Nicholas Wolterstorff - The Mighty and the Almighty: An Essay in Political Theology

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The Mighty and the Almighty

For a century or more, political theology has been in decline. Recent years, however, have seen increasing interest not only in how church and state should be related, but in the relation between divine authority and political authority, and in what religion has to say about the limits of state authority and the grounds of political obedience. In this book, Nicholas Wolterstorff addresses this whole complex of issues. He takes account of traditional answers to these questions, but on every point stakes out new positions. Wolterstorff offers a fresh theological defense of liberal democracy, argues that the traditional doctrine of two rules should be rejected, and offers a fresh exegesis of Romans 13, the canonical biblical passage for the tradition of Christian political theology. This book provides useful discussion for scholars and students of political theology, law and religion, philosophy of religion, and social ethics.

NICHOLAS WOLTERSTORFF is Noah Porter Professor Emeritus of Philosophical Theology at Yale University, and Senior Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, University of Virginia. He is author of several publications, including Divine Discourse (Cambridge, 1995), John Locke and the Ethics of Belief (Cambridge, 1996), Practices of Belief (ed. Terence Cuneo, Cambridge, 2010), and Justice: Rights and Wrongs (2010).

The Mighty and the Almighty
An Essay in Political Theology

Nicholas Wolterstorff

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, So Paulo, Delhi, Mexico City

Cambridge University Press

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK

Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York

www.cambridge.org

Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107027312

Nicholas Wolterstorff 2012

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2012

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wolterstorff, Nicholas.

The mighty and the almighty : an essay in political theology / Nicholas Wolterstorff.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-107-02731-2 (Hardback)

1. Political theology. 2. Church and state. 3. Christianity and politics. I. Title.

BT83.59.W65 2012

261.7dc23

2012017168

ISBN 978-1-107-02731-2 Hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

Acknowledgments

I was invited to deliver the Stone Lectures at Princeton Theological Seminary in 1998, the centenary of the delivery of the lectures by the Dutch neo-Calvinist politician and theologian Abraham Kuyper (18371920). The project Kuyper set for himself in his lectures was to articulate the essence of Calvinism and point to the contribution of Calvinism to various aspects of the modern world. The title of his third lecture was Calvinism and Politics. In this lecture he offered an imaginative and provocative theological account of political authority. I decided to honor the centenary by reflecting anew on the relation between divine and political authority, incorporating into my discussion some reflections on what Kuyper had to say on the topic.

I was not happy with the lectures in the form in which I delivered them; so rather than preparing them for publication, I set them aside. Every now and then in subsequent years I returned to them, reorganized them, revised some passages, developed some points more fully, and so forth; but each time I once again found myself unhappy with the result. It was the stimulus provided by my participation in the McDonald Project on Christian Jurisprudence, led by Frank Alexander and John Witte of the Law School of Emory University, that made me take up the project yet one more time; otherwise I would have discarded it as a good idea that didn't work out. I thank Alexander and Witte, along with the participants in that Project, for their provocations; and I thank the faculty of Princeton Theological Seminary for the honor of their inviting me to deliver the Stone Lectures on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of Kuyper's delivering them.

I am currently a Senior Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. I warmly thank the Institute for the extremely pleasant environment it provides for thinking, reading, and writing, and for its financial support. My writing was also supported, when I was a Senior Fellow of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University, by a generous grant to the Center from the Alonzo L. McDonald Family Agape Foundation. I wish to thank Ambassador Alonzo L. McDonald, Peter McDonald, and the other McDonald Agape Foundation Trustees for their support and encouragement. The opinions in this publication are mine, however, and may well not reflect the views of the Foundation or the Center.

My title, The Mighty and the Almighty , is not original with me. It's the title of a lecture that Madeleine Albright gave at Yale University and that she subsequently used as the title of a book in which she expanded her lecture. I have no idea whether it was original with her.

Finally, I thank Terence Cuneo, Chris Eberle, Miroslav Volf, and Kevin Vallier for their very helpful comments on earlier drafts of the essay. The flaws that remain are to be laid at my door.

Abraham Kuyper, Calvinism: The Stone Lectures for 18981899 (New York: Fleming H. Revell Co., n.d.).

Introduction

In his book The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West , Mark Lilla observes that In most civilizations known to us, in most times and places, when human beings have reflected on political questions they have appealed to God when answering them. Their thinking has taken the form of political theology. Political theology is a primordial form of human thought (34). Lilla goes on to remark that now the long tradition of Christian political theology is forgotten, and with it memory of the age-old human quest to bring the whole of human life under God's authority (5). We in the West have been separated from our own long theological tradition of political thought by a revolution in Western thinking that began roughly four centuries ago. We live, so to speak, on the other shore. When we observe civilizations on the opposite bank, we are puzzled, since we have only a distant memory of what it was like to think as they do (4). Lilla's book tells the story of how The Great Separation, as he calls it, came about.

These remarks of Lilla may lead some readers to infer that whereas once upon a time one turned to theologians and theologically inclined philosophers for a lively discussion of the authority of the state, now one looks to secular philosophers and political theorists for that lively discussion. One would look in vain. The topic of political authority has very nearly fallen off the agenda of theorists generally. In The Authority of the State , the philosopher Leslie Green remarks about recent political theory that the general problem of political authority is rarely regarded as being of primary importance. He says that there would not now be much agreement with T. D. Weldon's claim, made early in the twentieth century, that The aim of political philosophy is to discover the grounds on which the State claims to exercise authority over its members. Few of the most powerful contemporary thinkers... would accept this view.

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