which are based on divine revelation. Political philosophy is limited to what is accessible to the unassisted human mind.” Moreover, “political philosophy rests on the premise that the political association—one’s country or one’s nation—is the most comprehensive or the most authoritative association.” 18

Why one should base one’s political philosophy on any such premise Strauss does not answer fully, but it does provide insight into his distinction between “ancients” and “moderns.” Ancient political philosophers defined “the best regime” as one in which moral virtue was promoted and the hierarchy of natures within human nature itself was given its due; modern political philosophers lowered man’s sights and grounded “the best regime” in man’s passions, self-interest, and some conception of human equality. In other words, the fundamental shift in political philosophy for Strauss is a shift in what characterizes the best regime. For Strauss, to begin from the revelation-inspired premise that any effort to define the most comprehensive or authoritative association in political terms is itself impious is to be untrue to the goals of political philosophy, whether ancient or modern.

Christian political philosophers need not accept Strauss’s charge precisely because, unlike Strauss, they do not assume that reason and revelation are in conflict with each other. Rather, they begin from a contrary premise, laid out eloquently by Etienne Gilson:

If we admit, as we really should, that the miracles, the prophecies, the marvelous effects of the Christian religion sufficiently prove the truth of revealed religion, then we must admit that there can be no contradiction between faith and reason. . . . When a master instructs his disciple, his own knowledge must include whatever he would introduce into the soul of his disciple. Now our natural knowledge of principles comes from God, since He is author of our nature. These principles themselves are also contained in the wisdom of God. Whence it follows that whatever is contrary to these principles is contrary to the divine wisdom and, consequently, cannot come from God. There must necessarily be agreement between a reason coming from God and a revelation coming from God. Let us say, then, that faith teaches truths which seem contrary to reason; let us not say that it teaches propositions contrary to reason. . . . Let us rest assured that apparent incompatibility between faith and reason is similarly reconciled in the infinitewisdom of God.19

Gilson’s account of the reasonable basis for assuming a fundamental compatibility between faith and reason reflects the view of St. Thomas Aquinas, whose main point, as Gilson notes, was “not to safeguard the autonomy of philosophy as a purely rational knowledge; rather, it was to explain how natural philosophy can enter into theology without destroying its unity.”20 By seeing the Divine as “infinite wisdom,” St. Thomas—as well as those Christian philosophers who follow in his footsteps—renders such an explanation less problematic. By construing the Divine primarily as supreme lawgiver, Strauss actually seems to adopt a more voluntaristic view of revelation-inspired norms, thus making his desire to protect the autonomy of philosophy against the incursions of political theology more understandable. At the same time, however, it leads the careful reader to wonder precisely whata purely autonomous natural (as opposed to political) philosophy—as Strauss understands that term—can tell us about the nature of things.

The Christian philosopher begins with an assumption that the universe is intelligible, Strauss with the assumption that “philosophy is essentially not possession of the truth, but quest for the truth. The distinctive trait of the philosopher is that ‘he knows that he knows nothing,’ and that his insight into our ignorance concerning the most important things induces him to strive with all his power for knowledge.”21 Whether a purely autonomous natural philosophy can take us anywhere beyond the acknowledgement that there are important questions to be asked is a question that Strauss leaves unanswered."

There is, once again, a lot to unpack here.  Nonetheless, the part that jumped out to me was that "Christian" and "Non-Christian" philosophers come to what both would see as ageless questions with two different sets of assumptions.  The former assumes that the universe is intelligible and the latter that "he knows that he knows nothing."  The question, for our purposes, is which approach the founders took?  Unless I am missing something, I think almost all of them came to the table with the same assumptions as the former group.

An Interesting Book Review

I found this interesting Washington Post book review today on  The Long Road to Annapolis: The Founding of the Naval Academy and the Emerging American Republic By William P. Leeman.  Here are the portions that I think is germane to this blog:

"After American independence, patriots believed that standing armies and professional navies were instruments of royal tyranny and had no place in the new republic. George Washington, "Cincinnatus of the West," set the model, taking up arms to defend his country and then returning to the plow when the threat was past. Militias were to suffice for the new republic's defense.

Barbary pirates, conflict with France and the War of 1812 brought the realization that, indeed, an army and navy were needed, but Thomas Jefferson did not trust their officer corps because they were largely in sympathy with his political enemy Alexander Hamilton. This fear helped motivate Jefferson to establish the military academy at West Point in 1802 to inculcate republican values. Naval officers, while equally pro-federalist, did not present as great a threat as their Army counterparts for they were usually away at sea. Thus, he saw much less need for a naval academy.

So for the first half-century of the Navy's existence, its officers studied their profession in "the school of the ship." Captains took responsibility for the professional and moral training of young midshipmen, requiring them to take classroom instruction at sea from chaplains or civilian schoolmasters, who assigned extensive reading in the classics, science, philosophy and history...

If one were starting from scratch without historical anxieties and political pressures, it is unlikely that the current Naval Academy would be the outcome. There is an inherent conflict between a liberal education based on skeptical inquiry and military indoctrination requiring unquestioning obedience. Combining the two educational cultures tends to create a pressure chamber with too much to do and no time to think and absorb."

I know this is not a typical post but the last part about the "inherent conflict between a liberal education based on skeptical inquiry and military indoctrination requiring unquestioning obedience" really peaked my interest. Does it bother anyone else that at least some people are starting to doubt the merits of a liberal education because it undermines a culture of unquestioning obedience?  This sounds like Sparta not Athens and expresses an attitude that would have been anathema at our founding.

Robert P. Hunt on Leo Strauss II

This is another excerpt from Christianity, Leo Strauss, and the Modern/Ancient Distinction by Robert P. Hunt:

Under Glenn’s favorable interpretation of Strauss’s contribution to the recovery of political philosophy, Strauss’s view that the claims of reason and revelation are “mutually exclusive” need not be accepted by Roman Catholics. Rather, the Roman Catholic political philosopher can appropriate Strauss’s teaching in support of moral realism in the battle against subjectivism and relativism. In other words, Strauss shares with Roman Catholics an aversion to liberal modernity and provides a powerful philosophical argument for rejecting it, particularly in its positivist and radical historicist dimensions. The “ancient”/ “modern” distinction is a powerful hermeneutic tool through which one can embrace the moral realism of the “ancients” and reject the increasing nihilism of the “moderns.”8

And yet a closer reading of even the exoteric Strauss should give Roman Catholics pause before they embrace Strauss’s distinction. First, Strauss’s brand of “moral realism” is one which seems to be, at best, ambivalent to Christianity’s contribution to the history of political philosophy, particularly in its political ramifications. Second, Strauss’s distinction between ancients and moderns seems to be based primarily on the relationship between the philosopher and the city, not on whether the human mind has the capacity to grasp truths grounded in the nature of things. The first point is addressed obliquely in Natural Right and History, the second more directly What is Political Philosophy?

In his introduction to Natural Right and History, Strauss seems to indicate that “Roman Catholic social science” is preferable to most of “present-day American social science” in that it is not necessarily committed to “the proposition that all men are endowed by the evolutionary process or by a mysterious fate with many kinds of urges and aspirations, but certainly with no natural right.”9 In short, Straussimplies that Roman Catholic social science is at least open to the possibility of some view of natural right, implying for political philosophy the argument for a hierarchy of natural ends. The problem, however, is that “the modern followers of Thomas Aquinas” (i.e. neo-Thomists) have been forced to accept “a fundamental, typically modern, dualism of a nonteleological natural science and a teleological science of man” that seems to break with the views of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas himself, thus pushing, one infers, much of contemporary Catholic social thought in a non-teleological, imperativist direction.10 A possible implication: for Roman Catholics to salvage their own tradition from the shoals of the liberal politics of modernity, they must embrace a more fully (as envisaged by Strauss) Aristotelian Christianity and its hierarchical, prudentialist view of politics rather than a form of Kantian Christianity with its egalitarian and imperativist implications.11

And yet, at the very end of Strauss’s chapter on “Classical Right”—at the virtual center of the work itself—Strauss indicates that the problem with even St. Thomas Aquinas himself, a Thomas not read through the prism of neo-Thomists such as Jacques Maritain and Heinrich Rommen, is that “the Thomistic doctrine of natural right, or more generally expressed, of natural law, is free from the hesitations and ambiguities of the teachings, not only of Plato and Cicero, but of Aristotle as well.” Thus, for St. Thomas, there are certain immutable first principles of natural law that “suffer no exception, unless possibly by divine intervention.” Under a Thomistic dispensation, reason and revelation are reconciled in such a manner as to imply (1) that all men are conscience-bound to obey the natural law, even in its immutable first principles, and (2) that this places an undue burden on the latitude exercised by statesmen in their pursuit of the common weal. Thus, Montesquieu (a “modern” under any reasonable interpretation of Strauss’s “ancients”/”moderns” distinction) “tried to recover for statesmanship a latitude which had been considerably restricted by the Thomistic teaching.” The seeming gap between the “ancient” teleological view of political life and at least the early “modern” view (embodied in the writings of Machiavelli and Montesquieu) is bridged by a common rejection of immutable first principles that would limit the statesman’s capacity to do what might be necessary to serve the regime.12 It would seem, therefore, that the only way for political philosophers to salvage political wheat from the chaff of St. Thomas’s effort to reconcile reason and revelation is to return to a more overtly “classical” view of politics, or perhaps to argue for a Christian view which more greatly minimizes the difficulties caused by the ‘Christianizing” of “classical” political philosophy by portraying the Christian view of politics as an interesting footnote to Greek classicism.13"

I think Hunt's main point is that one does not have to throw in completely with all the implications of ancient philosophy to avoid the pitfalls of modern relativism.  The "immutable first principles" discussed here would seem to be rooted in imago dei and the inherent worth of the individual. My question is why any regime, whether ancient or modern, that would reject these principles is worth serving? 

Robert P. Hunt on Leo Strauss

The following in an excerpt from the essay Christianity, Leo Strauss, and the Ancients/Moderns Distinction by Robert P. Hunt:      

Leo Strauss’s effort to rekindle an appreciation of classical political philosophy in the face of the challenges posed to it, and to any serious effort to recover the truth about political things, is to be commended. Strauss’s seeming “moral realist” approach to the study of political life was viewed by many of his contemporaries, influenced as they were by the tenets of value non-cognitivism, positivism, and historicism, as hopelessly naïve. These proponents of a “value-free”political science believed that one could understand the workings of political institutions and the ideologies that supplied justifications for those institutions without reference to some transcendent source of meaning and purpose. As Strauss ably pointed out, however, these “value-free” efforts were doomed to trivialize the study of political things, replacing political philosophy (“a doctrine which claims to be true”) with the history of political philosophy (“a survey of more or less brilliant errors”).1 For Strauss, liberal modernity was incapable of providing sustenance for an experiment in self-government, most especially that experiment explicitly grounded in an acknowledgement of the “truthfulness’” of natural rights claims.2

For Roman Catholics in particular, Strauss’s work—and the work of the scholars who express an intellectual indebtedness to him—is of special importance. It has forced them to reconsider the relationship between the Roman Catholic intellectual tradition and classical political philosophy. It has also forced them to consider the wisdom of any full-throated embrace of liberal modernity, particularly in light of the development of Catholic social and political thought as embodied in the teachings of the Second Vatican Council. Moreover, as Father James V. Schall has noted, Strauss (along with Hannah Arendt and Eric Voegelin) has “forcefully raised the question about the relation of reason and revelation, of modern and classical political philosophy to each other,” thus challenging “the very philosophy upon which the modern state has rested.”3

Central to the Roman Catholic tradition’s quest for a fuller understanding of its own intellectual premises, however, is a need to understand the relationship of the tradition to Strauss in particular and to the reading of intellectual history upon which the Straussian distinction between “ancients” and “moderns” rests. The use of the word distinction here is important, for few Roman Catholics would argue that there is indeed a distinction between a type of philosophical and moral realism that acknowledges the existence of a hierarchy of ends within nature itself—usually associated with the tenets of “classical” or “ancient” philosophy—and a philosophical and moral voluntarism and nominalism that acknowledges no natural teleology and reifies human choice as the highest human good—usually associated with “modern” philosophy. To the extent that the Straussian distinction between “ancients” and “moderns” points Catholics back to this fundamental philosophical “turn,” thereby assisting Roman Catholics to appreciate the consequences of liberal modernity’s rejection of the aforementioned transcendent norms and standards that are not a product of human will, it is helpful. To the extent to which it is hardened into something more than a useful distinction—that is, into a principled dichotomy whereunder the person who employs it seems to be pushed into embracing either classical or modern philosophy, especially as Strauss characterizes the distinction—it might fail to do full justice to the richness and integrity of the Catholic intellectual tradition and that tradition’s reflections upon the nature, purpose, and limits of political life. I will argue that Strauss’s distinction between “ancients” and “moderns” in general and between “classical” and “modern” political philosophy in particular does tend toward a dichotomizing of intellectual history whereunder even an ostensibly Catholic view of political life is, upon even a favorable reading of Strauss’s distinction, more classical than Catholic in its philosophic orientation and political ramifications.4

Ted McAllister has pointed out that “Strauss devoted little space [in his works] to an examination of Christianity,” but that “he often employed a more expansive language” in his analysis of natural right and natural law, “designed to suggest to the uninitiated reader a broad Judeo-Christian tradition when he meant the Jewish heritage simply.”5  McAllister’s reference to “the uninitiated reader” and the inference he draws from it is based at least in part on Strauss’s famous hermeneutic distinction between exoteric and esoteric writing and the need for the philosopher, in the interest of the commonweal, to cloak or disguise his true philosophic intentions. On this reading, “the great quarrel” and tension between Jerusalem (representing revelation-based societal adherence to divine law) and Athens (representing the corrosive character of reason and of true philosophic inquiry) is “the root of Western civilization,” not the transition from Greek particularism to Roman universalism.6 The recovery of the root of western civilization, therefore, requires not merely a return to classical political philosophy as Strauss understands it, but to an awareness of the tension between the conflicting demands of reason and revelation. The effort to dissolve the tension in the interest of revelational norms or philosophic truth is one of the hallmarks of modern philosophy and its proclivity toward political utopianism."

There is a lot said here and much of it is, as TVD would say, the "tall weeds" of scholarship.  I thought it germane to this blog on many levels but particularly since it mentions modern philosophies "proclivity toward utopianism" which I stated in a recent post was the Enlightenment answer to the Christian notion of the "millennial reign of Christ".  This is the much ignored back drop in many discussions on political theory leading up to, and many years after, the founding.  It would seem me that one, the other, or both was at the root of "American Exceptionalism".  In fact, if this book is correct, this concept was in the forefront of the Puritan mind that spoke of a "City on a Hill".  

Anyway, that is what jumped out to me. But, like I said there is a lot here, and I would like to here from others that may have insights.

Aquinas, the Social Contract, and Catholic Resistance Theory

Here is a good article on Aquinas, the social contract, and Catholic resistance theory.


A taste:

"One of the myths of the English-speaking world is that there was an internal connection between Protestantism and freedom. Martin Luther supposedly instituted an age of individual freedom of expression when he challenged the monolithic authority of Pope and Church. In fact, the vast majority of Protestant Reformers were just as intolerant as their Roman Catholic counterparts. There was no more tolerance of heterodox views in Calvin's Geneva or Cotton's Massachusetts than in Spain under the Inquisition.

In Hispanic countries, in contrast, Catholicism is often seen as the seed bed of democratic ideas. Thomist notions (that is to say, notions derived from the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, 1225-74) of natural law were inherently hostile to arbitrary or despotic government. During the Religious Wars in France, Roman Catholic Leaguers wrote tracts in support of resistance to tyrannical rulers, and developed theories of original popular sovereignty.

In much of Central and Eastern Europe, the Counter-Reformation Church allied with secular authorities to reconvert the population to Catholicism and so (particularly from the later 17th century) Catholicism and Absolutism became seen as natural allies - embodied in the person of the Catholic absolutist Louis XIV of France. But this link was far from clear in Western Europe in the age of Shakespeare."

Fukuyama, Liberal Democracy, and the Tibetan Lamb

It has been about year since I started contributing to this blog and I have learned a great deal over that year and even before that as a reader and commenter.  In fact, I came to this discussion with a desire to answer some questions I had been thinking about for quite a while and have found a lot of answers. Questions that started when I began to study the rate of Christianization among the Tibetan speaking peoples of Asia a few years ago when I was there.

What I had begun to notice, in my studies, was that of these 800 or so distinct ethnic groups that all started out on the Tibetan plateau, the ones that lived in more "liberal" nations had a far higher Christianization rate than those who did not. In other words, all of the groups that had almost no interaction with Christianity(or for that matter any foreign ideas) seemed to live under totalitarian regimes or strict theocracies. 

Ok, I am sure that many of you are asking what any of this has to do with American Creation?  Well, this realization was the spark that re-ignited my interest in political theory that brought me to this blog.  The long and short of it is that I had just witnessed first hand what I had read about in Jihad vs. McWorld years earlier about the coming clash between the modern and tribal world. More specifically, I began to focus on the role that just government could play as this script was acted out.  This is the focus I brought to AC.

As I wrote, commented, and listened to many diverse points of view here there was one statement that continued to pop up over and over again that caught my attention.  Here it is in the words of Ed Brayton from Dispatches:

"There isn't a single provision in the Bill of Rights that has any concept even remotely analogous in the Bible. The Bible does not say a word about political liberty or political rights."

I am sure many of you are wondering about how what I shared about Tibet and just government have to do with Ed's statement?  It is quite simple, in that I feel that rights are fundamental to all just government. So if Ed is right that would mean that the Bible does not promote just government.  This implication would completely contradict my view that one of the main Christian obligations to the tribal world is to aid them in establishing just governments.  In other words, for a well meaning Christian that wants to bring heaven to earth this pursuit could be a waste of time.

With that said, as I began to study this topic it became abundantly clear that major streams of Christian Thought have used the Bible to promote the merits of just government based on inalienable rights; confirming that the pursuit of these ideals was not a waste of time. In fact, these rights were said to be grounded in man being made in the image of God.  Simply put, according to the way some interpret the Bible man has an inherent dignity because, as Locke would say, he is the "workmanship of God".  If true, this directly contradicts statements like the one made by Ed Brayton and brings into question what version of Christian theology he and others that follow his line of reasoning are beholden to?   

Now some might say, "What is all this theological talk doing on a history blog?"  I would retort that it is impossible to have a reasonable historical discussion when such profound ignorance about the relevant theology exists. Nonetheless,  I think it proper to stray away from truth claims and focus on the validity of labeling various streams of political theology as legitimately Christian or not.

If this is a valid line of historical inquiry, and I think that a proper understanding of Church history says it is, then the questions about the founders and their view of the foundations of just government would seem to boil down to these essential two:

1. Is there a historically valid biblical case for rights grounded in imago dei?
2. Is this case for rights that was used at the founding?

These two questions are at the heart of our ongoing discussion about vast differences in certain aspects of Enlightenment and Christian thinking and knowing the difference.  Especially those aspects that revolve around what Francis Fukuyama would call "the end of history" which was a popular topic of discussion in both circles during the founding era and into the next century.  The former called it the millennial reign of Christ and the latter utopia but both were looking forward to the day where lion shall lie down next to lamb. Which both seem to agree is only possible in a universal state of just government. A concept that goes back to Plato and Fukuyama's thesis brings back into the forefront.

At the heart of the modern version of this discussion is if "liberal democracy" is the key to a universal state of just government?  If so it seems prudent to ask what form of "liberal democracy"? That is if there is more than one form. I would submit that there is and that one is based on Enlightenment thought and its idea of man made rights and another on Christian thought and imago dei. If America is to be the example to be followed by the rest of the world then my two questions above carry great weight. That is because I don't think Fukuyama's version of the "end of history" refers to the Christian influenced version of "liberal democracy" and if the foundation of our success the last 200 years is found in God given inalienable rights this could be bad news for the Tibetan lamb.


It is also a shame because I think there is a possibility that Islam may allow for inalienable rights based on imago dei as well. But that is a discussion for another day. 

While We're At It

Here is a link to a series of essays about political theology and modernity from 2007 at Cato Unbound. Much of what we have been discussing here the last few months was discussed there.  It is interesting stuff to say the least.  This outstanding post by Jon Rowe at "The One Way" hits on this theme as well. I think it was was also from 2007. 

Strauss in mentioned in Jon's post and the so called Neo-Conservative roots of our War on Terrorism policy is at the heart of the Cato essays. So for Phil's sake, I am going to make this more of an open thread and allow for some contemporary political insights hoping it remains within the frame that Jon's post emphasizes about how we can learn from our own intellectual history on religion and tolerance as we seek to influence Islamic parts of the world.

Kraynak: Christianity vs. Modernity III

There has been a great deal of dialogue on this blog about the differences between the French and American Revolutions, and more generally between European and American styles of liberal democracy.  Also, much has been recently stated about Leo Strauss and the whole classical vs. modern debate as well and how the discussions about liberal democracy fit into this frame.  I hope that this third, and final, excerpt from Robert P. Hunt's essay Robert Kraynak: Christianity vs. Modernity adds to this discussion.

Here it is:

"The second of Kraynak’s major theses--that any endorsement in principle of human rights and democracy might constitute a surrender by Christianity to modernity--is the more controversial of the two, especially for those of us who reject the liberal model of man and society but who believe that a principled (and non-liberal) Christian defense of human rights and constitutional democracy is consistent with traditional Christian natural law teaching. I wish to focus the remainder of my comments on this latter thesis, and question whether Kraynak’s effort to link Christian personalism--and, most especially, the Catholic personalism of the Second Vatican Council and figures such as Maritain and Murray--and liberal democracy is entirely successful. I will argue that Kraynak’s argument is grounded in a reading of intellectual history that, contrary to his own stated purpose, fails to do full justice to the distinctiveness of the Christian tradition and its developing understanding of the limited, yet invariably moral, nature of the state.

Kraynak’s argument seems for the most part to be an extension to the whole of contemporary Christianity of themes addressed by the late Ernest Fortin, who focused on what he perceived to be the weaknesses of contemporary Roman Catholic social thought. Fortin wondered whether any Catholic defense of human rights and religious freedom as anything other than a prudential concession to the political facts on the ground might not place contemporary Catholic social thought in conflict with its historic commitments to "virtue, character formation, and the common good." For Fortin, this might produce within the Catholic tradition "a latent bifocalism that puts it at odds with itself and thereby weakens it to a considerable extent."2 Those who would wish to preserve these historic commitments to a hierarchically ordered view of nature ground their arguments in a philosophical anthropology that takes most of its political bearings from the insights of ancient political philosophy. By contrast, Catholic personalism and rights talk is liberal and modernist in orientation--the two terms being somewhat interchangeable. To endorse human rights and democracy as a matter of principle is to endorse the modern project.

Kraynak argues that there are "three great periods of Christian theology, each associated with a dominant philosopher": (1) the Platonic or NeoPlatonic Christianity of the early Church fathers; (2) the Aristotelian Christianity of medieval Scholastic theology; and (3) the Kantian Christianity of modernity (Kraynak, 153 ff.) The reader is left to infer that pre-modern (i.e.Platonic and Aristotelian) Christianity was teleological, hierocratic, prudentialist, and not favorably disposed to rights talk or democracy. (Kraynak dismisses all too quickly the efforts of scholars such as Brian Tierney to establish that "natural rights" talk originated among medieval constitutionalists.) By contrast, modern Kantian Christianity is deontological (it adopts a morality and politics of categorical imperatives), egalitarian, rights-oriented, and pro-democratic. At a number of points, Kraynak seems to assume that all rights talk is liberal and modernist (neo-Kantian) and that liberal democracy and constitutional democracy are synonymous. At others, particularly in his analysis of contemporary Catholic social thought, he retreats slightly from this assumption, at least as regards the efforts of Catholics to avoid the pitfalls of philosophical liberalism.

In support of the former assumption, Kraynak argues, for example, that "today, the term 'person' refers to a human being with a duty to forge his or her own identity or moral personality by an assertion of the will" (Kraynak, 154), that "the deep premise of rights is the natural freedom and natural equality of the autonomous self"(Kraynak,172). Even though modern Christian theologians believe that rights can be detached from these voluntaristic premises, the subversive nature of "the deep premises" gradually take over because "rights are essentially ungrateful claims against authority, either for protections and immunities against authority or for entitlements against authority" (Kraynak, 172). Thus, the fundamental premises of contemporary republican self-government are, at root, individualistic and voluntaristic: "those who see republican self-government as the decisive test of human dignity oppose any authority that stands above the will of the people" (Kraynak, 24). And "many modern Christians" have bought into the Kantian, modernist assertion "that the consent of the people and human rights are the sole legitimizing principles of political authority" (Kraynak,181)." (Bold text is mine)

The point contained in the first bold faced text is giant obstacle to arguments that claim there is no biblical source of rights and that "rights talk" is an Enlightenment interpolation to authentic Christian thought.  This line of reasoning results in statements similar to those found in the second bold faced text that fail to realize that consent of the governed and human rights were ideas that had been around in Christianity long before Kant was even born.  Brian Tierney's arguments that seek to prove this point remain untouched while the culture war obsession with lesser lights like David Barton and Peter Lillback rages on.  I guess it is easier to pick the low hanging fruit?