Exegesis and Theology

The Blog of Brian Collins

Kuyper on the Purpose of Government

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A state is not an end in itself. On the contrary, the life of a state, too, is only a means to prepare for a communal life of a still higher order, a life that is already germinating and someday will be gloriously revealed in the kingdom of God.

In that kingdom there will be perfect harmony. Tensions between maximum freedom for the individual and optimal development of communal life will there be replaced by the worship and adoration of God.

To prepare for that, and to contribute to the coming of that kingdom, the state has the calling to provide already now that higher form of community life that can do what family life is not able to do: namely, to ensure a social life where human persons can deploy their latent strengths in the most untrammeled fashion possible.

Abraham Kuyper, Our Program: A Christian Political Manifesto, ed. Jordan J. Ballor, Melvin Flikkema, and Harry Van Dyke, trans. Harry Van Dyke, Abraham Kuyper Collected Works in Public Theology (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press; Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, 2015), 44.

Any form of government, however tyrannical and despotic, is still preferable to complete anarchy. And anarchy, we all know, can be created not only by a revolution with incendiary bombs and pavement stones in the palace courtyard, but just as well by a revolution with slogans and ideas aired in cabinet or parliament!

Government is quite different from administration. The deteriorated constitutional situation into which we are gradually entering increasingly encourages putting administration in the foreground and leaving genuine governance in the background, as though it represents an abuse of power or a luxury we can do without.

Abraham Kuyper, Our Program: A Christian Political Manifesto, ed. Jordan J. Ballor, Melvin Flikkema, and Harry Van Dyke, trans. Harry Van Dyke, Abraham Kuyper Collected Works in Public Theology (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press; Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, 2015), 46.

Jonathan Edwards on the Purpose of Government

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It’s helpful when answering big questions like these to look at the answers of people in other times and other places. Their answers may or may not be right, but they likely share different biases that people of our own time. It’s therefore instructive to look at these answers, to ask if they are biblical, and to ask if they reveal any blind spots we might have as creatures of our own time and place.

Over the next couple days I’ll post quotations from various persons on the question of the purpose of government.

Edwards “preached that magistrates were to ‘act as the fathers of the commonwealth with that care and concern for the public good that the father of a family has for the family, watchful against public dangers, [and] forward to improve their power to promote the public benefit’ [WJE 8:261-62]. Their first three functions of government were to secure property, protect citizens’ rights, and—toward that end—maintain order. . . . Related to these first two functions—protecting property and keeping order—government was also to ensure justice. For Edwards justice was recompense of moral deserts. The evildoer would have evil returned in proportion to his or her evil deeds. Similarly, justice would prevail when the person who loved other received the proper return of his or her love” [WJE 25:321; WJE 8:569].

. . . . . . . . . . .

A fourth responsibility of government for Edwards was national defense. Military force was justified when the ‘rights and privileges’ of a people were threatened or when the ‘preservation of the community or public society requires it.’ If ‘injurious and bloody enemies’ molest and endanger a society it is the duty of government to defend that society by the use of force [WJE 25:133; sermon on Neh. 4:14, WJEO 64].

The next two functions of government referred not to preventable evils but to positive goods—promoting a common morality and a minimum level of material prosperity. The fifth function was to ‘make good laws against immorality,’ for a people that fail in morality would eventually fail in every other way. Rulers therefore were not to ‘countenance vice and wickedness’ by failing to enact legislation against it or enforcing what had been legislated. Sixth, governments were to help the poor. Edwards believed that the state—in his case, a town committee in Northampton—had a responsibility to assist those who were destitute for reasons other than their own laziness or prodigality. The state was also obliged to help the children of the lazy and prodigal. Governmental involvement was necessary because private charity (here Edwards had in mind the charity of churches) was unreliable: ‘In this corrupt world [private charity] is an uncertain thing; and therefore the wisdom of legislators did not think fit to leave those that are so reduced upon such a precarious foundation for subsistence.’ Because of the natural selfishness of all human beings, including the regenerate, it is therefore incumbent upon the Christian to support the state’s efforts to help the destitute [Sermon on Prov. 14:34, WJEO 44; WJE 17:403.]

The seventh and final item in Edwards’s job description for the magistrate was religious. The good ruler was expected to give friendly but distanced support to true religion. During a revival, the magistrate should call a day of prayer or thanksgiving. But he should not try to do much more than that. . . . . In his private notebooks, Edwards reminded himself that the civil authorities were to have ‘nothing to do with matters ecclesiastical, with those things that relate to conscience and eternal salvation or with any matters religious as religious.’ In other words, he would not allow any magistrate to tell his parishioners what church to attend or tell him what to preach .

McClymond & McDermott, The Theology of Jonathan Edwards, 515-17.

The Creation Blessing and the Origin of Governments

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If the Creation Blessing of Genesis 1:26-28 is the foundational text for a biblical theology of government, as argued earlier, then how does one move from the dominion that all mankind is blessed with to a government in which some men rule over others?

Interestingly, this is a matter that engaged political theorists such as Robert Filmer and John Locke. Filmer argued that all governmental authority is patriarchal. Adam was the first ruler because he was the the first father. He sees further evidence that patriarchs were rulers in the fact that Abraham and Esau oversaw armies, that Abraham entered into treaties with kings, and that Judah had the power to sentence Tamar to death. When God established a king in Israel, he did so on a dynastic principle (All of these arguments are found in the first chapter of Filmer’s Patriarcha). The upshot of Filmer’s argument was support for monarchy and opposition to increasing republican and democratic elements.

Locke rejected Filmer’s argument in his First Treatise of Government. Greg Forster summarizes Locke’s counter-proposal:

Locke argues that in God’s design of human nature, the relevant point for this question is that the capacity to have dominion over—to use and destroy—other things, meaning especially the capacities of intellect and will, are present in the entire human species. The need to exercise dominion—the need for food, clothing, etc.—is also diffused throughout the species. Every human being is therefore constructed by God to be an Exerciser of dominion. This implies that no human being is made to be an object of dominion. By nature, then, the human race is in a state of freedom and equality.

Greg Forster, Starting with Locke, loc. 1440.

And the rule of everybody over everybody is not government. Forster again summarizes Locke’s way of thinking:

So someone must have authority to enforce the natural law, since it is God’s law and cannot be void. Yet no particular person has a specific mandate to such authority, either from nature or revelation.

Locke takes these premises and makes a bold deduction. If someone must have authority to enforce the natural law, yet no particular person has a specific mandate for it, it must follow that—at least by nature—everyone has that authority equally.

Greg Forster, Starting With Locke, loc. 1448.

From this starting point Locke reaches government by consent of the governed. Since all have equal authority, government must have that authority by the consent of all over whom it rules.

Both of these theories have significant problems. For instance, how would Filmer account for the authority of kings who could not trace their geneology back to the line of kings that flowed from Adam or Noah?

Forster points out one of the large problems for Locke:

This theory of consent is subject to a number of problems; the most important of these is the problem of establishing that people do in fact consent. Consent theory implies—and Locke explicitly affirms—that people are not born as members of the community. Because people are by nature free and equal, they are free and equal when they are born. Only when they give their consent do they become members of the community, and thus obligated to obey its authority (see T II. 119, 176). …

Locke, like most consent theorists, argues that any adult who chooses to remain in a country and live there rather than leave it has consented—implicitly or ‘tacitly,’ even if not explicitly—to be ruled by its laws. . . . Only explicit consent can make a person a member of society, but this implicit or tacit consent is all that is needed to legitimately enforce the law. ….

The theory of tacit consent is subject to a number of objections. Is it reasonable to expect people to undertake the burden of leaving the country as the price of not giving their consent? And where will they go without having to face the same problem elsewhere?

Locke considers these questions, but only briefly and without much attention to the objections.

Greg Forster, Starting with Locke, loc 1533-1556.

It seems to me that there is little problem in affirming an authority structure in a world in which all humans are given the blessing of dominion over the earth. We see this with Adam and Eve in the first family. Yet how the first governmental structure of authority emerged is not specified by Scripture.

I think the silence of Scripture on this point is intentional. If Scripture told us how the first government formed, we would want to test the legitimacy of all subsequent governments on whether or not they were formed in the same way. But that is not what God would have us to do. God wants his people to submit to the existing authorities because “there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God” (Rom. 13:1).

Government and the Structures of Creation

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What does it mean to say that government is a structure that God built into creation? It means, in part, that not all of God’s creation is physical. God created the physical world: land and seas, moon and stars. But God created more than just the physical world. He created non-physical realties, such as marriage (Gen. 2:18-24). When people try to live contrary to God’s design for marriage or government they societies experience negative consequences just as surely as people who tried to live as though gravity did not exist would experience consequences for trying to live contrary to the way God designed His world to work.

Proverbs speaks of this reality in terms of wisdom being built into the very creation. Proverbs 3:21 says, “The LORD founded the earth by wisdom and established the heavens by understanding” (HCSB). Proverbs 8:22-31 (HCSB) makes the same point:

The Lord made me

at the beginning of His creation,

before His works of long ago.

I was formed before ancient times,

 from the beginning, before the earth began.

I was born when there were no watery depths

and no springs filled with water.

I was delivered

before the mountains and hills were established,

before He made the land, the fields,

or the first soil on earth.

I was there when He established the heavens,

when He laid out the horizon on the surface of the ocean,

when He placed the skies above,

when the fountains of the ocean gushed out,

when He set a limit for the sea

so that the waters would not violate His command,

when He laid out the foundations of the earth.

I was a skilled craftsman beside Him.

I was His delight every day,

always rejoicing before Him.

I was rejoicing in His inhabited world,

delighting in the human race.

 

In the past this passage has often been read as if it spoke of the pre-incarnate Christ. The chief difficulty with this is that Wisdom in Proverbs 8 is created. Because קנה in 8:22 has a disputed semantic range, the versions translate the word variously: “The Lord possessed me” (KJV, NKJV, NASB, ESV); “The Lord created me” (RSV, NRSV); “The Lord made me” (HCSB); “The Lord brought me forth” (NIV). But from the use of חיל, “be brought to birth” (CHALOT), in vv. 24, 25, it seems clear that “created” is the appropriate sense here. (Passages that indicate “create” is within the semantic range of קנה include: Gen. 14:19, 22; Ex. 15:16; Deut. 32:6; Ps. 78:54; 104:24; 139:13. See also NIDOTTE, 3:941; TLOT, 3:1152-53.)

Translating “The Lord made me” (HCSB) is only problematic if Wisdom here refers to the Son or to an attribute of God. But neither is likely here. Garrett correctly notes, “Woman Wisdom of Prov 8 does not personify an attribute of God but personifies an attribute of creation. She is personification of the structure, plan, or rationality that God built into the world. She is created by God and fundamentally an attribute of God’s universe” (Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, NAC, 113).

Though most translations locate this “in the beginning” (KJV) or “at the beginning” (HCSB, ESV, NASB) there is no beth prefix in Hebrew, making the NIV’s translation of v. 22 preferable: “The Lord brought me forth as the first of his works.” Garrett notes that “may imply that Wisdom herself is the ‘beginning’ of creation” (108, n. 65), the idea being that “Wisdom is claiming to be the first principle of the world and the pattern by which it was created” (Garrett, 108). Consistent with this, I would prefer the NIV’s translation of verse 23, “I was formed ages ago, at the very beginning, when the world came to be” (cf. HCSB), over the KJV’s “I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, Or ever the earth was” (cf. NASB). (This requires translating עוֹלָם “ages ago” rather than “everlasting” and translating נסך “formed” rather than “set up.” On the former, see NIDOTTE, 3:346. On the later see Longman III, Proverbs, BCOTWP, 205.)

In what follows, Wisdom affirms that she was prior to the ordering of the world and present at the ordering of the world. Wisdom concludes in v. 30 that she was an אָמוֹן beside God during the creation. The translation of אָמוֹן is highly contested, with “skilled craftsman,” “blueprint,” “child,” “foster-father,” binding,” and “faithful” all being suggested (see R B Y. Scott, “Wisdom in Creation: The ’Amôn of Proverbs 8:30.” Vetus Testamentum 10, no. 2 [April 1, 1960]: 213-223). If there is a favored translation by commentators and Bible translations, it is probably along the lines of “skilled craftsman.” If this translation is accepted, however, it should be made clear that in this passage Wisdom is not doing the creating. God is clearly the Creator throughout this passage, and Wisdom is standing beside God. Since Wisdom is beside the God who creates and is not the creator, Van Leeuwen suggests that Wisdom is “personified as the king’s architect-advisor, through whom the king puts all things in their proper order and whose decrees of cosmic justice are the standard for human kings and rulers (v. 15)” (“Proverbs,” NIB, 5:94). Or, as Bryan Smith has noted, a master craftsman could be the personification of a blueprint (personal conversation, 17 May 2011). Gordon Fee also sees the personification in terms of a blueprint: “Prov 8:22-26 asserts in a variety of ways that Wisdom was the first of God’s creation, emphasizing her priority in time, so that her being present with God when he alone created the universe would thus reflect—as it actually does—God’s wise blueprint” (Fee, Pauline Christology, 611). However the personification is understood, Garret once again captures the significance of the passage: “If Wisdom is here an artisan, the message again is that the principles of wisdom are woven into the fabric of the created order.”

I would argue that some of these principles of wisdom woven into the fabric of the created order are principles relating to the institution of government. Indeed, I would argue that the institution of government itself is woven into the fabric of creation. This, I think, is the teaching of 1 Peter 2:13.

Government in Creation, Fall, and Rememption

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In Federalist no. 51 James Madison wrote, “But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature. If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” Madison is right, in part, to note that in a fallen world government must reckon with the reality of fallen human natures. Madison goes on to say, “In forming a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”

But is Madison correct to say that “no government would be necessary” if humans were not fallen? I would argue that the biblical answer to that question is, “no.” In Revelation, the eternal state still has government. In the New Jerusalem there remains a throne of God and the Lamb (Rev. 22:3). Kingship continues into eternity, and the reign of the Messiah is not simply the reign of God but is also the reign of man. When Jesus was born he was declared to be both the heir of the Davidic throne and to receive an eternal kingdom (Luke 1:32-33). When Isaiah declared, “For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder,” he is speaking of a real government. This is why the prophets look forward to the Messiah’s rule to bring about justice in the earth.

The kingdom the Messiah rules over for eternity is not ruled over by he alone. Under him others rule. Revelation 22:5 says of the saints, “and they will reign forever.” There is also a structure to this rule. Revelation 21:24 speak of the kings of the earth bringing their glory in to the New Jerusalem. Jesus said to the apostles, “In the new world, when the Son of Man will sit on his glorious throne, you who have followed me will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel” (Matt. 19:28). Government persists for all eternity.

There is good reason for this. Government was part of God’s created order from the beginning. In Genesis 1:26-28 God promised mankind dominion over the world. The promises of a Messianic king are rooted in God’s purpose to restore the dominion of all mankind that was corrupted by the Fall. Government is not a necessary evil. It is a structure that God built into his creation from the beginning.

On the Need for a Christian View of Government and Politics

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For many Christians, faith is fundamentally private and consists of their attending church, praying and being honest in their dealings with others. If Christianity touches on politics, it does so only obliquely by making the individual politician more virtuous as a person. This is not to be taken lightly, of course, and we can be grateful if more of our political leaders are upright people. But it does not address politics as politics, and it has no real implications for public policy. We shall at this point leave this approach behind, since I am persuaded that it represents a defective understanding of the faith and its all-encompassing claims.

Koyzis, Political Visions & Illusions: A Survey & Christian Critique of Contemporary Ideologies, Kindle loc 2307.

Christians and Identity Politics

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The Public Discourse has a worthwhile article explaining the similarities between Donald Trump’s campaign and identity politics on the left:

Trump is a champion of identity politics, which in case we should forget, was invented by the left. He advances without apology or qualification the interests and values of his supporters. As a group, they possess the identity of people put-upon by their opponents. It may not be correct to say they are all one ethnic group, although many are indeed white; but it is true that Trump’s “tribe,” regardless of its demography, identifies with him as one of their own because of his unique political style. Like members of the politically correct left, Trump and his supporters see themselves as immune from criticism not because of the strength of their arguments, but because of the distinctive characteristics of “who they are.” They are defined by their grievances. Although their identity politics exists on the opposite end of the political spectrum from the left, they do make a claim to victimhood, the same as “black lives matter” activists do to assert their immunity from criticism.

There’s a warning for Christians in the Trump campaign. For many 2015 felt like the year the United States shifted from being a nation in which a Christian heritage garnered some respect to one in which holding to orthodox Christian ethics is bigoted beyond argument.

In this context Christians may also be tempted to view themselves as victims. They may be tempted to play identity politics to “get our country back.” This is a dangerous path to travel because it puts Christians in a frame  of mind contrary to that Jesus expects of his followers in such situations.

Jesus said (Matt. 5:11-12):

Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

It is hard to play identity politics as the victim and truly rejoice in being slandered for Jesus’s sake. Jesus’s own example forbids this course of action (1 Pet. 2:21-23):

For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you might follow in his steps. He committed no sin, neither was deceit found in his mouth. When he was reviled, he did not revile in return; when he suffered, he did not threaten, but continued entrusting himself to him who judges justly.

The way the Christian respond to reviling needs to demonstrate that his real trust is in God, who will render justice in the end, and not in our own verbal or political skills.

None of this means that Christians ought to be politically unengaged or that they fail to make use of the liberties they have under the law. The apostle Paul in Acts appealed to his Roman citizenship when needed. It does mean, however, that Christians engage in politics in a distinctively Christian manner, a manner informed by the two great commandments.

Christians press for laws that conform to God’s law not to take their country back, as if it is theirs and not their non-Christian neighbor’s, but because they love God and that neighbor. First, Christians love God, and they should desire for his will to be done on earth as it is in heaven. Second, Christians should love their neighbors, and they know that laws which violate God’s laws will ultimately harm their neighbors.

If Christians engage in the public square with love rather than with the bitterness of a victim claiming rights they will truly stand out as distinct on the American political landscape. And whether they achieve their political goals or not, they will bring glory to God for being like Christ.