Five Views on the Church and Politics
240
Five Views on the Church and Politics
240eBook
Related collections and offers
Overview
Learn to think deeply about the relationship between church and state in a way that goes beyond mere policy debates and current campaigns.
Few topics can grab headlines and stir passions quite like politics, especially when the church is involved. Considering the attention that many Christian parachurch groups, churches, and individual believers give to politics--and of the varying and sometimes divergent political ideals and aims among them--Five Views on the Church and Politics provides a helpful breakdown of the possible Christian approaches to political involvement.
General Editor Amy Black brings together five top-notch political theologians in the book, each representing one of the five key political traditions within Christianity:
- Anabaptist (Separationist: the most limited possible Christian involvement in politics) - represented by Thomas Heilke
- Lutheran (Paradoxical: strong separation of church and state) – represented by Robert Benne
- Black Church (Prophetic: the church's mission is to be a voice for communal reform) – represented by Bruce Fields
- Reformed (Transformationist: emphasizes God's sovereignty over all things, including churches and governments) – represented by James K. A. Smith
- Catholic (Synthetic: encouragement of political participation as a means to further the common good of all people) – represented by J. Brian Benestad
Each author addresses his tradition's theological distinctives, the role of government, the place of individual Christian participation in government and politics, and how churches should (or should not) address political questions. Responses by each contributor to opposing views will highlight key areas of difference and disagreement.
Thorough and even-handed, Five Views on the Church and Politics will enable readers to consider the strengths and weaknesses of the most significant Christian views on political engagement and to draw their own, informed conclusions.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780310517931 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Zondervan Academic |
| Publication date: | 12/15/2015 |
| Series: | Counterpoints: Bible and Theology |
| Sold by: | HarperCollins Publishing |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
J. Brian Benestad (PhD, Boston College) is the D-Amour Chair of Catholic Thought at Assumption College in Worcester, Massachusetts. The editor of Fellowship of Catholic Scholars Quarterly, his published works include The Pursuit of a Just Social Order and Church, State, and Society: An Introduction to Catholic Social Doctrine.
Robert Benne (Ph.D., University of Chicago) is Jordan-Trexler Professor Emeritus and research associate at Roanoke College. He founded the Roanoke College Center for Religion in 1982 and is the author of twelve books including Good and Bad Ways to Think About Religion and Politics, Reasonable Ethics, and A Christian Approach to Social, Economic, and Political Concerns.
Bruce L. Fields (Ph.D., Marquette University) is associate professor of biblical and systematic theology and chair of the biblical and systematic theology department at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He is the author of Introducing Black Theology: Three Crucial Questions for the Evangelical Church.
Thomas W. Heilke (Ph.D., Duke University) is associate dean of graduate studies and professor of political science at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. He is author, co-author, or co-editor of more than 40 publications, including Voegelin on the Idea of Race and Nietzsche's Tragic Regime: Culture, Aesthetics, and Political Education.
James K. A. Smith is professor of philosophy at Calvin College where he holds the Gary & Henrietta Byker Chair in Applied Reformed Theology & Worldview. The author of many books, including the award-winning Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? and Desiring the Kingdom, Smith is a Cardus senior fellow and serves as editor of Comment magazine.
Amy E. Black (Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology) is professor of political science at Wheaton College. She is the author of Honoring God in Red or Blue, Beyond Left and Right, and Helping Christians Make Sense of American Politics, as well as many articles, reviews, and commentaries that have appeared in publications such as Christianity Today, Books & Culture, and the Christian Science Monitor.
Stanley N. Gundry is executive vice president and editor-in-chief for the Zondervan Corporation. He has been an influential figure in the Evangelical Theological Society, serving as president of ETS and on its executive committee, and is adjunct professor of Historical Theology at Grand Rapids Theological Seminary. He is the author of seven books and has written many articles appearing in popular and academic periodicals.
Read an Excerpt
Five Views on the Church and Politics
By Amy E. Black, J. Brian Benestad, Robert Benne, Bruce Fields, Thomas W. Heilke, James K.A. Smith
ZONDERVAN
Copyright © 2015 Amy E. Black, J. Brian Benestad, Robert Benne, Bruce Fields, Thomas W. Heilke, and James K.A. SmithAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-310-51792-4
CHAPTER 1
THE ANABAPTIST (SEPARATIONIST) VIEW
THOMAS W. HEILKE
Introduction
In 1994, Richard J. Mouw, then-President of Fuller Theological Seminary, wrote a foreword to a collection of essays by Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder. He suggested that — thanks in good part to Yoder's work — adherents of the Reformed, Lutheran, or Roman Catholic traditions could no longer either ignore or politely condescend to the claims, arguments, and practices of the Anabaptist tradition.
Professor Mouw's observation was a remarkable and generous nod to Yoder's theological project, and perhaps a confirmation of a growing assertion among Mennonite theologians and historians that Anabaptists do have "modern relevance." But the descendants of the early Anabaptists make up today, as they did five centuries ago, an exceedingly small portion of global Christianity: "Anabaptism forms but a rivulet in the stream of Christian tradition." Nevertheless, Mouw argued that Christians who are not of this tiny minority should pay attention to what it has to say. Why?
In this book, five scholars have been asked to explicate five Christian views of politics. Along with at least two other traditions represented in this book, the Anabaptists arose in the early sixteenth century, a European era of vigorous and widespread political, economic, and religious disruption and dissent. Modern-day groups that trace their heritage or origins to the Anabaptists include Mennonites, Swiss Brethren, Amish, and Hutterites. When Anabaptism has been recognized at all, it has traditionally been "for its ethics."
Politics is perhaps at the pinnacle of "applied ethics," but the "separationist" political ethic that has generally been attributed to Anabaptists would seem to exclude them from seriously addressing political problems with anyone outside their tradition. I will suggest, however, that the Anabaptist "radical wing" of the Protestant Reformation offers a clear alternative to those Christian traditions in the West that are situated in some more or less recognizable "Magisterial" stream. Perhaps the Anabaptist movement — with all its flaws — expresses an ever-present possibility of the Christian gospel that is gaining traction as the magisterial churches are becoming gradually "disestablished" and therefore find themselves confronting a world in which their sociopolitical status looks increasingly similar to that of minority groups like the Anabaptists in what was once Christendom.
Aspects of the Anabaptist movement have been multiply expressed in other movements from some of the traditions identified in this book (for example, in the simple asceticism and missionary impulse of St. Francis of Assisi, or the emphasis on ethical probity in the Lutheran pietism of Nicholaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf, or the missionary impulse of early Calvinism). But does Anabaptism, broadly speaking, really possess distinctive characteristics that together form a coherent body of thought concerning political questions that deserves the kind of consideration implied in Professor Mouw's praise for Yoder's work?
The early Anabaptists never produced a coherent work of "political thought," and neither are their modern-day heirs generally noted for such. Nevertheless, I will argue that the early Anabaptists did leave deep traces of political thought. General impressions notwithstanding, a number of contemporary authors who are self-described heirs of the Anabaptists have produced substantive, engaged, practically minded accounts of social and political life. The work of Yoder, to which Mouw was responding, is the most widely known of this group. Other authors include Duane Friesen, Ron Sider, and more narrowly, John Redekop, along with the Mennonite fellow traveler and Methodist theologian Stanley Hauerwas.
Anabaptist Beginnings
Anabaptism began more or less as a recognizable movement on January 21, 1525, when Conrad Grebel, the son of a Zurich patrician, baptized ("re-baptized") George Blaurock, a Roman Catholic priest, at the Zurich home of Felix Manz. This "rebaptism" had profound ecclesiastical — and therefore political — implications, and the participants were aware of those possibilities. Several of these soon-to-be Anabaptists belonged to the circle of friends and students around the Zurich reformer Huldrych Zwingli, who swiftly condemned the baptism.
Zwingli's opprobrium became part of a complex of persecution and condemnation such that, within ten years of this first baptism, nearly the entire first generation of Anabaptist leaders had been executed. It was from this group that an initial political theology, or even a general tradition of political-theological inquiry, gradually arose. Robert Friedmann points out, in his search for a core Anabaptist theology with which to account for Anabaptist distinctives, that "[i]t is clear that besides Balthasar Hubmaier (d. 1528), who was a doctor of theology (from a Catholic university), there were no trained theologians in the broad array of Anabaptist writers and witnesses." In Franklin Littell's assessment, however,
Although the best-educated leadership was martyred during the first years, the early leaders — Grebel, Hubmaier, Denck, Hetzer — were men of marked accomplishment in the university world, a world inspired by the new Humanistic studies.
Michael Sattler was a prior of a Benedictine abbey before his conversion to Anabaptism, and Menno Simons was a Catholic priest. Both had received theological training. Nevertheless, neither a definitive political-philosophical treatise nor a strong tradition of articulated political thought emerged from the work of the early Anabaptist leaders.
As the Anabaptist movement developed, most of the disparate groups identified under that label continued to encounter a hostility often connected to a well-tuned violence that offered little leisure in which to formulate a coherent, systematic, and focused theology. Anabaptists tended to focus on personal ethical behavior ("discipleship") and a corresponding unity and purity of the community of believers. Both emphases derived from Anabaptist emphasis on the life and example of Jesus as the model for Christian behavior individually and communally, with a diminished focus on traditional political-philosophical questions of who should rule, in what manner, with regard to what ends, and why.
Beyond questions of Christian behavior and several of the usual doctrinal questions in dispute during the sixteenth century, the next and largely pragmatic concerns of Anabaptist leaders had to do with the survival of the community of believers. Ongoing persecution that forced the dispersion of Anabaptist leaders and believers into various parts of Europe initially enhanced Anabaptist proselytizing tendencies, but eventually forced a policy of "withdrawal" as a matter of survival, diminishing any nascent theological activity out of which might arise something resembling a coherent body of political thought.
Anabaptist Identity(s)
Political thought as traditionally understood is usually undertaken by people who can imagine themselves in positions of power or in positions to influence those who wield power. It has been undertaken much less often by people whose very existence is under threat and whose chances of proximity to power are nil. Both political thought and political theology are activities of reflection that require schole, or leisure, preceded in nearly all cases by the luxury of extensive education.
The first circumstance is unlikely under conditions of persistent suppression and persecution, and the second — at least after the early generation of leaders had been killed — was not a common characteristic of those who joined the Anabaptist movements. Thus, as Mouw rightly points out, a weakness developed in Anabaptist theology from the start: "historical and biblical studies have often been preferred over systematic theology among the Mennonites and their kin."
Those Anabaptists who, like Pilgram Marpeck, were afforded these two luxuries and not killed early in their careers, were either not trained in theology (Marpeck, for example, was a highly skilled engineer), or — like Menno Simons (who had rest from persecution for brief periods) — were concerned overwhelmingly with a specific set of doctrinal questions that formed the loci of attacks on them, or with matters of personal ethics, and with the preservation of their harassed communities of believers. Nevertheless, the Anabaptists recognized the political realm of human activity, and they articulated a general set of attitudes toward it that we can tease out with confidence.
A second difficulty attends the problem of an abbreviated political vision: The beginning of Anabaptism was a relatively amorphous undertaking of disparate movements, with various groups more or less identified as Anabaptist arising in several northern cantons of Switzerland, a number of southern German polities, and the Low Countries. The result of this dispersion of origins and developments is that Anabaptist identity cannot be easily established around some set of doctrines or ideas — including political ones. Along a register of doctrines and orientations, we see a wide diversity of perspectives, developments, and settlements in the so-called Radical Reformation; of its many movements, Anabaptism is perhaps the widest and certainly the most important surviving thread, but it is itself a thread of many smaller filaments. This characteristic of Anabaptist multiple origins (polygenesis) is not a mere methodological dispute; in regard to political life, it will influence how we read the "separationism" of Anabaptism.
For purposes of this essay, I will describe Anabaptists as Peter Gay characterized the philosophers of the Enlightenment: They were a grouping of the like-minded with what Ludwig Wittgenstein might have called a "family resemblance." Their articulations of theological, political, economic, and ecclesiological perspectives, doctrines, or ideas should be understood not as expressions of "Platonic ideas," but rather as "baskets collecting significant similarities." It is from those baskets that we can draw something of enduring value to reward the charity Mouw expresses.
The heterogeneity of Anabaptist thought is rendered less unusual or even "foreign" if we consider that magisterial reformation thought, too, is not entirely unitary. There is, for example, development in Lutheran and Reformed thought after Luther and Calvin. Consider the names Philip Melanchthon, John Knox, and Abraham Kuyper. In the Roman Catholic tradition, the works of Thomas Aquinas were under severe attack for a period of time. The existence of conflict, amendment, and creative re-working indicates a vital, living tradition, of which deep-seated disagreement is but one feature. At the same time, Luther, Calvin, Augustine, and Aquinas all set in motion broad patterns or even schools of thinking, so that to speak of each of them as a fountainhead is not simply mythmaking. The influence of neo-Platonism and pagan administrative practices on Augustine, of Aristotle and Averroes on Aquinas, of Occamite nominalism on Luther, and of Stoicism and a particular interpretation of Augustine on Calvin, not to mention the influence on all four of specifically classical Greek philosophical modes of inquiry,20 established specific vocabularies of thought, inquiry, and doctrine in all four cases. These traditions therefore appear at their origins less "basket-like" than Anabaptism, but it is not entirely clear whether the assumption of consequently greater cohesion or even coherence is in all cases warranted.
Because Anabaptism was an amorphous, lay-led movement — rather than an agenda of reform headed by a single, identifiable individual in a specific city or territory where he enjoyed some level of official protection or at least toleration — the fragmented and not unitarily representative character of the Anabaptist movement can make a discussion of "Anabaptist thought" on any matter at times frustratingly fraught with pitfalls.
Anabaptist Theological Distinctives
With appropriate caveats in place, let us nevertheless propose that the several "baskets collecting significant similarities" among the Anabaptists included three distinctives that are pertinent to political-theoretical concerns.
First, Jesus is the central focus. In the words of contemporary Anabaptist writer Stuart Murray, Jesus is "example, teacher, friend, redeemer and Lord." For sixteenth-century Anabaptists (and for their various modern heirs), Jesus is to be not only worshiped or admired, but followed. He is "the central reference point for [Anabaptist] faith," for its understanding of the church, and its point of entry for engaging with the surrounding society. This centrality could also be identified in the claim that "Jesus is the focal point of God's revelation." Reading and interpreting the Christian Bible and understanding its implications for individual and communal existence begins with placing the Jesus revealed there in the center of all interpretive implications for the life and practice of individual believers and the community of believers alike.
Second, Anabaptists hold to an ecclesiology that affirms a "priesthood of all believers" and emphasizes lay leadership, even while acknowledging ministers, missionaries, and other designated leaders. The community of believers exists for the purpose of mutual spiritual, economic, and moral support and discipleship. Anabaptists therefore insist on a separation of ecclesiastical affairs from the oversight of political authorities. Christian communities of believers are independent of any political authority, and membership is based on confessed belief in the God and the theological principles around which the believing community is formed. It is for this reason that Anabaptists, to express it negatively, are universally anti-pedobaptist: Infants and children cannot voluntarily join the community upon a confession of their own faith.
Third, Anabaptists have a general inclination toward nonviolence that is usually expressed in forms of pacifism, including a refusal to serve in the military or to swear oaths of loyalty to a particular regime. The Anabaptist rationale for this principle was essentially the one that Luther and Augustine and a host of other Christian thinkers had previously identified: The use of violence and divided loyalties are inconsistent with the teachings and practices of Jesus. The Sermon on the Mount has been an especially important source for such arguments.
In these three broad distinctives we can also see three ways that polygenesis affects Anabaptist beliefs, doctrines, and intentions. First, most of these distinctives were in some dispute in the early years of Anabaptist development. The basic distinctives that I have listed here — limited to those doctrines and practices that have a discernible influence on Anabaptist thought, practice, or doctrine concerning politics — are more or less "settled" within, if not among, modern Anabaptist groups. Second, Anabaptist polygenesis has also meant that the meaning of these distinctives has been in some dispute among scholars. The implications for political thought and practice are therefore unlikely to be certain until the meaning — again — is "settled," at least provisionally, within that group. Finally, and closely related to the second consideration, these distinctives may have different implications at different times for any specific concerns regarding Christian behavior and access to the political realm.
Can anything even vaguely like a coherent political doctrine — let alone a political philosophy — grow from this woven container that is Anabaptism? For an answer, we must consider distinctive Anabaptist political thinking in its historical and contemporary contexts.
Early Anabaptist Political Thought
Two characteristics of political philosophy set the context for Anabaptist political thought. A version of the political philosophy and virtue ethics of Aristotle — mediated through Thomas Aquinas and other scholastics — and an unpolished version of Augustine's subtle analysis of human affairs offered the Reformation (and Counter-Reformation) thinkers alternative constructs for reflecting on the purposes and possibilities of politics. Roman Catholics and Protestant reformers alike wrestled with the tension: Does government exist to construct and protect a realm of human flourishing, or does it exist essentially to restrain evil? And, following from that tension, what is the role and place of the church?
The Anabaptists were obliged, like all other reformers and social or political thinkers of the time, to work through these questions. That working through took place against the background of social, political, and economic upheaval and crises that included most immediately for the Anabaptists the widespread peasant uprisings of 1524 – 25 in the German-speaking territories of central Europe.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Five Views on the Church and Politics by Amy E. Black, J. Brian Benestad, Robert Benne, Bruce Fields, Thomas W. Heilke, James K.A. Smith. Copyright © 2015 Amy E. Black, J. Brian Benestad, Robert Benne, Bruce Fields, Thomas W. Heilke, and James K.A. Smith. Excerpted by permission of ZONDERVAN.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.